When there’s nowhere else to Run

by Murray Middleton

  ‘Hey, Eddy!’ I yelled when he appeared at the glass doors of his office building.

  It took him a second or two to recognise us, but once he did he walked straight over. I had no idea how I was supposed to greet him. He still looked incredibly handsome in a suit. He crouched down and gave Harrison a big hug.

  ‘Hey, little buddy,’ he said, sounding as upbeat as ever. ‘Remember me?’

  It felt strange watching Harrison hug him back.

  Eddy stood up and smoothed his jacket. As he squinted at me, I was relieved to notice the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.

  ‘What are you two doing here?’

  ‘We came to see you.’

  ‘Right now?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I said. ‘Harry got expelled.’

  Harrison started fidgeting with the spine of Peter Pan. It was the third copy I’d bought him.

  ‘Are you allowed to take a lunch break or something?’ I asked.

  He squinted at me again and I wished that I were allowed to get the upbeat facade that he reserved for Harrison. ‘Just let me make a call,’ he said.

  Eddy walked towards a bus shelter and turned his back to us while he spoke on his phone. I felt more offended at that sight than I had when he told me he was applying for a job in another state. He returned with a cheeky grin for Harrison.

  ‘So are we allowed to have a chat?’ I asked sarcastically.

  ‘Sure.’

  Eddy set off through the city streets. I held Harrison’s hand and tried to keep up. We turned right and then left. The sun glared off the glass buildings. Eddy stopped outside a two-storey Victorian pub on the corner of a busy intersection. It was called the Belgian Beer Café. Harrison and I chose a high table in the dining hall while Eddy waited at the main bar. All around us corporate patrons were drinking imported beers and eating mussels.

  ‘Why do they keep ringing the bell?’ asked Harrison.

  ‘I think the bartenders ring it every time they get a tip.’

  ‘What sort of tip?’

  ‘It means extra money that’s not part of the bill. Money they get to keep for themselves.’

  ‘But not a tip on how to live.’

  ‘No,’ I said, smiling. ‘Not one of those tips.’

  Eddy returned with two glasses of Leffe Blonde and a paper cone filled with chips. He handed the cone to Harrison. ‘Be careful, it’s hot!’ he said.

  Harrison started blowing on the chips, eager to impress his dad.

  ‘Where are you staying?’ asked Eddy.

  ‘The YMCA.’

  ‘Shit!’ said Eddy, leaning across the table and speaking in a hushed voice. ‘I’ve heard it’s a dive.’

  ‘I didn’t have time to book anywhere.’

  He squinted at me, rubbing his lip with his forefinger. I imagined that he regarded his clients in a similar manner.

  ‘I just thought it’d be nice for us both to see you, especially Harry.’

  ‘It is nice,’ said Eddy, glancing at Harrison. ‘But you should have warned me. That way I could have organised something and freed up a bit more time.’

  ‘What’s the matter, are you seeing someone?’ The Leffe had gone straight to my head. I hadn’t drunk beer in over a year. ‘It’s alright,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to be angry.’

  Eddy tilted his head in Harrison’s direction and smiled. ‘Still lord of the fries.’

  Harrison was busy blowing on the chips and monitoring their heat with his fingers.

  ‘You appreciate I can’t get out of court,’ said Eddy.

  ‘I know. I never asked you to.’

  ‘You’re putting me in a difficult position.’

  His tone made me ache inside. Eddy used to lie next to me in bed at night and tell me all about the cases he was working on. He would show me the interview transcripts of the people he was representing. Sometimes they were thicker than great novels. We would laugh at the policemen’s grammar. It was wonderfully unethical. I couldn’t help but think that if it wasn’t for Harrison, Eddy might still be showing me transcripts in bed.

  ‘I need one year,’ I said.

  It took Eddy several seconds to understand what I was saying, or asking. His eyes darted towards Harrison. ‘Are you sure this is the right place to have this discussion?’

  ‘There’s no right place.’

  Eddy sipped from his beer.

