The Family Men

by Catherine Harris

  Johnno flung Harry another handful of snakes, the sweet candy smell briefly disarming, a pleasing juxtaposition of innocence met with experience, like the scent of baby powder on his crotch. “Be hungry, not greedy,” his teammate said, the two of them sitting towards the back as Laurie crapped on about the importance of finishing, the hardest part of the game, holding their nerve all the way to the end, sucking the sugary reptiles in and out, the sticky tails brushing their chins, competing to see who could cram in the most sweets in one go.

  It could be like that when they were winning. The cracks papered over. Fun.

  The more Harry presses himself forward the more enmeshed he feels in the past, a highlight reel of marks and interceptions, improbable goals and missed opportunities, scenes playing themselves back to him at random, thrown up from a personal catalogue that he pauses and rewinds, examining for something he might have overlooked, a useful detail, a clue, a way of fitting all his newly accented pieces together.

  Playing pool, Dean breaking the rack, a crisp clean shot that scatters the triangle clean across the table. Harry seeing that he doesn’t need everything to be perfect. He just wants a clear run at it for once, at whatever it is that he’s pursuing. To be able to have a bash without all the annotations. But maybe that’s all anybody wants; the secret to happiness, to be free of all the guff.

  At the petrol station, on his way inside to pay he is twice stopped by women asking for autographs, smiling and giggling in their tight jeans, the types his mother calls baby home-wreckers, saying pretty please, we’re big fans. The usual bunk. On and on until he gives them what they want. His name in Sharpie pen on the back of their t-shirts. He doesn’t like it, is much happier talking to them when they don’t know who he is (though when was the last time that happened?), the girls following him from the drinks fridge to the register, then back outside again. “He’ll give you one too,” he says, indicating his friend scratching his balls by the cage of gas bottles. The girls laugh again, double entendre, as Dean happily steps forward and takes up the pen.

  Where do they come from, these so-called fans? What is the point of this kind of devotion? During the season, female supporters gather around the gates after the matches hoping to catch the eyes of their favourite players as they exit the field. Harry has had more than one pair of underpants thrown in his direction. His brother could open a lingerie store.

  Dean doesn’t understand why it hasn’t all gone to his head, the money and the women. “You have the best life. Tell me, how can you resist? All that desperate pussy.” But it has never been something that Harry has really focussed on, it has never felt like an end in itself, taking it all in stride – the one benefit of being in the family business, knowing it comes with the territory, like sprained fingers and blackened toe nails. And sycophantic fans who don’t know when to back off. Though Dean doesn’t know the half of it, not really, the lengths they’ll go to in exchange for his conspicuous inarticulate company. “It’s more like it’s gone to your head,” Harry says, deflecting the question. “Your sick, twisted, fucked-up little head.” Thinking of his father again and that fateful evening, wondering if there had been music playing in his car, cocaine snorted right off the back of his hand, the sweet smell of too much Brut, and then back to Sportsman’s Night, his girl, Baby, can’t you see?

  But Dean won’t shut up. “Are you saying you’re happy to share the spoils? Sloppy seconds is good enough for me. Whatever you can spare. Unless you’d prefer me to audition the candidates, break them in for you, which I’d be more than happy to do.”

  “Jesus, Dean, sometimes you’re such a cunt.” It is the kind of thing he can say after nearly twenty years living in each other’s pockets. Twenty years watching each other’s backs.

  His friend is flattered. “The pub later?”

  “Sure.”

  The surf is dead flat. They paddle out then sit there straddling their boards, quietly transfixed by the unbroken line of the horizon.

  Save a Mouse, Eat a Pussy – the bumper sticker on Dean’s ute. Half a mile from the beach, the steady idle of the waves gathers around them in the night, enclosing them in a low auditory fog, a barely discernible racket like the engine noise on an aeroplane at high altitude. Too much Jim Beam, or maybe not enough? Dean fumbles with the keys as Harry leans against the car door scoffing the rest of his chips, lining his stomach, aware of the automatic rhythm of his breathing, the pumping of the air in and out – he saw those machines in the hospital when his grandad was sick, ventilators like game consoles forcing the oxygen through his grandfather’s lungs – as the ground shifts beneath his feet, its solidity threatening to dissolve at any moment, swallowing him up in his own ambivalence.

