Tom Houghton

by Todd Alexander

  ‘What d’ya mean, why? I make it fun, don’t I, eh? You’ll see.’

  I wasn’t used to the company of adults other than my mother but I liked Mal, and the fact he never questioned me. He was just like a big kid, only without any of the teasing. As a treat, he’d brought over Rocky on video. It wasn’t a film that had ever interested me but I enjoyed the camaraderie that it encouraged between Mal and me. I knew this was Mal’s attempt to bloke-ify me; show me films that were supposed to appeal to real men. It did appeal to me but not as Mal had expected it would. Before we went to bed, we shared a hot chocolate in the kitchen.

  ‘So you like my mum, then?’

  ‘Yeah, buddy, for sure, eh? She’s a pretty cool woman, you know that?’

  ‘My mum works really hard, she’s always working.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘It would be nice for her not to have to worry about me any more, wouldn’t it? It would be good for her to have someone do nice things for her every once in a while. She deserves that.’

  ‘I’ll try, bro, hey? Honest I will.’

  I knew not to go near my mother’s bedroom when Mal announced it was time for bed. Mal and I stood side by side in the bathroom, looking at our reflections as we brushed our teeth. Mal had taken his shirt off already and I was envious of his hairiness, wished I could develop faster than it was taking. I took my time to floss after Mal had left the room, went to the toilet, cleaned out the wax from my ears. I went to my mum’s room to say goodnight to Mal, who was lying beneath the sheets, his arms behind his head, his naked torso on display.

  ‘’Night, Mal.’

  ‘Yeah, ’night, buddy. Sleep time. Eh, Tom?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I like spending time with you, eh? You’re a cool kid.’

  ‘Goodnight, Mal.’

  I lay in bed reading a Clint Eastwood biography Mal had found in a second-hand store and not long after I switched off the overhead light, I heard my mother come home.

  She showered before climbing into bed, then again I heard the sounds of Mum making love to Mal. Mal’s voice was different in these moments – soft, barely a whisper, full of tenderness. As I listened to their motion increase, heard my mother’s cries of delight, my mind turned to the magazines up in the rafters, and how close I’d come to being caught by Mal. I thought it would be better to start leaving the roller door down if I was going to be spending more time up there.

  I heard the adults making tea in the kitchen.

  ‘Steve came in again tonight,’ Mum sighed.

  ‘Any trouble?’

  ‘Nah, but he sure is one persistent little bugger.’

  ‘Needs a good smack in the head, eh?’

  ‘He’s all right, just got the wrong end of the carrot is all. Called me every name under the sun but I just told him I’d made my mind up and he’d better just get over it . . . How was Tom tonight?’

  ‘Great. You’ve got a great kid there, Lana. Real smart, he is.’

  ‘I still worry . . . You know . . . you don’t have to do this for me, or us. He’s used to being on his own, you don’t need to spend your time here with him when you must have better things to do.’

  ‘I think Steve’s getting to you, eh? I don’t do it for you,’ Mal said. Heh heh heh. ‘Sweet that you think that though, eh? Don’t you like me coming ’round?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, of course I do. We’ve been friends at the pub for yonks but I dunno, when you bring that into my home, it changes everything. Tom’s still just a kid and I don’t want him thinking . . . I just don’t want him hurt. Or to see me hurt. I need to protect him and I just don’t know where all this is going. I think about Steve and I think . . .’

  ‘Oh fuck him, eh? It’s not about him. And as for Tom, I ain’t gonna do nothin’ to him. He’s a mate of mine. A cool character, eh, our Tom? I get bored at home, eh, and watching you work ain’t that fun. Well, you know what I mean, it’s too much of a tease and I get all barred up just watching you.’

  ‘Mal! Watching me pull beers? Get out of it!’

  ‘Watching you doing anything, eh?’

  They did not speak for a while. The last thing I heard before drifting off to exhausted, longed-for sleep, was Mal saying: ‘Thought I might take him up the coast, fishing in his boat. Boys’ weekend. Would you be okay with that?’

