The Family Men

by Catherine Harris

  It is news to him, the specifics, but not really. He can see this is the direction it is heading, the obvious way she is expecting it to go (more than six months and most girls assume you are engaged). Just like his mum and dad had been, and her mum and dad. Love and marriage, horse and carriage. And baby makes three. Or four. Or five.

  Except that they aren’t really together, much as he and the Club aren’t really together so much as proximate and convenient, an untenable way to continue a relationship.

  His thoughts run to bunk beds. Bunk beds and unflushed toilets. And his mother’s endless carryings on (still) about all their dirty washing piling up on her laundry floor (“Will you two ever be old enough to wash your own clothes?”), the strictures of happy family life beyond him for the time being. No wonder his dad had left them. Not that he’d had much choice. But Harry can see that this is the way it might have happened. One too many straws and he was off (pushed!).

  “I don’t know why everyone goes on about your brother,” says Rosie. “You’re much better looking than him.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes, definitely,” she says. “No doubt. Guess what, I think I’ll take the afternoon off work.” She adjusts her position to the side and he feels her chapped lips begin to inch across his exposed spine.

  The house feels dark, gloomy, the blinds drawn, windows closed, but he is reluctant to get up and turn on some lights lest she mistake it for an invitation to stick around. Can I have a cup of tea? and so forth. He wants her out before his father returns. Not that the old man would object too strongly to there being a lady in the house (he’d have a nerve if he did), but Harry doesn’t want Rosie getting too comfortable, asking questions, presuming an intimacy borne of blurred boundaries and forced politenesses. Right now he has no tolerance for his dad’s shtick, the gentleman celebrity in his ratty clothes, trying to cover the gap with a chipper mood. Pleased to meet you, young lady, and all that crap. And Rosie would suck up too. All the way up. It makes him wish he could replay his father at his worst. Let her listen to a grab of that and then see how much she likes him.

  Now that the word is out, people want to know what he is going to do. Harry’s an expert at avoiding eye contact but they still stop him in the street and demand explanations: Will you be back next season, Harry? Will we see you training again on the home ground? But what to say? That they might? Probably. He doesn’t know. He isn’t even sure what the questions mean anymore, beyond the obvious – whether or not he’ll be listed on next year’s roster, if he still considers himself part of the side. It is the scale of the issue that stymies him, its breadth. Pinioned there between the everything he’s ever done and the everything he’ll ever likely do, the possibilities looming larger than the universe, greater than any footy field he’s ever played, the answers as unknowable as the vast pale sky stretching above it.

  Walking along, absent-mindedly bouncing the football, he directs his thoughts to his next meat pie. Curry or onion? With or without sauce? Angling the ball across the cracks at just the right pitch, up, down, without a hint of top spin, so that the ball returns to the matching curve of his hands as though attached by string.

  On the field he doesn’t think too much about it, the technical specs. All that concerns him is the trajectory of the football after he kicks the shit out of it, its subjection to his foot, bent to his will, flying through the air, ever forward.

  The management committee urges Harry to get out of town, to take a break, clear his head, fresh legs sometimes making all the difference, could change the whole momentum. Ted saying for the life of him he doesn’t understand why Harry didn’t take off with the others, that none of this might have happened if he’d just had a holiday. The same strategy you use with young children, distract them until the problem goes away.

  “It’s not too late. Why not spend a week in Tahiti? Practise your French. Bora Bora’s nice. We’ll set you up in a hotel, five stars. You’ll have a suite. Everything at your fingertips. Spend your days sucking rum out of a coconut. Sleep in, get drunk by the pool, eat too much, have a massage. You might even get lucky with one of the local girls. Or don’t. If that’s not your poison. Go fishing with some mates in Yarrawonga instead, that’s always popular. Or skiing. Or camping. Somewhere off the beaten path. Whatever you like. It doesn’t matter to me what you do, just so long as you’re not here. No wonder you’re burnt out. Even I’m sick of the sight of you.”