  The band at the pub is just tuning up, the sound check wafting across the car park, along with the odd high-pitched giggle and the distant clack clack of high heels on the pavement.

  Dean digs out his tobacco tin from under the back seat and rolls a spliff. Tally-ho! He offers some to Harry, but the alcohol is enough, Harry’s mind already playing tricks with him, pairing snatches of conversation with unrelated images. Always leading back to the same topic. Tracks. Shacks. Along the road to Gundagai. Damn, what is the next line? Old-fashioned. Jack. Jack. Jack. Squinting in the dark, trying to remember how it all played out. Sportsman’s Night, the crowning social event of the season.

  He remembers talking with Jack, early in the evening, before it all went pear-shaped. Jack putting the wind up him about the dancers, telling him he could arrange a dance in private if Harry felt like it. “You know, ‘dance’,” he said, winking, then assuring him that it was all alright, that it was just a game, that they all knew the score. Harry’s eyes on the girl. Jack saying, “What are you looking at?” And then Jack seeing her too. Seeing her properly, as distinct from the others. Harry having singled her out for him.

  Yes. That’s it, that’s what Jack said. Under his breath: “Hello there, you pretty young thing.”

  Michael Jackson. They were always playing him at Club events.

  Harry doubted she was more than seventeen, maybe eighteen years old, her lipstick the same colour as Rosie’s, his would-be girlfriend, a blazing slash of recrimination smeared across her dry cracked mouth. Last time he and Rosie kissed he stopped and made her wipe it off, transferring the cosmetic stain to a bloodied tissue to be wadded up and thrown away. As though one act could erase another. One girl could erase another. His father’s, his brother’s, his. Or was every girl now the same girl, each lost soul his responsibility? And then he was back to Jack again: “Women: can’t live with them, can’t kill them.”

  He presses himself against the cool body of the car. He has that same sick feeling one gets riding a roller coaster as the carriage slows to a crawl before making its descent. He squeezes his fists tightly as they approach the summit and then the floor seems to fall away and his knees buckle and he thinks he might retch.

  Deep breaths, Harry. Deep breaths. Everyone always exhorting him to breathe. He shakes his head, tries to collect himself, to bring his mind back to the present, drawing himself in, a tug on the rope, hand over fist. “Focus on the here and now,” his father is always saying, ever since he started seriously at church and AA, one day at a time, one step at a time – the fish and chip shop, the car park, the car, etc. But Harry isn’t sure he can. He is too full of grog, too racked with regret.

  Dean doesn’t notice, busy as he is blathering on about work as usual, how this one client is such an idiot putting decking around the pool when it so obviously calls for tile, a fool’s errand, but that he doesn’t care how long the job takes because the guy’s wife is shit-hot, always running around half naked offering them drinks and stuff. “It’s his money. He can waste it however he likes,” he says, suggesting again that Harry think about going into business with him (“We’d make a killing”), then detailing the skimpy dimensions of the client’s wife’s bikini, the bottoms held together by flimsy loops on either side that are as good as askin
g to be ripped off. “Clearly the bastard’s got a huge cock or he won the lottery or something ’cause he’s punching way above his weight there,” Dean says. And then he tells jokes:

  How do you get a nun pregnant?

  Fuck her.

  By the time they go into the pub the band has already started. Everyone is yelling because there is so much noise, but it is so noisy you can’t tell that everyone is yelling.

  They push their way up to the bar. “Beer?” says Dean.

  Harry nods. “You’re a cunt,” he tells him, about the hundredth time that day.

