The Family Men

by Catherine Harris

He stands in the shower and turns on the faucet hard in defiance of the water restrictions, letting the torrent gush as he replays the scene over and over, trapping water in reservoirs at his feet, wedging his toes together, an impenetrable shelf, until the level breaches his ankles and overflows.

  Rosie is fond of whispering messages when she thinks he is asleep. Better than if he is awake, thinks Harry, not having to acknowledge her ridiculous feelings, enunciated so quietly they might not exist at all. Definitely the way he prefers it. Already enough under the rug without having to accommodate her muffled contribution. This time it is that she loves him. “I love you,” she utters, barely a notch above her breath. “Do you love me too?”

  He doubts it, doesn’t think so.

  They’d first hooked up at the pub about eight months before and have been fucking on and off ever since. Not that anybody knows, not officially, it isn’t exactly the Christian thing to do, getting together secretly after dark, at the beach, by the surf club, at her flat if Katia, her flatmate, is out, Rosie’s thick body a lumpy buttress against the fray, her homeliness his private antidote to the onslaught. He grips her upper arm, watches the way the flesh bulges between his roughened fingers, his hand wrapped around her stippled skin like a vice.

  Father Murphy says that romantic love is a blessing, the spirit of the creator packaged for human scale, as sacred and honourable as any other bestowed by God, but if that is the case then why does he loathe her so much? He asks his mother. “Is it possible to love something you hate?”

  She scoffs. “Have you been talking to your dad?”

  Even after the shower he can still smell Rosie on him, that cloying sweetness in his hair as he stands over the bathroom sink, the cool water running across his hands and wrists, wondering how it is that he can detect her perfume after lathering himself so thoroughly. I love you. Did they have sex or not? He doesn’t think so. He is pretty sure he just passed out, though he can’t be certain. Fuck, he hopes they didn’t.

  His mum is sorting invoices when he returns to the kitchen, little piles of paper distributed across the table. He struggles with the new aspirin bottle, first fiddling with the security seal then roughly pulling at the residual sheath blocking the opening, releasing a cascade of pills that pour over his palm and scatter in a kind of dot design across the speckled Laminex.

  The phone rings again. An image of Jack and Eddy, older and younger brother, conjoined, a grotesque minotaur.

  “Jesus. This is bullshit.”

  His mum doesn’t want to hear it. “Just answer it,” she says. “Don’t be such a drama queen.”

  It is probably only Margo following up about their lunch date, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t want to sit down with her for a blow by blow of how he ties his shoelaces. He doesn’t want to get that close. “I don’t want to talk to anybody right now. Can’t you just answer it, say I’m out? You’re my mother; buy me some space.”

  “Right, that’s it,” says Diana. “I’ve had enough.”

  He heads straight to his dad’s latest dwelling, a battered two-bedroom weatherboard around the corner (such are the gifts of the true believers), his parents being modern divorcees, publicly loathing each other but always living within easy walking distance for the sake of the children; it being their game when the boys were growing up – sending them back and forth between their two houses whenever they had a point to prove, as though regular eviction was somehow beneficial to the children’s welfare. “Run, don’t walk,” his mother’s catchcry. How was he supposed to learn to pace himself?

  Dean helps him transport his stuff. It isn’t much, a rucksack and an overnight bag. It fits easily in the back seat of his car, but Dean tails him anyway, more symbolic than necessary, a two-vehicle convoy trailing around the block.

  Harry dumps his things in the spare room, a thin cigar of a space barely wider than the single folding bed, with peeling green and brown linoleum on the floor and warped venetian blinds shading him from the prying antics of the neighbours. It is like a dodgy motel but without the hospital corners, including a scuffed edition of the Bible that his dad has left for him on the folding chair set up as a bedside table.

  There is something fitting about finding himself unexpectedly billeted in this makeshift barracks. He pulls out his alarm clock and plugs it in, getting down on his hands and knees to locate the power point under the bed, a cracked fixture with exposed wiring that looks like it might catch fire at any moment (injecting an unexpected dramatic element; which will happen first, that or his father’s relapse, his mother certain that the latter is perpetually imminent).

