Then you’re left with three options. You can spend eight grand re-stumping if you think the house is worth it. You can level the place and start again – which for the average builder is a bit like euthanasia – you’re either for it or against it in principle. Finally you can ignore anything beneath the boards and simple tizzy the old girl up for a final fling. Bevan and Chris had mostly done that with the houses they’d bought and sold on, but they always advised against it for home renovators. Home renovators have a steel about them that won’t put up with sloping kitchen cupboards. On the other hand those too weak or too ill-skilled to renovate probably won’t notice little things like that.
“I love the dadoing in the dining room, don’t you darling?” some tall blonde chick will gush to her husband or boyfriend as she imagines her first nouveau cuisine dinner party. “And that kitchen island is so practical.” It’s all window-dressing of course; the equivalent of buying a car after you’ve gone round and kicked the tyres.
I got to Charis’s almost frantic to know how things were with her.
She let me in as if everything was normal.
“Hi,” she mumbled through a mouthful of something, turning away expecting me to follow.
I halted on the step, a king-tide surging in my stomach.
“You coming in or not?” called the voice from her silhouette down the hallway.
I went in. Gappy floorboards with dust-bunnies hugging the skirting. Same. Crackly-painted meat-safe stacked with books. Same. Shabby blue rug with the torn bit that the cat played with. Same. Kitchen smell. Same. TV game show sounds coming from the lounge. Same. Nothing was dreadfully wrong. Everything hadn’t changed.
The king-tide ebbed.
“You okay?” asked Charis, coming over and giving me a hug. Same feel. Same fit. Same Charis. “Busy day?”
“Mmm. The usual.” There it was again. Same. What was I expecting? “Chris is drinking way too much on the job.”
“He’ll be cutting his hand off one of these days.”
“So mum keeps saying.”
“Given the law of averages she’s bound to be right sooner or later.”
Some things would be worth the trade-off for mum. I pictured Chris with no hand trying to open a stubbie and Mum scolding him triumphantly.
“I guess there is a funny side to it then,” said Charis.
“Eh?”
“You’re smiling.”
“I’m just picturing him trying to open a stubbie with one hand.”
“He’ll have to switch to tinnies,” she laughed. C’mon let’s sit outside, I’ve got something to show you.”
“What?”
“Wait and see.”
“Hi love,” said Charis’s mum to me, padding in on bare feet and putting a tea-cup on the draining board. She gave me a hug, rubbing my back in silent sympathy. And then I smelt it before I saw it. Finally there it was in front of me. Difference. Beautiful, thrilling difference.
“Mum went to the hairdresser’s this morning.”
“I’ve never seen you with short hair.” Her long tangled mat was cut to a shoulder-length bob. It looked clean-blonde and combed. It looked shiny. It looked like someone else’s hair. It looked like someone else’s Mum. Charis wouldn’t have a mum with hair like that.
“Charis has never seen me with short hair,” she said, “I’m popping the kettle back on. Want a cup?”
“You look … different.”
“I feel different.”
“It’s take years off your face hasn’t it Mum?” Charis sounded pleased.
“Fifty dollars it cost me! I feel like a new woman. Wonder why I didn’t do it years ago.”
“Does Mr Sullivan like it?”
“He hasn’t seen it yet, has he Mum?” said Charis, prancing round like a five year old showing off a new Bratz toy.
“I had it like this when we started going out.”
“Ooh-aah!” laughed Charis, “Rob and I’ll make ourselves scarce tonight, give you and Dad some space.”
“Charis,” started her Mum, reddening, but looking pleased anyway. She ran her hand through her new look, like the way she hoped Mr Sullivan would later.
Charis started to the back door.
“Looks good anyway Mrs Sullivan,” I said, following Charis. The haircut was a distraction, keeping me from whatever it was Charis wanted to show me.
“I’ll bring your tea out! English Breakfast ok?”
“Thanks Mum!” sang Charis in time with the bang of the fly-screen.
“So what’s this you want to show me?” I asked. We’d finished our tea and flopped into the hammock. At first it wriggled against us, before settling into its decaying rhythm.
Charis struggled round onto her side, bucking the hammock again, before pulling a folded-up A4 from the ripped pocket of her jeans.
“What is it?”
“Open it and find out.”
I caught the opening line even as the paper unfurled:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
“Where’d you get this?”
“Found it in a poetry anthology in the shop yesterday.”
“And you ripped it out? Don’t tell Hector and Doris.”
“I photocopied it stupid. Just read it.” Was she exasperated? Angry?
I started again, reading it straight through, Charis’s face close to me, her tea-y breath in my nose.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
“When I first read it I thought the first two lines were the point,” Charis said, taking the sheet from me and folding it back up.
“And aren’t they?”
“So you think your problem is the problem, do you?”
I must have looked thick.
“You think that just because your mum and dad split up and your dad didn’t know what he was doing; you think that’s the problem?”
“Isn’t it?”
