The Family Men

by Catherine Harris

  Lately his dad has taken to lingering long after the service, chatting with the special ministers, helping to put away the collection, anything to prolong that semblance of autonomy, to avoid returning to the aegis of his son’s scrutiny. It could be hours before he makes an appearance, leaving Harry feeling like a jilted bride.

  Harry slips into the back pew, rests his eyes for a second and focusses on his breathing. Counting backwards from one hundred as slowly as he can. Another of the counsellor’s exercises. A way of making the time pass. You’d think it would be easy, thinking about nothing, letting the clock roll down to zero but his mind is an amateur brass band, each discordant trumpet louder than the last, the past reaching into the present more and more insistently so he is as good as there again, Sportsman’s Night, watching the show.

  “Tits, tits, tits, tits, tits,” the players roared, flooding the forward area, the scene a fervent zoo of inebriation, the atmosphere so thick that the occasional sickly lungful of dry-ice smoke was actually a blessed relief from the alcohol and sweat and stifling pheromones. Packed in against one another, their bodies a tight scrum of desire giving off the disembodied chant, imploring the women to remove their clothes, until one by one the ladies took off their tops.

  They were wearing pasties. Silver stars attached to their nipples that did little to conceal their breasts. Yet they were strangely chaste with the decals, like youngsters in bikini tops at the beach.

  Nevertheless, Harry had a hard-on, despite himself, despite Jack whispering into his ear like a lover – “How’s that? Could you tap a piece of that?” – as the women, some just girls really, jiggled and shook, the wry false modesty of their “adult” performance.

  He starts counting again. One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven, ninety-six, forcing himself to focus on the numbers, to block the rest of it out, the girls, the boys, the music. Ninety-five, ninety-four … his feet pressed firmly to the floor, the present.

  Alan is right up the front near the altar, has no idea Harry is sitting there watching him hobble about, bowed and limping as he stores away the wine, snuffs out the candles, almost impossible to believe it is the same man who once proudly snorted six lines of cocaine in one sitting, drank vodka shots for breakfast, Harry and Matt making hay as best they could, turning his recklessness into lemonade (“Sign this, Dad,” then flogging the autographed booty to their school friends). Years spent climbing on and off that transport, the toll like a winch, prematurely drawing him in, tightening. If Harry didn’t know better he’d have assumed his father was an invalid visiting from the local convalescent home, that, or he was there on some kind of community service order.

  The church is shabby modern. Built in the 1980s – blond brick, wood panelling, a simple pulpit, the walls adorned with large impressionistic copper plates depicting the Stations of the Cross, the carpet runners thinning regal Berber. There is no choir. Altar boys operate the tinny sound system. Renée Geyer sings Songs of Joy. Or very occasionally a local duo will treat them to an out-of-tune sampling of devotional hymns set to their acoustic guitar.

  Harry could have sworn there was a choir at the church they’d attended as kids. If you could call their visits “attending”, Easter, Christmas, the occasional confirmation or first communion, he and his brother like Switzerland, sandwiched between his warring parents, an anodyne territory regularly breached. At the time his thoughts were more concerned with his latest district carnival performance than with prayer, the service seeming interminably long. That’s mostly what he recalled. That and working on his short kick and eating Chiko Rolls, their snacks on the way home (piping hot, he always burnt his tongue), purchased to offset the deleterious effects of the inevitable quarrelling which resumed seconds after they all returned to the car.

  His stomach issues a decided rumble. He could go a Chiko Roll now.

  Father Murphy makes his way up the aisle to farewell the remaining parishioners, ducking into a squat beside Harry when he reaches his pew, close enough that Harry can see the short flecks of ginger and grey stubble on his chin. “What do you think of this,” says the priest, closing his eyes and reciting a couple of lines.

  “Say it again, Father.”

  “The nothings you can never put into words. I thought of you when I read that, your situation.”

  “What’s it mean? Is it from the Bible?”

  “No. It’s a poem.”

  “A poem?”

  “‘Small-Scale’ by Gig Ryan. She’s an Australian poet.”

  Harry laughs. “You’re bullshitting me. Like Ryan Giggs?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Never mind.”

  At the Point mist rises from the sea, the temperature of the water cooler than the temperature of the air, gulls gliding across its surface to escape the heat. Harry dives into the waves, head first through the surf, his thin blond hair pressed against his translucent scalp framing his face like an acanthus garland. There is more than a little malice in that black morass, the way its unrelenting purposefulness lands one wave on the shore after another. He ducks his head again, his chest swollen with breath. And then it crashes right on top of him, the thrust of the ocean.

  Jock Riley, team legend and Club board member (also known as EG because he set such a fine example), had been roped in for the Sportsman’s Night presentation ceremony. First he delivered the annual “Swinburne” speech, a bit of spruiking about Club glories, past and present, after which awards were presented while the boys ate dinner. The dancers returned to the stage, more modestly dressed in translucent Club-coloured chemises, taking it in turns to hand out the gongs. There you go and a kiss on the cheek:

  Best Club Man

  Most Improved

  Leading Goal Kicker

  Best and Fairest (First, Second, Third)

  Most Courageous

  Striving for Excellence

  Best Finals Player

  Player-Voted Award

  Coach’s Award

  Rising Star

  Best VFL Player

  They were all attractive enough, the women, but Harry didn’t really see the others, the young blonde having scope-locked his attention, the way she seemed to be there but not there, startled and slightly lost, like a foreigner at a tourist attraction wandered into someone else’s family photograph.