  The old man potters around the backyard, demonstrating for Dean the effectiveness of his new weed trimmer as Harry finishes putting his things away, grateful for the rudimentary nature of the place. His father is a neat freak but there is nothing too flouncy. No rugs overlaying the carpet, no runners on the coffee table, no special towels in the bathroom just for drying your hands. It is a straightforward space to match his straightforward outlook. Pared back and basic. Nothing will be expected of him here.

  The back door squeaks then bangs behind him, announcing Harry’s presence as he joins them outside. “Easy does it,” says his dad, “it’s not my house,” the heat of the day washing out the yard in an overexposed blur, Harry thinking the media would be hard pressed to categorise this moment, the old man looking like neither a football legend nor a drug-crazed monster (or has he, Harry, now assumed that role, a capricious changeling, his mother’s most recent description), rabbiting on about his voluntary work, how some desperate bastard broke into the church office and stole the weekly donations, a grand total of forty-five bucks earmarked for the steeple fund. Harry slips off his shoes, feels the tough spears of buffalo grass under his feet, glad for the illusion of a home away from home, sanctuary. Then they crack tinnies. Cheers. The three of them sitting on the folding deck chairs, sipping Fantas in VB stubby holders, his father going on about his different varieties of tomato plants.

  The old man waits until Dean takes off before suggesting that Harry call his mother to apologise. “It’s not her fault she goes off at you. She can’t help herself. You know that.”

  “But I didn’t do anything,” responds Harry. “Why should I ring her if I didn’t do anything? That’s fucked up.”

  “I don’t think it’s about anything you did or didn’t do. That’s not the point.”

  “Well what then?” He eases up a brick from the border of the vegetable patch, slaters writhing beneath it on the brown deadened grass as his father considers the question, Harry knowing the answer without having to be told, that it is his dad who bears the responsibility for this disaster, their family’s not so private melodrama. He is the one who scripted it, all those years ago, breaking her down with his bullshit, wearing her out. She’s said so often enough, that he’d destroyed her spirit with his selfishness, leaving her with little more than her name to defend, so that now when it comes to football she shuts down because she has nothing left to give. She’ll drive them to appointments and come to special games, but when it gets more complicated than that they are on their own. All the highs and lows, the star turns and mercurial temperaments, she’s had a gutful of it. What is good for the goose is good for the gander and will have to stand for the goslings too. But understanding that doesn’t change anything. Harry is still furious. “It doesn’t give her the right to pay out on me whenever she feels like it. Why does she always give me such a hard time?”

  “Look, if you want to go off at someone, blame me, alright. I’m right here. I’m the reason. Me. My career. Whatever you want to call it. You’re just a place holder. I’m the one she’s mad at.”

  “You call her then. You’re the one always saying not to shit where you eat.”

  “I would if I could, you know that, but it doesn’t work that way. That ship’s sailed, it sailed a long time ago. The damage is done. Now it doesn’t matter what I do. It’d just be window dressing. She’s like a racehorse
with a broken leg. On the surface it’s healed, but she’ll always walk with a limp.”

  “I thought they shot injured racehorses,” says Harry.

  “Yeah, well you should still give her a ring,” says his dad. “They only shoot the ones with nowhere else to go.”

  It is like a coffin, his narrow bed, but he likes it. He lies there in the dark, a strip of light glowing beneath the door, as his father rattles between the bathroom and the kitchen, the soft shuffle of his slippers betraying his position. Textbook insomnia. Or what his dad calls his special friend, these episodes that plague him night after night, the ones he takes the white pills for, when he takes them, the same ones that leave him groggy in the morning, give him headaches, the joint stiffness and chronic dry mouth, but they are worth it, necessary even, the fear of those long spare hours so intense they often keep his father from going to bed at all (causing Harry to wonder if his own nightmares aren’t hereditary, a congenital marker in his DNA, or even contagious, an unidentified strain of virus unwittingly picked up and transmitted from parent to child). Praying for forgiveness (To seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out – AA Step 11), but one can only pray so much – his father forcing down another cup of coffee at midnight to stave off weariness, preferring that stark caffeinated consciousness to the vicious derangements of his so-called repose. Would he ever be able to make peace?

