Whipbird

by Robert Drewe

  How Mick hated those insider-trading shirts. Since his descent into the comfortable non-fashion of retirement, clothes made him irrationally angry. Young city fashion plates with their tight, bumfreezer jackets and snug, ankle-bearing pants drove him crazy. And shoes without socks – what was that about? Didn’t they get blisters?

  It mystified him, too, why all the young men on the planet had decided overnight to wear their shirt tails outside their pants. And to roll up their shirtsleeves only two turns. And why women would choose to wear ripped jeans. And teenage boys displaying their underpants elastic! What was going on?

  And don’t get him started on haircuts. Man buns and girlie topknots and ponytails on 100-kilo footballers! Razored partings. Mohawks. And who would’ve guessed that the working-class short-back-and-sides of his youth would make an exaggerated comeback? And that now he’d think it looked ridiculous?

  He felt his right eyelid twitch. He was getting agitated again.

  ‘Reckon any Chinese footballer will ever make the league?’ Doug asked. He’d just spotted Dr Nigel Hu, who was married to his niece Amanda, in the crowd. Three-year-old Imogen Hu was riding on her father’s shoulders. Father, mother and daughter all wore the Casey T-shirts.

  ‘They already have,’ Mick said, loyally, forcing his mind away from infuriating clothes and haircuts, because Nigel was his relative too, and a successful thoracic surgeon in Adelaide, much in demand for businessmen’s coronary angioplasties, although seeing him in apple green did raise the question of whether spouses were permitted to wear the descendant colours as well. There’d been some debate about this.

  ‘Some of them have played top level. They went very well.’

  Doug looked sceptical. ‘At ping-pong maybe.’

  What would you know about it? thought Mick. Yet again, Doug was getting under his skin from the outset. After a few minutes everything about him always began to niggle. It was partly the AFL-versus-rugby thing and partly the Rani-Muslim and Nigel Hu ping-pong thing. Also the old Sydney–Melbourne rivalry. And, if he was honest, all those gripes were magnified by Doug’s current tanned-and-fit-for-his-age thing and his divorced-and-probably-getting-loads-of-sex thing.

  Above all, it was the bank thing. That alone was enough reason for twenty-three years of tension between them.

  Mick took a calming breath. A lot of bloody stuff got his goat these days. Ever since Thea had moved back home with him between assignments she’d been on his case about it.

  ‘Have you noticed you say “thing” a lot lately, Dad? When you’re searching for the right word, or someone’s name, you say “thingamajig” or “thingamabob” instead. “Old Vince What’s-his-name at the football club.” And “Mrs Thingamabob-down-the-road”. This morning you said, “Pass me the thing for the thing.” I’m worried it’s the short-term memory thing.’

  Not the most restful housemate. Thea was as blunt as a brick. Always had been. Since her fifteenth birthday anyway. Something strange had occurred that year.

  Kath had blithely summarised the dramatic teenage changes as ‘hormones’. But did ‘hormones’ work so instantly to transform overnight the daddy’s girl, the apple of his eye, the girl who wanted to be another Margot Fonteyn, into a moody, superior loner? Resistant to any parental advice or direction? Even, seemingly, to affection?

  Not that she’d ever been a girlie, prissy girl. Bored with Brownies, bored with dolls, bored with party dresses and sleepovers and boy bands, she’d nevertheless adored dancing. It shook him up when she dropped it.

  The pointe shoes she’d craved and saved for were dumped in the garage with her Georgette Heyer historical romances and photos of Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, abruptly exchanged for brutal, calf-high Doc Martens and Converse boots. The ballerina’s bun became a jagged crow-black bob. Pierced ears had come first, earlier, way back at twelve, and he’d decided he could live with delicately perforated earlobes. But then a nose piercing followed. And two piercings at the top of the ears. An eyebrow. To his horror, the bottom lip. And, finally, the dreaded tongue stud.

  It was the suddenness of the change in Thea that he found hard to fathom, even more difficult than the change itself. For nine years of her childhood he’d driven her to dance classes two evenings a week and every Saturday morning before he left for the football. He was a Dance Father, a weary Dance Father certainly, but one totally supportive of her childhood ambition.

  Dutifully, he attended winter eisteddfods in bleak, faraway municipal halls run by bony ex-dancers with blighted ambitions. They eyed suspiciously this rare male interested in watching scantily clad small girls, forbade him photographing his own child, then charged him plenty for blurry photographic glimpses of his daughter’s right ear, shoulder and outstretched fingertips.

  But he’d taken these dance crones’ crankiness on the chin and proudly applauded his daughter’s brilliant performances, not only in classical ballet but – although never fully grasping the difference between these three endeavours – in jazz, funk and contemporary dance as well.

  Apparently the routines at the Jessica Le Soeuf School of Dance were so original, so artistically revolutionary, that passing down the previous year’s costumes was too ridiculous and cheapskate to consider. Would the Bolshoi do that? The Kirov? And so he’d learned of the lucrative industry that was dancewear, of the necessity of different costumes for the regular eisteddfods and for the dance studio’s mid-year and end-of-year extravaganzas.

  Thea in a brolga-pink tutu. Crimson-lipped Thea twirling in silky gypsy flair and glitter, banging a tambourine on knee and hip. Raincoated Thea tap dancing to ‘Singin’ in the Rain’. Thea stamping in flamenco heels. Impossible to imagine now.