  He wanted to talk to her but not like this, dreaded the sound of his name being called, knew it was coming but almost tripped when he was invited forward, second-last prize of the evening.

  He tried to smile. Who else could they have given it to? “Rising” what? Any other player would have been insulted.

  Someone booed as he stumbled across the stage. Half-hearted. He didn’t care. All he wanted was for it to be over, to accept his honour and to step down.

  Laurie was up there. And Ted, the Club president, flanking Jock, all awkwardly extending their hands:

  “Good onya, mate.”

  “Give my regards to your dad.”

  “Well done, son.”

  Harry didn’t dare look towards the women. One of the other dancers kissed him, presented him with his prize.

  The trophy now lay atop a box of calendars in his mother’s living room. Someone else might have been pleased to receive it but for him it was just one more in a house full of trophies, another placeless keepsake looking for a home.

  Again his father wants to know what he is going to do. “You can’t just sit around all day scratching your behind. This labouring work’s a dead end.”

  “Jesus was a carpenter.”

  “Save your bullshit for Laurie, right. So—”

  “So I don’t want to talk about it,” says Harry, for the thousandth time thinking, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck off.

  He doesn’t want to talk about a lot of things – like his past or his future or the other night when he found his father broken down on the kitchen floor, his composure strewn like the jigsaw puzzle, scattered in a million pieces (thinking of the first time his mothe
r walked out, TAB stubs sprayed across the living room, Alan swallowing diazepam like aspirin, coming down from a week-long bender – now that was a morning after). It is plain his father doesn’t want to talk about it either and Harry is more than happy to remain ignorant of his father’s particular demons spelled out for him in all their idiosyncratic detail. Or so he thinks. Except that this wilful Lethe allows for figments of his own invention, projections created in his own image, and thus he imagines them the same as his father’s; an equivalent palette of sorrows, one colour bleeding into the next, there being no clear distinction anymore where one torment starts and the other ends. Which girl is it who keeps him up at night? Whose injustice does he cry for? What is it that he is losing, has lost?

  What he wants, what he’ll miss, is mud. The kind his grandfather called jungle muck. The thick, slimy, New Guinean sludge caked on his boots after a game. In summer, dust blackens his feet, wedging itself between his knuckly toes, so abrasive, it is the very opposite of slick.

  Even when he’s been surfing, his toes remain filthy. A melanoid souvenir. A visceral stubbornness. A refusal to be wiped clean.

  Rosie knocks on the front door.

  He answers in his bathrobe, his hair clumped, eyes puffy from watching too much TV.

  “What?” she says, as he stares at her in disbelief.

  “I told you not to come here. Not unless you rang first.”

  She laughs. “Oh, lighten up. A few of us are going to the movies.”

  “Who?”

  “Who do you think?”

  He glances back, knows his dad is dozing off on the couch. Surely it is alright to leave him alone for a couple of hours. He probably won’t even notice Harry is gone. “Okay,” he says, “but not as a couple or anything. We’re not holding hands.” Not that she has ever tried to hold his hand. Not in public. But he knows what she is after, that unspoken desire for legitimacy, has long had an inkling of it, a dogged shadow of an idea that is now forcing its way into the open.

  She watches him disappear barefoot down the hall, the light from the telly flickering through the frosted glass door, separating the living room from the front entryway.

  At the cinema, Simone looks like she has a football stuffed under her jumper. Lank hair, thick ankles, she is up the duff, easily six months gone. In the ticket line, as she waddles along beside Katia and Katia’s boyfriend, Pete, Harry has to remind himself that he knows her, that she isn’t just another faceless mum.

  Inside, they throw popcorn at the girls. “Fuck off,” yells Rosie.

  “Stick it up your arse,” calls Simone.

  Picturing Simone in Grade 2, flat-chested with lace-patterned white knee-high socks.

  Stick it up your arse.

  She wouldn’t have said that then.

  They sit through nearly two hours of The Devil Wears Prada. Ladies’ choice. The girls’ rapt faces flickering before Anne Hathaway’s simpering attempts to impress her vicious boss, played by Meryl Streep, while he and Pete and Pete’s mate, Chris, wait it out (junk time), such is the price of consensual sex. The theatre is barely half full. Usually he likes going to the movies, especially during the day, sitting in the dark, as indistinct as everybody else, a matinee reprieve from reality. But since the press conference he feels like he can’t get away, that he is conspicuous even here, an aura of infamy surrounding his very being.

  Rosie sits across the aisle but her presence is so immediate she might as well be sitting right beside him. Every time he looks across she is looking back at him. Or she isn’t but he can feel her thinking of him, as though she’s just been looking but has managed to turn away in time – a clumsy strategy, faking her intermittent interest in the film, so that he won’t notice her obsessing.