  This latest bout is precipitated by the coming day’s events, specifically an interview granted months ago in the first flush of flattery, his father agreeing to put himself out there in support of a new endorsement deal (I’m mad for MADCITYSPORTS), a discount active-clothing line, his signature embroidered on some shorts legs, the words arranged like a logo across a couple of shirt pockets (knowing he should cancel, it’s plausible that he’s changed his mind, Harry agreeing that he should give it a miss, but he is paralysed by a lack of conviction). “It’s just a where-are-they-now story,” he qualifies as he irons his shirt later that morning, as though that makes it alright, obviates any risk of collateral damage, creasing and re-creasing it with alternate shots of steam and Fabulon as he shifts from leg to leg, so great is his agitation – he can count on one hand the number of times since getting sober that he’s willingly submitted to a journalist’s interrogation.

  But the big man doesn’t like to look a gift horse in the mouth (even when the gift looks more like an interest-heavy hire-purchase agreement) and this interview is part of the deal or so he’s been led to believe – it is all part of God’s plan, he is fond of saying, the journalist assuring him that no one is interested in gratuitously dredging up the past (his culpability in a young woman’s death, the inescapable knowledge that there was always something that could have been done, if only he’d had his wits about him, hadn’t drunk so much, hadn’t scored so much; and that is just the start of it). “I’m in the business of profiles, not hatchet jobs,” the reporter insists, even if the interview subject is the only person to believe it – but you have to have faith, don’t you? That having always been his problem, not lacking the wisdom to know the difference, but the serenity to name the issue, to see things as they are.

  He keeps saying the article’s just meant to be a bit of background, a survey of his career, fluff; the kind of thing you’d read in a doctor’s waiting room or on the bus, two-thirds through and then forgotten. But as the day for the interview approaches, Alan’s back starts playing up again, aching at night, the bulging discs pressing against his sciatic nerve, shooting pain through his buttocks and thighs, so much so that at times he says he feels his knees might give out beneath him, that they might buckle and he’ll crumple to the floor.

  Harry listens to his father muttering to himself, rummaging in the kitchen cupboards for his prescription, barely a wall separating them – there but for the grace of God, or is that an insufficient distance? – preparing Weeties at 4 am (you can’t take those drugs on an empty stomach), the distempered clang of his spoon on the side of his bowl as he absently shovels in cereal while fiddling with his current jigsaw puzzle. Dawn. A cityscape. Or, if he finishes that, he might start on his new one. Ducks at Lakeside.

  Come morning, his dishes line the sink, errant wheat flakes bloated in the milky swill. The cereal gives off a slightly musty smell, the odour reminding Harry of his mother’s camphor chest. Moth balls. The faintly necrotic scent of naphthalene.

  *

  The girl pulled out her cosmetic bag and touched up her make-up, doing her best to disguise fifteen – foundation, lipstick, mascara, blush – the dingy suburbs trailing away faster and faster as the train gathered speed. Not that she needed to worry. Most of the dancers were about her age when they got started, Greta had assured her the first time they seriously talked about it, standing in the Big W car park, the girl gripping Greta’s contact details (a telephone number scrawled beside Upside Entertainment). It was a standard thing. The blokes liked them young (she herself was barely fifteen when she performed at her first event), no surprise there, and it was harmless really, a bit of fun, and good experience (“You’ll easily get other work once you’ve got this job under your belt,” she’d said), the boss looking the other way when it came to convincing IDs, though everyone was expected to play the game (you might well have been a teenager when you walked through the door but for taxation purposes you had to say you were eighteen).

  “You’d be perfect,” Greta reiterated, uncommonly glamorous amongst the suburban shoppers in her white jeans, oversized tortoise-shell sunglasses, pumps, lacquered bouffant hair. “I can tell. I’ve got a nose for these things.”