   Fifteen

  After leaving Hanna, I went home for a nap before getting ready for dinner with my mother. We’d agreed to go out for an expensive meal as a bon voyage for my upcoming trip. Lana had insisted it would be her shout and had chosen the restaurant. I’d come dressed in my only suit, returning her effort and wanting her to know how much it meant to me. But I sat at the restaurant on the harbour watching minute after minute tick by, and a full one hour after our reservation time she was still nowhere to be seen. Texts and messages had gone unanswered, as had calls to her home phone, which appeared to be disconnected. I was furious but concerned enough to investigate further. It was probably all a stupid mistake; she was off drunk somewhere, having forgotten the date. I decided to take my revenge by travelling all the way to her apartment and if I got there and saw she was out, sit and wait patiently for a confrontation.

  I was met by Valerie Taylor, harpoon in hand.

  Lana stood on her bed. She was naked and had a look of sheer terror on her face. In her hand was something on a stick – a plunger perhaps, or a feather duster, and she was swishing it about the air in front of her. She was panicked, inconsolable. ‘The sharks! The sharks!’ she said repeatedly.

  I had the urge to laugh. Had she not been naked, and so visibly shaken, I would have suspected that she was up to one of her pranks. It was one of those awkward moments when I knew something was so horribly wrong but the absurdity of its symptoms were beyond my comprehension.

  ‘The sharks! The sharks!’ she said again, pointing her stick down at the carpet where I stood.

  ‘Lana? Mum?’ Her commotion struck me the second I unlocked the front door.

  ‘Quick, Liam, quick! The sharks! The sharks!’

  ‘Mum, it’s me, Tom, Tommy.’ I tried to soothe her but it soon became apparent this was futile.

  ‘Jump, Liam, jump! The sharks are coming.’ Her panic dissipated and was replaced by a slump into bereavement. ‘Oh Liam, Liam, my poor Liam, the sharks, you poor baby, the sharks have my poor baby.’

  The mention of the name of the brother I had never met told me she was in some altered state and it was more serious than just another of her drunken episodes. Liam was a topic she’d refused to discuss ever since I’d found out about his existence. While seeing my mother naked was nothing new, her unexpected energy common and hallucinations regular enough, confusion over where she was – I’ll grant that precise location wasn’t always grasped but there was a big fucking difference between a bedroom and the middle of the fucking ocean – and more to the point, who I was, had never occurred before.

  Suddenly I was useless, out of my depth. I wanted to calm her then comfort her, but her eyes were manic, her movements discombobulated. My mother was a marionette on someone else’s string. Instinct told me to be forceful; to wake her from a nightmare despite always being told it was never the smart thing to do. I threw the bags on the ground.

  ‘Lana!’ I yelled. ‘Lana?’ I said even louder.

  ‘Aw, the sharks,’ she whimpered. ‘Oh the fucking sharks, the sharks, the sharks. Sharks!’ This last one was a complete turnaround, a high-pitched scream unlike any noise I’d ever heard, or expected, my mother to make. ‘Sharks! Sharks!’

  I threw myself at her. I connected somewhere above her knees and threw her off-balance. She landed heavily on the bed, her head bouncing awkwardly on her neck and for a millisecond I thought I’d broken it. My face was inches from her pubic hair and she smelled vile – not just night-after-drinking unpleasantness, but full-blown I-haven’t-washed-in-weeks filth. I gagged, turned my head from her and simultaneously scooped up a corner of the quilt and threw myself on top
of her, wrapping her tightly and positioning myself above her now, as though we were about to play an impromptu game of guess who’s coming to my party?

  I had winded her, and caused her some pain, and this in turn made her silent. The relief of her calmness made me want to cry, but as I kept staring at her I saw this was not a coming-to of the senses but rather a saying goodbye to most. Lana looked vegetative.

  My breath was heavy, my skin clammy.

  ‘Mum, Mum, it’s me, Tommy. Mum, are you okay?’ Nothing. ‘Can you hear me, Mum?’ Still nothing. I slapped her hard on the face. ‘Lana!’ I screamed at her and even then I got barely an acknowledgement, a half-blink of the eyes.