  Six shots later and his judgement is right off. Rosie lets him in even though it is late and she has to work in the morning, her white chemist assistant’s uniform ironed and hanging on the back of her bedroom door. He reeks of alcohol but it isn’t the first time, smiling at her through the fly wire, the moths going crazy under the outside light. In the morning he’ll curse himself for not dragging his backside home, but for now her bed is warm, the sheets giving off the faintest scent of sweat. He falls into them fully clothed and allows himself to sleep, a dead man’s slumber, deep and dreamless.

  His mum isn’t exactly happy about it. “It’s just like the old days,” she says when he slips inside early the following morning, standing in the middle of the hallway with her arms crossed as he eases off his shoes at the front door, his useless concession to quiet. “I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed it, staying up all night waiting for someone to come home.” She looks at her watch. “Not bad, technically still before your alarm would go off. So you had a good evening? Should I expect a visit from the police?”

  “Come on, Mum. Give me a break. Don’t be like that.”

  “Like what? Where were you last night? I was worried sick.”

  “I had a few drinks with Dean. It’s no big deal. It’s nothing.”

  “Nothing? After the way you’ve been behaving lately. I had no idea what you were up to, leaving without saying goodbye, your bloody phone switched off. What if something had happened? Would you have even called me, or would I have had to read about it in the papers like everybody else?”

  “No. Fuck, no. Of course not.”

  “Of course not? That’s all you’ve got?”

  He doesn’t know what else to say. He would like to be able to explain himself to her. At times it is all he can do to stop from spilling his guts. About the Club and the girl and how he hasn’t been able to sleep properly since that night, the music like bile, rising up when he isn’t expecting it, so that he might find himself walking down the street or at the pub, happily humming along to the melody before processing that it is that tune again, that he is humming that song, walking in time to that music, the sense of revulsion so immediate and complete that his skin breaks out in a rash of goosebumps as though he has paused too long before showering after a mid-season game, when in fact it is twenty-nine degrees outside in the shade. But where to start? What to say? That he is exhausted? That he needs a break? That he just wants to be left alone?

  “Is there anything else?” asks Diana.

  “I might have had a bit too much to drink, that’s all.”

  “Right.” She’s heard that one before. That and everything else. She shakes her head at him and starts down the hall, saying that if he doesn’t watch himself he is going to end up like his dad, an alcoholic with no impulse control, beating up innocent door-to-door canvassers for trying to get him to switch his electricity provider.

  “It’s not the same,” Harry insists as he keeps pace with her, following her into the laundry, where she starts pulling things out of the dryer. “Don’t say that. It’s completely different. You know Dad didn’t mean it.”

  His mother can barely look him in the eye. She throws a towel at him. “Take a shower,” she says. “You smell like a brewery.”

  The shower is a little steam box, so tightly sealed you can’t defog the mirror for a good twenty minutes or so after you turn off the taps, even with both of the windows propped open for ventilation. As he strips off his clothes he thinks of Rosie getting dressed that morning, her thick white tights under her stupid dress, the buckled elastic of her enormous beige underpants visible beneath the distended ribbing. “Why do you wear those undies?” he asked as she buttoned her dress from midriff to top, the fabric pulling slightly at her bust. Had she always worn those underpants? He tried to remember. If so, this was the first time he’d noticed.

  “I can put on other ones if you like,” she said, her face lighting up as though he’d invited her to her first dance. “I just wear these for work.”

  The image of her in her underwear, whether it be those undies or any others, was not appealing. He shook his head, fell back on to the bed, sneered. “No. Don’t bother. Don’t change them for me,” imagining his mum, there he goes again, knowing full well that this was what she meant by his attitude.