  Harry considers it for about five minutes, Alan letting it be known that he is keen to reprise their childhood hunting expeditions – father, sons, a tent and three rifles out in the middle of nowhere – but Harry has long had designs on Ningaloo Reef. Ever since primary school when Dean’s parents visited the area, returning with snapshots of dugongs and nurse sharks in water so clear it took nothing for him to imagine sitting on the edge of a weathered old rowboat trailing his feet over the side. Riffling through dozens of photographs of brightly coloured tropical fish, Dean’s mum saying that you could rent a glass-bottomed boat and spend all day in it if you wanted. Matt can’t understand what you’d do all day if you couldn’t surf, but Harry has no problem with it, exchanging the rush of the waves for dozier occupations – fishing and scuba diving, whale spotting from sheltered coves, fossicking for unusual shells.

  “I might come with you,” says Diana, as the two of them stuff holiday cards into company envelopes. Season’s Greetings from Irwin Mercantile. One of his mum’s clients. “It sounds like Blue Lagoon.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Just a movie. Though seriously, you might want to double-check if you can swim there. They’ve got crocodiles in the west.”

  His father doesn’t see the point of it when the Barrier Reef is that much closer, but Harry is enticed by the distance, by the fantasy of being so far away from home. At very least he might be able to walk into a pub without being stared down all the way to the bar. “Imagine taking a leak in a public dunny without everyone trying to guess the size of your cock.”

  “So do it,” says Alan. “If you think it’ll make you happy, leave.”

  Embrace the challenge!

  It isn’t difficult for him to arrange it all in his head. He has the car. He has the rucksack. All that is missing is a dog for the passenger seat. Man’s best friend. A blue heeler or a kelpie, one of those working dogs, something hardy to keep the riffraff away (not a runt like that terrier next door). A breed only a mother can love, says his mother, who’d steadfastly resisted her sons’ adolescent entreaties. But Dean had had one, Ruben (fuckstick name for a pet), now buried under a camellia tree (he just keeled over one morning beside his kennel, his tail extended as though he’d been chasing rabbits). “His ticker gave out,” the vet said, he was pretty sure, though it could have been anything really. Ruben was sixteen years old.

  Harry missed Ruben possibly more than Dean did, the stupid animal, keeping pace with them on a run, or tearing up and down the beach barking at the waves when they were surfing.

  If Ruben was still around he might have borrowed him; loaded up the car and hit the highway. Without the dog though it would just be him out there, him out there again doing it on his own.

  The street shines with the false gleam of early holiday cheer. Harry cruises past the formal-wear hire shop – Michelle is there, the one his mum likes, the same girl who’d fitted him for his tux – then circles the block and parks a few doors down where he has a good bead on her but is sure she can’t see him. His back pocket vibrates and he responds to it automatically, too distracted by his surveillance activity (metaphorically trying her on for size) to check the number before answering it, a decision he regrets the moment he recognises her voice. “G’day, Harry,” says Margo, all charm. The double doors at the front entrance to the shop automatically open and close as passers-by, on their way to the wine store next door, veer too close to the motion sensor. Michelle doesn’t even look up, she must be so used to it. Again, Margo wants to know if he has any news.


  “What kind of news? I’ve told you a million times, Maggie. I don’t know anything. I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  He isn’t about to deliver any kind of meaningful information (he can’t imagine she thinks he would) and he knows better than to lie, might as well dig himself a trough and lie down in it right there, but Margo has a sixth sense about things – it’s what makes her so good at her job – and he feels her dogging him like he’s caught a hard tag.

  “Come on Harry, you’re not playing fair. Why haven’t you returned my calls? I did that Make-A-Wish piece on you and Matt at the hospital. It’s a two-way street. All I want is something to work with. There’s a couple of stories floating around, the usual Jack horseshit mostly, the Grand Final, something about a girl, but I smell smoke. Is it fire or am I sucking a stale ashtray?”