“And that gives you an excuse to be like them? Look at it again!” Exasperation flowed out of her, bucking the hammock so violently I nearly fell out.
“Careful!”
“Read the last stanza again.” She went to give me the paper, but kept it at the last minute, whipping the words with her tongue: ‘Man hands on misery to man; it deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can; and don’t have any kids yourself.’ See? He may have been a great poet, but he was a miserable shit.”
When she said “shit” I flinched back like I’d stepped in it, rather than heard it. It was the first time I’d ever heard her swear.
“You swore! You never swear!”
“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!” she rattled off, with a grim smile “There, I’ve said it enough times to lose its shock value. Now Robert, focus, you’re the lit student here! Think big picture, if you’re allowed to in literature these days!”
Somehow it twigged. Just there swinging between the posts of the old verandah, with the first autumn leaves yellowing on the liquid ambar. I don’t know why it was then. Maybe because I was scared what would happen between us if it didn’t. But there it was – the full fucked-up-ness that Larkin was up to his neck in. He saw no circuit-breaker; no by-pass; no genetic cavorting to stop the baton change. Just simple resignation all the way down to the seabed. The PSI of our misery crushes the life out of us and we suck it up like a huge baleen, thinking if we swallow enough of it we can drain it. “I’ve got a better idea!” says Phillip, “Kill yo
urself early enough to ensure you don’t procreate. Escape, escape, escape!” he’s saying, “Do us all a favour!”
Maybe Charis saw it in my face, for she softened her voice, allowing the softness to flow through her limbs.
“You’re not the only one fucked up by your parents Robert.” I could hear the game show from inside, and her mother calling out advice to whoever it was about to be dissatisfied with winning less than their greed demanded. “What do you think Sunday night was about?”
“I was wondering when we were going to get to that.”
“I’ll bet you did, because you think it’s about you.”
I started to object, but didn’t want her to stiffen up again, so I lay there compliant.
“A young boy at Living Waters had leukaemia.” Then nothing. There was more, you could hear it coming, it just hadn’t arrived, but it was there. I didn’t look over or say anything. The word “leukaemia” was too familiar, too close, for this to be unconnected. Bevan’s decaying body inside coffin reared in front of me, a cross-section view; the earth pushing down on it, hard and determined. The hammock rope creaked. A rogue cloud hid the sun for a few seconds, the iron roof clicking its tongue at the sudden chill.
“And I was the one who…” she paused as if distancing her words from what came next, “…was pure like Jesus. That’s how they put it because I knew stuff. Said stuff. Stuff that only Jesus and the Spirit could know.”
“Stuff?” I didn’t want to interrupt and I knew she was going to elaborate, but it felt like she was inviting me to ask.
“Stuff like words of knowledge. Stuff like telling a love-sick woman God was going to get her a husband, and she did. Stuff like… once a young couple involved in the ministry came out the front and the Spirit was on me and I told the girl that she was pregnant. You should have seen the look on the boyfriend’s face.”
“And was she?”
“I don’t know, they left after that. Her parents still go. Someone told me she had an abortion later, but I don’t know.”
Charis had turned around and balled up. I put my arms around her. I could see where it was heading. Was she inviting me to fill in the blanks? I wasn’t sure, but I went ahead anyway.
“Stuff like telling a sick kid he’s going to be healed?”
“Mum and Dad’s best friends at Living Waters had a son called Benjamin,” she said, answering me by going on. “They’d been friends since before they were married. One day June – that’s the mum – phoned Mum to say the sore throats and flu Ben had been getting were the start of leukaemia. Mum swung the prayer roster into line and the whole church got together to intercede.”
“Intercede?”
“With God,” she smiled, “It’s what “we” say when we ask him for stuff!”
She did the inverted comma’s thing as she said it, but the word stung. Maybe Sunday night hadn’t just been the freaked out bonding session between us that I’d assumed.
“And that’s when Mum got the idea that maybe God was going to use me in all of this.” She said the word “Mum” softly. The telly had been silenced by now and we could hear kitchen clatter.
“You two want mash or steamed potatoes with your sausages?” Her Mum’s head popped out the screen-door as if on cue.
“Please Mum!”
“Which? ‘Cos I can do either.”
“It doesn’t matter Mum, you choose!”
“You Robert?”
“Steamed Mum, steamed!”
It got rid of her, the door banged and a few second later the clatter picked up again. We heard a shout from inside, a male voice, followed by laughter. The door opened again.
“Mum! Oh hi Dad.”
“Your mum’s hair!” said Mr Sullivan, with a look on his face, “All gone!” His usual blank slate was a grimace, as if the pain of moving atrophied muscles was too much.
“Pretty wild eh?” said Charis, enjoying the moment again.
“Didn’t recognize her!”
“Hope you said you liked it!”
“I said I was surprised.” He shaped to sit down in the old leather chair that had moved down the food-chain, now slowly rotting on the verandah, the white stuffing bursting out of the headrest.
“Dad, get in there and tell her you love it.”