  ‘It’s the last favour I’ll ever ask you,’ I said, staring at the blurry ceiling lamps.

  ‘I don’t know how it can possibly work,’ said Eddy.

  ‘But you’ll give it a try?’

  ‘Do I have a choice?’

  Harrison finally decided that his chips had cooled down enough to begin eating.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  FORGET ABOUT THE PRICES

  He was surprised to hear someone knocking on the front door. It was never locked. No one had even given him a house key.

  When he answered the door he saw his mother standing on the tatami mat that he’d bought at the local market. She looked much older than the last time he had seen her. It was the skin around her eyes. He wasn’t sure how she had managed to find him. The only postcard he had sent was from a sugarcane town several months ago, at the end of the harvest, when he had already booked his next train ticket.

  He led her through the weatherboard house to the back porch, where he had been filing his nails. She sat on a wicker couch opposite him and surveyed his Crazy Clark’s uniform on the clothesline. It was late in the afternoon. Shadows were creeping across the vegetable garden towards the bungalow where he slept.

  ‘This humidity is something else,’ she said, trying to air out her stiff denim vest, which made her look a bit silly. It was nice to hear her voice, though.

  ‘You’re looking thin,’ she said, eyeing his wrists. ‘Am I allowed to buy you dinner tonight?’

  ■

  They ate at a new Japanese restaurant in the main arcade of town. It was deserted.

  ‘Forget about the prices,’ said his mother, seeing him inspect the right-hand column of the menu first.

  After taking their orders, the Scottish waiter walked outside and fed a handful of dumplings to a pug that was tied up in the passageway. He knew the waiter from somewhere, but it was all a bit foggy and it might just have been because the man had passed through his checkout at some point.

  The food tasted rich and nourishing. It was the nicest meal he had eaten in a long time.

  ‘How’s your meal?’ asked his mum.

  ‘It’s good,’ he said.

  ■

  After dinner they took a walk along the main street. There were buskers on every corner. The noticeboards were brimming with ads for yoga clinics, drumming workshops, second-hand surfboards and lifts to capital cities with split petrol costs. Backpackers were handing out flyers for the two main nightclubs in town. His mother was too polite to decline the flyers. He didn’t visit the nightclubs often. Only when he felt desperate.

  She started updating him on the lives of relatives. He knew she’d been dying to do it all evening. One of his cousins had recently got engaged. Another had purchased their first home.

  ‘But the big news is,’ she said, unable to contain her excitement any longer, ‘you’re now an uncle.’

  ■

  His mother bought them both ice-creams. They walked towards the beach and settled on a grassy knoll. An old, bronze-skinned man with a white beard was approaching strangers on the grass and giving away Hawaiian leis. The man placed one around his mother’s neck and kissed her hand, which made her laugh nervously. She looked a bit ridiculous, licking an ice-cream in a denim vest with a colourful necklace on, but she was trying and he knew he couldn’t hold it against her.

  They sat in silence and watched a lean woman amble across the sand, remove her dress and wade out into the inky ocean. She lay on her back and floated over the waves. Every fifteen seconds her body was fleetingly illuminated by a shaft of light from the distant cliffs.

  �
�I hope she doesn’t drown,’ said his mother, not daring to take her eyes off the woman.

  ‘It’s her own fault if she does,’ he said.

  A group of fire twirlers started a performance on the grass behind them and a large audience gathered.

  ‘I really like the choreography,’ whispered his mother. Her warm breath repulsed him in a way that he knew was unfair. He didn’t think there was any choreography.

  ■

  The chirping of the insects grew louder as they drew nearer to the rainforest. His stomach was starting to feel unsettled. They passed several hitchhikers and barely spoke. He knew that his mother was worrying about the young girls with their thumbs out.

  When they reached the motel, she stopped and pointed out the blue car she had rented. It didn’t really look like her kind of car. He tried not to think about how much money she had spent tracking him down. It would have been much better spent on the new baby.

  ‘Your father would love to teach you how to drive someday,’ she said. ‘He’s been talking about it a lot lately.’