  Fire, smoke, smoke machines, the volume so loud he can’t hear himself think … You keep fronting …

  But he won’t budge. “Time to give up smoking, I reckon, Margo. There’s no fire here.”

  “What about you, then?” she tries. “Where are you sitting with your plans?”

  The formal-hire shop is empty of clientele. It is too late in the year for much of that kind of dressing up. Too hot. Michelle leans against the counter, staring out the window, trancelike, as though she is looking right at him. He knows she can’t see him from that angle but he leans back anyway. “Mum says I shouldn’t talk to you,” he says, his eyes firmly fixed on the automatic doors.

  She snorts. “Really? But we’re old friends. I would have thought she’d be all for—”

  He hangs up before she finishes talking, for once the simplest solution seeming like the best – knowing he won’t have a comeback for whatever it is she is going to say next – a flash of certainty guiding his hand, and then the inevitable hollow as it evaporates, the familiar nothing that trails his indecision. Looking at the phone, thinking it might explode from his insolence, he quickly switches it off before Margo has a chance to ring back to chastise him – who do you think you are? etc. – finding it hard to distinguish between her and the other maternal figures in his life, despite their supposed professional relationship.

  Team officials tend to stick to the sidelines, but business is business and when it comes to her family, Diana is nothing if not pragmatic. Harry hears the car door slam and then her voice carrying down the hall. “I thought I told you to tell that old bitch to fuck off,” she says, fuming at the front door. “You know how I feel about those people. It’s bad enough that she rings – I don’t know why she bothers, I’m never going to call her back – but to come to the house. And speaking gibberish, some garbage about you and a girl at Sportsman’s Night. It was like a flashback; at first I thought she was talking about your father. Are you trying to give me a heart attack? I told you not to go. I virtually begged you not to go. Didn’t I say that? Didn’t I say, ‘Don’t do it?’ But no, you were going to go anyway. Fine. And now I’ve got reporters at my door again asking me about strange women like it’s 1989.” She stands there staring at him through the screen door, kicking the doorstop but refusing to come inside. “She wanted to know if you’d said anything to me about it.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her to piss off and get off my property, that’s what I told her, but do we need to call the lawyer, Harry? Is that what we’re dealing with here? You understand, she came to the house. She says she spoke to you but that you refused to answer her questions. Is it true? Did you do something? Did you? What did you do?”

  If Harry could have hit someone, something, he would have. He knew Jack had had a few beers already on Sportsman’s Night, a few more than usual, not that you could really tell, staggering being his default posture, that, and grabbing his dick, preferably in public, whenever he got a chance, but this, this trying to drop him in it, was a new low.

  “Pity he’s so famous or he’d probably be in jail,” Diana had said, issued at report of his last stunt, exposing Mr Happy to some woman at a Family Day meet-and-greet, news of which reached the major networks within minutes of the woman’s husband telephoning the police. She didn’t press charges (an omission rumoured to have cost the Club a small fortune – her children were now enrolled at a very expensive private school – the woman going on record only to say that she was keen to put the matter behind her), but it was enough to get Jack suspended for a couple of weeks on Club ethics violations. He’d been pulled up on more than anyone in recent history, but when you are the greatest full-forward since Tony Lockett, who really cares if you can’t keep your hands to yourself?

  Eddy is more demure, but not much, tending to follow his older brother’s lead (less a question of character than courage, Jack holding the majority share of both), the adage being proved yet again that the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree, stunted, gnarled and diseased though it might be (and if you knew their father you’d know it was true, cruel bastard that he was).

  Harry knows he has to keep it under control, to hose it down and put a lid on it before his mother decides to take matters into her own hands. The last thing he needs is her involvement, the meddling of an activist coach come out of retirement. “There’s nothing to worry about, really. Nothing. I didn’t do anything, I didn’t. I promise. I said there’s nothing going on and there’s not. I told Margo too, that’s why I had nothing to say to her. I don’t know what she wants.” He is about to add, I can’t believe you had to ask, a stab at moral indignation, but he knows it is a step too far. His mother is perfectly within her rights to doubt him. It is part of the deal, the reality they’ve come to accept, that when it comes to football no accusation is too far-fetched.