  Rescued from her sinking dinghy, I could tell she was not going anywhere so I raced about the apartment looking for a trace of what she might have taken. This was not mere alcohol, or at least, not alcohol alone. I knew her bathroom cupboard was well stocked with a pharmacist’s array of painkillers, sleep aids, hangover cures, arthritic solutions, migraine pills, vitamins, minerals, out-of-date menopause assistants and treatments for high cholesterol, blood pressure, anxiety and any other type of ‘high’ that was bad to have. But there were no Hollywood props of drained bottles next to her bed, sink or toilet. Everything appeared in place, which to most people might have looked like a suicide attempt or crime scene, but for Lana was just a sign she was living. There was no alternative explanation but that she was on one of her spirals. I’d only seen the lead-up before, and the aftermath, never the actual point of no return, her moment of crisis.

  I knew she hated them, held an innate fear of them and all to do with them, but at a total loss, I called an ambulance. I had a hard time explaining to the dispatcher what the problem was, starting with the fact that my mother was an alcoholic, giving the basic details of the shark episode and then a more thorough description of her current state. I gave a rough history of her mental illnesses and half expected the woman to tell me to get over myself and make my poor mum a cup of herbal tea and run her a warm bath but, to my utter relief, she said she’d send the nearest vehicle and within minutes I heard the sound of its siren approach.

  What happened next was very Hollywood. They wheeled her into the back of the van after strapping her down, me following to sit in the front like an aggrieved Jackie Kennedy. I knew Lana wasn’t dying, that much was plain even to me. Her breathing was fine, her eyes were normal and responsive, but her brain had done another of her fuck-you farts and I suspected no amount of normal hospital poking and prodding was going to alleviate any of her symptoms or shine light on her condition. I suppose her history was enough for the ambos to know not to bother either and we headed straight for the loony bin.

  I’d seen her in one only once, though I couldn’t be sure of how many times she’d been admitted, or admitted herself. I was in New Zealand, just finished my final year of school and was all set to attend drama school for the summer when word got to Mal that Lana had spiralled again and had admitted herself into what she liked to term a sanctuary. It was nothing more than a prison for the insane. That time I’d barely recognised her, so many years had passed since we’d laid eyes on each other. The whole scene was so depressing that I actually vomited after visiting, so god-awfully wrenching was the entire experience. It wasn’t just the state that I found my mother in, but the state of the ward, the behaviour of the other patients. Perhaps my reaction is to her abandoning me, I thought at the time. I knew she’d been back and forth throughout the years but never for long enough for me to visit, rather conveniently.

  When they admitted her this time, I stayed for a few hours, conversing with doctors and specialists, but there was still no great clarity over what had happened, how it could be treated, nor what her diagnosis was. Various nouns had been bandied about – stroke, breakdown, episode, hysteria, mania – but a general lethargy in identifying something specific meant that poor Lana was housed in a ward next to all sorts of loonies, indeed they appeared to share no common symptoms whatsoever. So spiral continued to be the term I used.

  I went home exhausted and drank myself to numbness with three bottles of wine. This spiral brought back the one of 1986 and I had to sit watching bad television to keep my mind from straying to that time, even when I found it hard to focus. I couldn’t deal with the here and now, let alone the then.

  • • •

  The following day, as my hangover raged, Lana’s language had returned, but her lucidity had not. Some frustrated movement lent itself to the diagnosis of stroke, as did mood swings and mental confusion, but tests were inconclusive and as no one had been with her before she took her bed-dinghy for a whirl, no professional was prepared to place their bet on that being the case. Phone calls, meetings, internet research – nothing had gotten me closer to any truth as I sat in that hospital ward next to my vacant mother and all I knew was that Lana had all but disappeared and in her place was someone pretending to be her, a not-very-good actress who kept forgetting my mother’s lines.