  She exhaled when he didn’t respond.

  ‘Do you want to come inside for a soft drink?’ she asked. ‘I think they’ve got a few different ones in the fridge.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m doing the morning shift tomorrow.’

  She suddenly reached over and hugged him. She hugged him for a long time. He didn’t feel as though it was his right to relinquish the embrace.

  ‘Do you think you’ll come home soon?’ she asked.

  It was the fake flowers on her necklace that undid him.

  ‘No,’ he said, wiping his eyes above her head. ‘I’m happy here.’

  ‘No one’s ashamed of you,’ she said, finally letting go and looking up into his wet eyes. ‘I thought it might be important for you to hear it.’

  ‘It is,’ he said, sniffling. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Please remember to eat.’

  He nodded and she quickly kissed him goodbye.

  ■

  He followed the winding road back towards town. He had got used to wearing thongs at night and he was no longer worried about stepping on cane toads. That was how he knew the Scottish waiter. They had stumbled back to the bungalow together late one night, kicking dead cane toads on the side of the road and laughing.

  He approached a big white house with a pristine lawn and a flagpole out the front. He had read about the man who owned the house—a Korean War vet—in the local newspaper. The man woke at seven every morning to raise the country’s flag.

  He didn’t think the man who raised the country’s flag every morning would approve of him.

  I REMEMBER A TIME WHEN ONCE YOU USED TO LOVE ME

  Les Holcombe explained the lyrics of the Beatles’ song ‘Norwegian Wood’ to the bartender at the Farmers Arms while his wife Sylvia pretended to survey the interior of the pub. Les had always been good with strangers. He was better with strangers than he was with friends and loved ones. He had entered the congenial fog that usually descended after his third or fourth lowball of scotch. He sometimes gave the impression that he’d prefer to reside within the fog. But like all fogs, it would eventually disperse, leaving him cold and disorientated.

  ‘It was actually the first pop song to use a sitar,’ Les was saying. ‘George Harrison studied the sitar with Ravi Shankar.’

  In his eagerness to engage the bartender—whose accent sounded Irish to Sylvia—Les seemed to have forgotten their purpose in visiting the country. Although it was possible that he knew exactly what he was doing. Still, at least he’d agreed to spend the weekend with her at his brother Dave’s holiday house. Given their recent interactions, it seemed like a step in the right direction. It implied that there was hope. The only problem was that she wasn’t sure she wanted there to be hope.

  Their meals seemed to be taking an eternity. Sylvia had ordered a herb-crusted lamb rack with rocket and grilled pear. She found it odd that a country pub was serving, or trying to serve, such refined cuisine. Dave had warned her that Daylesford was becoming an increasingly upmarket town, pandering to couples on romantic weekend retreats. It was the main reason he’d bought the house. The prices on the chalkboard menu certainly suggested that he’d made a wise investment.

  Patrons were scattered throughout the main bar and the crimson-painted dining room. Everyone else at the bar seemed to know one another. Several men were wearing kilts. How on earth were they going to get home? It was freezing outside. When Les had turned off the Midland Highway an hour ago, the thermometer in the Forester had registered an outside temperature of just four degrees.

  Les and the bartender had moved on to Van Morrison. If this was his way of putting her to the test, then it wasn’t going to achieve anything, even if she did somehow manage to pass. She resented the fact that she now evaluated his actions as though they were so calculated, as though he constantly had revenge on his mind.

  Sylvia noticed a laminated newspaper article on the wall. It was about a local footballer who’d been drafted into the national competition. A big smile was splashed across the boy’s blotchy cheeks in the accompanying photograph. It reminded her of Les’s expression in a photo they’d asked a stranger to take outside the Louvre when they’d been caught in a sudden snowstorm. Neither of them could speak more than five words of French. They were barely even adults then and all they could do was smile at each other.