  The girl admitted she had some experience. The Eisteddfod, years seven and eight. She loved dancing. And two hundred dollars for two hours’ work, that was a lot of money. You couldn’t make that much at Big W, not even on public holidays. She was meant to be saving for a car; Mr Pyke from next door had promised to sell her his old Volkswagen Beetle if she could come up with three thousand dollars by Christmas (a bargain, it had only driven forty thousand kilometres), but at this rate she’d be lucky to have the money by the time school finished. With this dancing work though she’d easily be able to afford it. She might even be able to save enough for a security deposit as well.

  Her mother thought she was going to the cinema then staying overnight at a friend’s (Laura’s, or was it Cassandra’s? One of them. She always got them mixed up. It didn’t matter; they were all basically the same in her view, average height, thin build, dirty blonde hair obscuring their insolent faces), choosing to accept it as the truth, the movies a vastly preferable occupation to the waitressing job her daughter had been banging on about, casual shifts with some nameless catering company. “Who staffs their evening functions with teenage girls? Serving themselves up as part of the dinner menu, because that’s what it would amount to – you know that, don’t you? – young girls in short skirts balancing t-bone steaks between their bosoms. Coffee, tea, me? Not on your life. As long as you’re still young enough for me to forbid it then forbid it I will. And fifteen is still young enough for me to insist on a few rules around here. So no, you may not.”

  “But Mum—”

  “Will not! What would people think?”

  And so the girl had lied. Mentally cycling through the dance sequences again, rehearsing the transitions, the hardest steps, the ones most likely to trip her up, no one caring much what she did otherwise, Greta saying at one of their lessons, as long as she smiled and vaguely kept up with the group. Secretly practising for weeks in front of the mirror at home, pouting and smiling as she looked over her shoulder, imagining the applause as she executed a pretty turn or bent over to adjust her stockings, it never occurring to her that there could be more to it, that afterwards she’d be doing anything other than banking her pretty cash.

  *

  It’s what a father might have explained, if she’d had a father, the type
to put her straight, to lay down the law. Or in Harry’s case, a mother, Diana not being one to mince her words, much as at times he wishes she would, especially when he is acting as his parents’ go-between. “It’s your fucking ego,” she says down the phone, Senior’s voicemail capturing the minute quaver, despair sublimated as disgusted fury. “Your unquenchable thirst for attention.” She’s long refused to speak to journalists, can’t believe Alan has fallen back into that trap, doing interviews again, worse than a thirteen-year-old girl, his susceptibility to flattery. “In all these years haven’t you learnt anything? You tell that little shit not to bother me again or he’ll be speaking to my solicitor, unless of course you want me to issue a comment, which I’d be very happy to do,” Harry dutifully passing along the message as Alan twitches around the garden in his shorts and gumboots, a smouldering fuse waiting to go off.

  Parlaying his energy into weed pulling, spreading fertiliser, turning the topsoil, applying moisture-trapping mulch, but no end in sight. Bent over the parsley, dropping to one knee, winded, like he’s taken a foot in the solar plexus, saying, “Goddammit, can’t she leave it alone?”

  Magical thinking of the first order. But that is the way his father has always been when confronted with the truth.

  Harry has tried denial, telling himself that he doesn’t buy half the stories bandied around about his dad, but in actual fact he does. Everybody does. That is the problem. Predisposed as he is to disclaim it, most of the time one barely has to dig, allegations about the drugs and the women and the alcohol lying about on the surface of his father’s reputation like fabled nuggets during a gold rush. Beneath the scuttlebutt and scandal sheets, the denials and rationalisations, there is always something there. It might not seem like much, a speck, a skerrick, a flake panned from the cleanest looking riverbed, but it is rare that a story about his father finds its way to the public domain without having some weight (even Matt would back him on that). His father used to protest that they weren’t true – the media loved to scapegoat him, he would say, to make up lies. The prostitutes, for example; why would he have spent so much money on hookers when so many women were happy to offer their services for free? A classic defence guaranteed to both exonerate and incriminate him in a single misfire (he was the victim here), but the rumours invariably had some veracity.