  The first week I visited daily, the second week every three days, and by that third week I’d decided that weekly visits were better for my health, if not hers. I knew this made me a bad son, intolerably so for most but this was the last thing I needed in my lead-up to Edinburgh. I still struggled with the most apt term for where she was: home, institution, hospital . . . None of them felt quite right, but I refused to use her preferred ‘sanctuary’. But the staff at the . . . place . . . were all very pleasant and accommodating for Lana, even in the face of the abuse she sometimes hurled (racist, sexist, classist . . . all the delightful ists) and a nice young male nurse took me aside to tell me Lana was already his favourite ward (his term, not mine) and they often sat and played cards together for hours at a time, occasionally accompanied by Lana’s biting critique of her fellow inmates (my word, not his). The elite told me there was no saying when, or if, Lana was likely to emerge from her internal battle and I’d noticed that with each subsequent visit, another light had gone off inside her, as she now had the slightest limp, her skin had yellowed and her hair was dry and brittle.

  One visit we sat talking about all the old movies we’d seen at the cinema in Seven Hills and, with startling clarity, she was able to list them all in what appeared to be chronological order. Lana went right down to the detail of what food she’d taken for us to eat each day, and what I said about each film at its end. It was a bizarre and guilty voyage, like warping back into a film of my own life that someone had painstakingly monitored for continuity. That day she cried when I left.

  The next visit she continued to call me Steve, a name that did not exactly fill me with joy, and when her touch became inappropriate I stepped back from her quickly and walked out without saying goodbye. Such were the wonders of my visits – I never knew who I was going to be meeting, or in whose role I was going to be cast.

  • • •

  My last visit before flying ten thousand miles away from her was bittersweet. I held immense shame for leaving her in that place, knowing she could not fully comprehend that I was going, nor where I was going and for how long. I hoped she would miss my visits, but could not say for sure. On my arrival, however, it was as if she knew, and she produced a performance as good as any I’d ever seen her deliver. There were tears, great sobs of relief and joy that her baby had come to take her home again; she’d awoken that morning and suddenly come to her senses knowing she was being held here against her will and only I, as the one who knew her best, would be able to correct the situation and explain to the decision makers that she was right as rain and could now return to her flat in Five Dock, and her lovely life and her lovely friends, and the occasional beer with her good mate Okie. Seeing her off the booze, despite her unpredictable state, had filled me with hope and pride. Not that her cold-turkey journey had been any of her doing, but in all of my visits, she had not once mentioned a craving for the drink. Now to hear her say she was returning to her life filled me with dread because here, at least, in this see-sawing state, I knew
she was without temptation, and had people to look after her should her day begin down over up.

  ‘Mum, I’ll be gone away for weeks, maybe more. I don’t even have any plans to come back home right now.’

  ‘I don’t need looking after,’ she said grumpily, ‘I’m not the baby in this relationship.’

  ‘Well, be that as it may, you do need looking after still. I just don’t think you’re ready to go home, to be on your own again.’ There were still so many tests to run, and uncertainties to overcome, not to mention too many temptations outside the safety of these window bars.

  ‘Please, Tommy,’ she started softly. ‘Please do this for me, sign me out of here.’

  ‘I can’t, Lana, I’m sorry. It’s unfair of you to even ask. If I was going to be around, maybe . . . but I’m not, so . . .’

  Tears started streaming down her face.

  ‘I know you’re frustrated, Mum, I know this is awful. But it’s for the best, you have to trust your doctors. No amount of tears are going to change this situation. When you’re better, the doctors will let you go home.’

  ‘Please!’ she said louder, a drawn-out wail. ‘Please! Please!’ Her words echoed through the ward like a siren.

  ‘I’m going to leave now, Mum, and neither of us wants this to be the way for us to part.’

  ‘Tommy, no!’ she positively screamed. This alerted one of the nurses, who came running into the room.

  ‘I’m gonna go before this gets worse,’ I said apologetically to him and he waved me on supportively.

  At my leaving, Lana became the caged beast, Frances Farmer had nothing on her.

  ‘You bum-fucking faggot!’ I heard her yelling as I walked down the hall. ‘You’re gonna die of AIDS, a lonely, sad, old poofter.’

  I had hoped she was talking to the nurse who was now trying to placate her. But just before the lift arrived I heard: ‘You’ll die with nothing for company but your sad lukewarm reviews and a Liberace toy boy cashing in on your last pennies of Z-grade theatrical connection. An actor? Ha! Still obsessed with some boy hanging from the rafters knowing you’ll never be half as great as a Hepburn!’