“I don’t know if I do!”
“Get in there,” said Charis sitting up now and pointing towards the kitchen window where we could see her Mum’s shadow, “And tell her you love it.”
He grumped, but got up and started back inside.
“And don’t ask her how much it cost!”
Another screen-door slam. We could hear something like eulogizing going on. More laughter.
“Where was I?”
“Your Mum getting the idea.”
“Yeah, anyway there was a prayer meeting at the church one Sunday afternoon and heaps of things were happening.”
“Things?”
“Like last Sunday night,” she said impatiently, “That sort of stuff. One or two people had been praying for healing for him when for some reason Mum said that I’d been given a word of knowledge about him earlier that week that he shouldn’t get medical treatment.”
“And had you?”
“I’d said something to Mum about how the Spirit could heal him if they’d just believe, rather than him going through all the medical stuff with doctors who didn’t know Jesus.”
“And you went along with that?”
Silence.
“I was twelve Rob, twelve. Of course I did. That’s the sort of things twelve year old Pentecostal girls say. I got swept along with it, and pretty soon we were announcing from the front that Ben was going to be healed and that his parents just had to have faith in God.”
“And what happened?”
“What do you think happened? During the second round of chemo Mum, me and a few others from church went into the hospital and prayed all night. There was so much tongues going on the nurses must have thought we’d gotten into the drugs cabinet! There was a bone marrow donor available for him, but June said no, that she and Archie were going to take Jesus at his promise.
“And he died?”
“Of course,” she said sounding teary. “He died and it was terrible. June and Archie left the church – a whole heap of people did. We did too - we were sort of asked to. June and Archie split up a year later. Grief does that to people. You think it’s going to bring you together, but it can do the opposite.”
“What did it do to you?”
“Never been back there till Sunday. Mum and Dad got all sorts of phone calls and letters. People saying that we were the ones without enough faith. Accusing me of being a tool of Satan. Someone came round once and wanted to cast out the spirit of deceit from me. Mum nearly let them, but Dad kicked them out. Only Granny Barlow and a few of the older ones kept in touch.”
“Do your Mum and Dad know you’ve been back?”
“No, and you’re not going to tell them,” she warned, pulling away slightly as if I’d already betrayed her.
“If it doesn’t work how come you and your Mum came in and prayed with Bevan then?”
“Who said it doesn’t work?” Anger zinged out of her. “Do you think because we stuffed it up it doesn’t work? What do you think Sunday night was about?”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that. I wasn’t sure what Sunday night was about. I had thought it had been about me and Bevan, but that was only part of it now.
“It’s about breaking circuits remember? It’s about God maybe doing something we don’t expect or don’t even ask for, just because he wants to breaks a circuit, Just because he wants to make sure we’re not all as fucked up as we could be by our parents. Just so we don’t have to get out early. Just so we can have kids and love them enough, but not so much that we fuck them up. Just because God wants to do something we don’t expect or even deserve! Just because he doesn’t want us to be miserable.”
Maybe that was it. Maybe Charis was hearing from the S
pirit. Maybe this was the voice of Jesus mediated in stammering obscenities and baby-talk for those like me with hard hearts and dull ears. I’d been waiting for a Messiah to come out the desert and announce a “Verily verily, I say unto thee.” Maybe Messiah’s don’t do that anymore.
“Everything all right folks?” Charis’s mum’s face appeared at the screen-door.
“Yes mum.” Tired. Empty. Drained.
“Dinner in five.”
“Thanks Mrs Sullivan.” I watched her go back to the kitchen, the 100 watt bulb tussling with the dusk for supremacy. It held her head steady with her new hair. Mr Sullivan standing reading some mail at the breakfast bar, holding a stubbie. Looking up at her every so often as she said something. Saying something that looked mumbled. Plates coming out of the cupboard. Salt and pepper put on the table.
The four of us and the hair had dinner together. Every now and then Mr Sullivan would look up and shake his head in amazement. Charis would glare.
“Cool hair Mum,” she said by way of admonition.
“Thanks love. Don’t know what your father thinks though.”
“S’good,” he slurped, through the remnants of gravy and peas that he was soaking up with a slice of white bread. “S’good. I’ve already told your mum.”
“I like it a lot.” It sounded sycophantic and Mr Sullivan gave me an eye as if to say, “You’ve already got one of my girls, who do you think you are?”
“Crumble?” asked Mrs Sullivan, getting up. Charis started stacking the plates.
“Ice-cream, or cream, or both?”
“How much was it anyway?” her Dad asked.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I only saw Dad the once more. He phoned home when he knew Mum was at work and we arranged to have a coffee. It was out in his direction in a disinterested shopping centre. The lunch-bar had pretensions beyond its station. The coffee tasted burnt. The Florentine was stale. The walls were pastel and the net curtains were trying too hard. Our conversation was punctuated by whining power-tools from the refit at the shop next door. “Exciting new fashion store opening soon!” said the sign posted on the boarding.
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