  When their meals finally arrived, Les gathered his cutlery and attacked his Angus fillet. There had always been a primal quality to his eating. When they had first been introduced, in the cafeteria at Monash University, Sylvia had found it endearing. Her lamb was nice and tender, but the pear was too sweet. She just wanted to say it out loud. Why couldn’t Les stop chewing with his mouth open and say something?

  ‘So, what films do you want to see?’ she asked finally. She removed the program for the Melbourne International Film Festival from her purse and spread it across the bar.

  ‘I’m not fussed,’ said Les.

  ‘Has anything taken your fancy?’

  Les glanced at the program. ‘I haven’t really given it much thought this year.’

  ‘There’s a South Korean film I’ve been dying to see. You’d like it, I think. It’s set in Seoul.’

  Les attracted the bartender’s attention and signalled for another scotch.

  ‘We saw the preview together earlier this year,’ said Sylvia, wondering whether it was before or after she’d started sleeping with her boss. ‘It was set in the snow and everything was in reverse.’

  ‘Really?’ said Les, staring at a small axe that was suspended above the bar. ‘I can’t remember it.’

  One of the purple-cheeked men wearing a kilt erupted into laughter and thrust his pint towards the ceiling, almost spilling beer on Sylvia.

  ‘Do you want to see the film or not?’ she asked. ‘It’s on Friday week at the Forum.’

  ‘Sure, whatever you want.’

  ‘I want what you want.’

  ‘Great.’

  ■

  Sylvia was woken the next morning by rasping music coming from the kitchen. She put on her dressing gown and opened the curtains, admiring the golden fur on the branches of the walnut tree in the backyard. A white net had been draped over the tree to prevent the cockatoos from eating Dave’s walnuts. Dave didn’t care about walnuts, but he maintained that life wasn’t worth living without engaging in such warfare with animals. It was probably why he’d been divorced three times.

  The central heating had been turned on. She stood above the vent near the window, letting the warm air caress her legs. She didn’t know what to make of the house. The furnishings were more modern than she’d expected and there were ugly Warhol prints all over the bedroom walls. When Dave first suggested the retreat, she’d imagined a cottage in the woods with an open fireplace. She couldn’t help but resent the dishwasher, the clothes dryer and even the central heating unit just a little.

  Dave had purchased the house from an oncologist who
had built it with retirement in mind. The oncologist had found a melanoma on his own neck eighteen months before he was due to retire. He passed away six days after the settlement period had ended. Ever since, Dave had referred to him as ‘the dying doctor’. For some reason it always made Sylvia laugh.

  Les was making scrambled eggs and listening to Dirty Three. Sylvia knew the album. It was called Horse Stories, which she suspected was a reference to some illicit drug. There weren’t even any vocals on the album, just drums, electric guitar and violin. She was prepared to concede that there was a profound sadness in the wailing of the violin, but she found it all a bit disconcerting.

  The violinist, Warren Ellis, was a deranged expatriate who lived in Paris. Les had shown her pictures of his beard. She didn’t trust an urban bushranger with her husband’s heart.

  Les was busy distributing the scrambled eggs onto toasted sourdough bread. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and there were damp patches underneath his armpits.

  ‘Where’d you get the eggs?’ asked Sylvia.

  ‘There’s a farmers’ market down at the primary school. They’ve got everything.’ He gestured with the silicon flipper towards two glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice. ‘I also got fudge.’ He smiled eagerly, like a six-year-old boy.

  ‘I might wander down there after breakfast to have a look,’ she said. ‘What should we do for dinner?’ She was keen to eat a home-cooked meal so that Les couldn’t become best friends with the waiter and block her out again. At some point they were actually going to have to talk about it.

  ‘I’m easy,’ he said.

  He placed their plates on the dining table. A raucous violin solo coursed from the stereo. Les had once told her that Warren Ellis liked to attach a guitar pickup to his violin to distort the instrument’s traditional sound.

  ‘Is there any chance you can turn that down?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure,’ said Les. He switched off the stereo and brought over the two glasses of orange juice.

  ‘I got two flavours,’ he said, taking the seat opposite her.