  “She seemed pretty sure of herself.”

  “Of course she did. She’s a journalist. You taught me that. But there’s nothing to it. Really. Did she say where she got her information? I keep telling her that nothing happened, that there’s nothing going on. You know what those nights are like. Strippers and whatnot. But it was all pretty tame. Maybe someone got me mixed up with someone else, or one of the other blokes is having a lend of her, trying to get her to leave him alone by fobbing her off on to me. But I swear to you, I didn’t do anything. Nothing. She’s just digging for something to write about, trying to join the dots to make something that isn’t there.”

  His father advises him to deal with it head-on. “It’s a pretty bold play to drop in on someone like that, especially someone like your mother. She obviously thinks there’s more to this business with the Club than you’re saying, otherwise why take the risk?”

  “Obviously.”

  “So is there?”

  “No.”

  “I’d understand, son. Of all people, you know I would.”

  “I said no.”

  “So set her straight. The sooner you make a decision the sooner life will get back to normal around here. These people are relentless. Do you want me to talk to her?”

  “Don’t be daft,” says Harry. He doesn’t want that. Certainly not. “I can handle it,” he says. But even if couldn’t, he wouldn’t want his father talking to her. He never wants his father to talk.

  He is having that dream again: groggy, waking from a deep sleep, and she is there, her hair spread over his belly, warm wet mouth on his cock, her breasts grazing the pale skin on his thighs. He ejaculates as he wakes, just as he realises what is going on; Kate, his brother’s girlfriend, has hijacked his imagination.

  Harry feels ill. Why won’t the women let him be?

  At the Club a directive is issued reminding the boys to keep their mouths firmly shut. Off the record: Margo has been calling people making all sorts of crazy accusations and they are trying to get a handle on it. It is imperative that all media requests however small be channelled through the publicity office, the email says.

  What happens at Sportsman’s Night stays at Sportsman’s Night.

  Matt is dispatched to make sure Harry gets the message. He comes bearing boxes, mostly footb
all memorabilia their mum has threatened to throw away if it isn’t cleared from under the bed. Harry helps him get it out of the car, an open carton revealing a publicity still, the good old days, the family patriarch taking a mark.

  There are fewer photographs of the groupies and the gambling parties (“extracurricular activities”). Fewer still of the kids. Alan’s stash hidden in their junior comp trophies. Their Monopoly money rolled into little tubes. Images of the great man snorting speed off the credenza at 4 am then not eating for five days straight filed indelibly in the murky archive of their childhood memories. Golden moments. No wonder the old man’s career went off the rails.

  “Do you ever think about after, about what you’ll do next?” Harry asks Matt, a rare moment of ease between them.

  “That’s a way off, isn’t it?”

  “Is it? I don’t know. You never know.”

  “I take it you’ve been giving the matter some thought. Does that mean you’re in or you’re out?”

  “Jury’s still out.”

  “If you’re having that much trouble making a decision maybe you would be better off doing something else.”

  Easy moment over.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Yeah, well stop making your problems my problems.”

  The days feel perennially grey, a great tarpaulin draped across the city, the sky somehow lower than usual, lower and wider, like it is flattening out on top of him, flattening and pushing, draining him of colour the way a leaf is flattened and loses its pigment when pressed down by a book.

  Harry pulls up outside of Our Lady of the Assumption about five minutes early but already people are mingling on the front steps, early departers, or others, like him, tasked with the job of collecting someone. He doesn’t feel like waiting in the car, sitting there almost as awkward as being benched in the first half (taking one for the team, that’s what his high school coach had called it, his tone of voice a reminder that Harry was lucky he hadn’t been forced to take a couple more, and at fourteen you didn’t argue with your coach, even when you were up by twenty goals and it was the one time that year your dad had been sober enough to come and watch you play).