  It is a kind of truculence he expects his brother might have understood, the one person who could have risen to his defence, being cut from the same cloth, fallen from the same tree, and so on, not to mention that he was actually there, a reliable witness (in so far as any witness is reliable), could testify to the intoxicated fog of the situation, but Matt can’t put enough distance between them, their already cool relationship having turned decidedly frosty in the days leading up to his departure, it being all Matt could do to acknowledge Harry’s existence, end-of-season events having driven a wedge between their already tenuous fraternal bond. “I can’t believe you did that,” is all he’ll say on the subject, as though Harry has betrayed them both with his behaviour, publicly compromising the reputation of the entire family with his actions, much as their father had with his. I can’t believe you did that. The way their mum would talk to their dad. Wasn’t it bad enough already? Why do you always have to make such an exhibition of yourself? As though he, Harry, is responsible for the entire fiasco, when he knows that isn’t the case, can’t be, his role simply the logical extension of circumstances set in motion by others, months if not years before he even accepted the invitation. Hardly the same ball park.

  But you try telling that to Matt. So imperious. Thinking back to the hotel elevator, not much bigger than the fitting rooms at the formal-wear hire shop, barely recognising himself in the mirror beside his brother, the two of them like male fashion models side by side parading evening attire, or two secret agents on the make, Harry wearing a black dinner jacket with satin lapel facings and black dress slacks with matching satin stripes down the leg, the light too dim to pick up the subtle differences in fabric quality and design that marked Matt’s suit as his own and Harry’s as a loaner, off the rack.

  He felt like a right idiot at the fitting, standing there as Michelle pinned and tugged and pulled at his jacket. “You’ve got a good strong frame,” she said as she ran her hands across his chest, smiling as though it was an innocent gesture, a professional sizing up of his bearing in the suit. It was the kind of game he was used to from drunk girls at the pub, drunk silly girls who’d get a kick out of sipping from his glass, an affected intimacy he’d fast forget but that they’d likely brag about all weekend.

  This was yet another way in which he and his brother were different, Matt loving the limelight, a publicity lush, whereas he eschewed it at all costs – the aversion an exotic lure, irresistible to the sports media who then preyed on his discomfort, stalking him with the same pleasure as sharks mobilised by the scent of blood.

  As he spun around his mum said he looked dashing in his get-up, quite the dapper gentleman, but he didn’t care about that. He just wanted to get out of there before he was recognised. It was only a matter of time before some passer-by cottoned on. And why wouldn’t they? The shop was an arcade of full-length mirrors, with huge windows facing onto the street. He was as good as asking to be seen.

  In the car on the way home Diana hassled him again about his manners. “You could have been nicer to Michelle. She is pretty enough. What would have been the harm inviting her out for a d
rink? How are you going to meet anyone decent with your attitude? Look at your brother. He’s always friendly. He didn’t wait for Kate to make the first move. You’re so stiff. What did I do to make you so uncomfortable around women?”

  “I’m not uncomfortable. I just don’t need you choosing my girlfriends for me.”

  “What does it cost you to be more outgoing?”

  “I thought you hated groupies.”

  “She is a nice girl.”

  “She is a groupie.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I went to school with her mother.”

  It was the kind of conversation they had when his mother was worried about him, when she was worried but she didn’t want to say, like being concerned about him attending Sportsman’s Night but not wanting to keep going on about it, choosing instead to badger him with questions until he told her something she wanted to hear. Something along the lines of how happy he was, or how even though he was single he was solidly heterosexual and had lots of female friends. Most of the time he humoured her, knew it was her clumsy affectionate way. That day, however, he wasn’t in the mood. “What’s her family got to do with anything?” he barked. “It doesn’t mean she’s not a gold-digger.”

  “And it doesn’t mean you can speak to me like that. Take it down a notch, hotshot. You’re not the only one around here with any feelings.”

  Harry pictured himself pushing his mother off a cliff, the fantasy taking him further inside himself, a quietness that she interpreted as hurt feelings, which in turn made her feel guilty and then resentful and then angry, all in the blink of an eye so that out of nowhere she was screaming at him (“Why do you have to make everything so difficult? I’m only thinking of your welfare”) while he was envisioning her remains on the jagged rock below, her bright red blood startling against the pale limestone, the ocean fast washing it away.