  His skin feels itchy. He imagines himself blushing, the red patches clawing up his pale neck. Back at Rosie’s flat, he tries fucking her but finds it hard to sustain any interest, the sound of Katia and Pete rooting in the adjacent room off-putting, or perhaps he has had enough of ferreting about in the knickers of this girl he doesn’t care for. “Maybe we should call it quits, I think we should call it quits,” he says, as she pumps again at his penis as though it is her fault (poor technique, she worries), meaning the whole relationship, not just this current botched attempt at sexual congress, the idea of being free of her an immediate relief to him, realising this is what he’s wanted for a while now, to politely tabulate their score and move on.

  Rosie understands all too well what he is getting at but she persists anyway, determinedly coaxing at his genitals like bashful stress toys, bent on eliciting a response. When she finally has him inside her she doesn’t waste any time, flicking off the light and keeping quiet as she agitates her hips, giving him a chance to think of someone else.

  The Rising Star trophy was surprisingly heavy – a bronze figurine taking a grab. Why were the manikins always arranged in the same pose? He lobbed the statuette on the table as he contemplated what remained of his meal while Jack said, “Get a look at that, Nipper.” And Eddy followed reflexively with: “What do you think about that?”

  2006 Rising Star *

  His gravy had largely congealed on his plate. He picked up the cutlery then put it down again, the fatty lump of meat easily wider than his head. He cast his eyes about for his brother, but Matt was on the other side of the venue, seated almost as far from him as it was possible to be. He fingered his bow tie, wished he could take it off.

  Keith Slattery and Richie Moore were on their table. Along with Jonathan Knight and Nick Hartigan from the forward line, heads tipped towards each other, engaged in their own conversation. Most of the boys were pissed as farts, drinking much more than they ate as Marty ran through another comedy routine, entertaining the crew with digs at the coaching staff and cheap swipes at the Club sponsors. Something about an American and a wombat had the room in stitches.

  Not in his corner though. With Jack and Eddy downing shots on either side of him, theirs might as well have been a private party of three. The brothers, nicknamed “Dumb” and “Dumber” by the press, tag-teaming him with intimations about his sexual preferences and predilections, making suggestions about what he might like to do with the various performers, pressing him for details about his romantic experiences.

  Harry squeezed his fists until they throbbed but he refused to answer their questions.

  It is a habit he hasn’t tried terribly hard to break, digging deep half-moons into the calloused skin whenever he forgets to trim his nails. The smell of Preen wafts up his nostrils, the comforting scent of Sunday nights in front of the telly at home as he gouges and jabs his palms while his mother works at the buttons on her tennis dress. “Are you really still thinking things over,” she asks, “or have you already made up your mind? I, for one, would like to know your plans.”

  He realises he’s been doing neither, no tossing around, no deciding. He is simply suspended upon a high wire in space, wavering on a wobbly leg, waiting for fate, the breeze, to tip him in one direction or another.

  It is an approach that has stood him in good stead until now, following along, letting circumstances dictate his next move, the vicissitudes of prevailing conditions determining his course. And there has been no reason to do otherwise. The path has always been clear. Easy. One foot in front of the other and that is that. The precedent well and truly set. This time, however, precedent won’t do. He has to make a decision. His hand is being forced. It is the first time he is aware of having to make such a choice, the first time he has been instrumental in establishing the conditions leading to that decision-making.

  “They’re not going to wait for you forever,” continues Diana. “I know they say to take your time, but they’re just words, Harry. They’ll say anything to buy themselves a bit of breathing room. Especially after your father’s latest episode. Whatever they think you want to hear if that will put the ball back in their court. Bottom line though is they want an answer. You know that, don’t you? They’re not going to
let you swan right through pre-season without turning up to training. ‘Family issues’ are only going to get you so far.”

  Harry closes his eyes, can see two bright round discs clearly reflected on the inside of his lids. “You sound like you’re working for Laurie. Dad always said you had a thing for him. That he was a ladies’ man.”

  “That’s funny, coming from your father.”

  “Well why are you hassling me about it? A few more days isn’t going to make any difference.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know. I don’t want to see you forced into a position you don’t like, though, because you’ve left things too late. You don’t want to be swept along on someone else’s timetable. It’s important to be realistic, to take control. Have you written it all up, the pros and cons? Those human resources people always say you’ve got to do that, to make a list of your strengths and weaknesses.”

  His father thinks it is fear that is holding him back, capping his ambition as surely as a botched knee reconstruction. Good old-fashioned apprehension. What if he is crippled after copping one in the shin, or fractures some vertebrae and does his back? But that is just the name of the game. Everyone goes out with a use-by date. You could break your neck, you could break your arm. Any round could be your last.

  When Alan started out there was none of this whining about personal safety; you ran out there and gave it your all, your attention monopolised by the ball. “Tough it out,” the coaches would say after a nasty tackle. “Push through the pain.” Stiff upper lips were the order of the day. You had to be strong. Shake it off. No one cared if you copped an elbow in the jaw, lost all your teeth. Anyone worth their salt would soldier on. You’d have to have been knocked unconscious to get off the field. And that didn’t always work. The only thing that mattered was the game. You kept on going until the final siren call.