  While Thea’s class thumped through its practice routines with snooty Miss Jessica and officious Miss Amanda and bucktoothed Mr Adrian, he waited in the car outside the Bentleigh Methodist hall with the sporting pages. But his heart was in a good place. His lean athletic daughter lived for dancing, she flowed and leapt around the house, and he loved that it made her so happy and healthy.

  Then, amazing to see, the great passion of her childhood and early adolescence became ho-hum overnight, and remained mired in childish yesteryear as her personality swiftly evolved to aloof black-clad geek, to semi-goth, to fully-fledged goth. And then eased out of the subculture week by week via its many gradations and sub-subcultures, finally culminating in Confident Swot, the last girl to leave the library. In her final school year she’d dropped the bleak pose, kept boys out of the picture, buried herself in study, matriculated well and managed to get into Medicine.

  Of course he was proud, even awed, about her accomplishments. But frankly she’d become even bossier once she was a doctor. Her MBBS was a licence for candour that extended beyond his health to his love of the Tigers and his TV and food preferences. Culminating in a particular bugbear of hers: his taste for good old fish and chips in front of Friday-night football.

  ‘A weekly meal of mercury and saturated fats! What’s that about, Dad? You know your generic Friday night “fish” is “flake”, and flake is actually shark, of course. And sharks accumulate mercury and metalloids like arsenic from the fish they eat. Unhealthy as well as obsessively Catholic.’

  ‘Good God, Thea. Friday-night fish and chips and footy on the

  TV aren’t going to kill me.’

  ‘I’m just stating the facts. Cholesterol aside, even if you ignore your scary 6.5 reading, mercury toxicity is associated with everything from brain fog and lack of focus to Alzheimer’s.’

  ‘So I have to cut out fish and chips or I’ll go loony?’

  ‘You’ve got to keep an eye on dementia. You might be sharp enough for your age but it’s wise to watch the senior moments. Get another interest apart from the Tigers. Keep your brain working.’

  ‘It’s working right now, Thea. And it’s getting pissed off.’

  ‘Cryptic crosswords. Sudoku. You’d find Sudoku a breeze after your years at the bank and all that adding and subtra
cting. Back in Gold Coast general practice with all those Melbourne retirees I used to be swamped with dementia patients, and they really benefited from Sudoku.’

  ‘I hate Sudoku.’

  ‘And colouring books. You’d be surprised how restful they are. And how beneficial it is to focus on not going over the lines.’

  ‘Tell me you’re joking.’

  ‘I’m talking serious cases, too, sweet old Toorak and Brighton darlings. Former stockbrokers and members of the Melbourne Club who pat invisible cats, put their undies on over their trousers and call their wives “Bob”.’

  ‘I don’t need a second childhood, thanks Thea!’ Why did the bloody A-word always crop up once you were in your late seventies? And the P-word, of course. People giving you that ‘Poor you’ look: he probably can’t get it up, even if he wanted to. Probably peeing ten times a night and taking a big risk wearing light-coloured trousers.

  Mick hid all depressing news of old acquaintances from Thea in case she used their loopiness or illnesses against him. In silence he read the obituaries every morning. Of course the smokers were first to fall off the perch, followed by the big drinkers. That wiped out just about everyone from the old days. Their livers tossed it in; their throats and lungs gave up the ghost; they popped their heart stents.

  Plenty of heavy drinkers in sport, of course. Lots at the club. The former stars didn’t last any longer than puny shiny-bum accountants. The champs did it even worse – they had to limp through their last forty years with wrecked knees. Mick’s best advice to a young player on signing up? Don’t buy a two-storey house. Nothing with stairs.

  It seemed mightily unfair that all that stuff about keeping your eye on the ball, and tackling hard and fair, and staying on message, and taking it one week at a time, and following the processes, and applying scoreboard pressure, and not taking a backward step, counted for nothing in the end.

  7

  In the sleepless pre-dawn hours of anxiety since Afghanistan, Father Ryan often wondered if he suffered post-traumatic stress disorder, too. The old shell shock.

  The way thoughts tumbled in his head this weekend, as this enormous disjointed family massed around him in all its colourful hubbub – like a noisy T-shirted village – he felt melancholy one minute and – occasionally, yes – ecstatic the next. And then the shell-shock numbness swept in. He felt the incoming tide. The over-whelming sensation. But Numbness could be dealt with. Numbness was neutral. Numbness didn’t take sides. It could get you through the day.

  Unlike Numbness, Melancholy liked a drink – lots of it, in fact. And so did Joy. Boy, did those two feelings give drink a thrashing. Whereas, having lost the sense of taste and thirst and need, Numbness could take it or leave it. Eventually, of course, Numbness took a sip (why not?), a swig, and was soon pissed off its face.

  Ryan could deal with numbness. He stopped a passing drinks waiter, a local boy with a ferocious orange beard, selected a beer, and took his first drink of the day.

  The numbness, his own PTSD, had begun when he received the letter a month after his return home.

  Hello Father-Captain Ryan Cleary,

  I hope I’ve got the rank and title right! You might remember me, Evan Ballantine from school. If not, maybe you remember me from a brief occasion since.

  I recently read the interview with you in The Age when you returned from Afghanistan. ‘A Padre’s Life Under Fire’ and so am sending this care of the Army’s Chaplain Service.

  I must say it was a big surprise seeing you as a priest in the paper. And a soldier for that matter. Not exactly what I would have expected! I don’t remember you doing school cadets! Or Catholic Fellowship either!

  But of course I saw you were an ‘achieving type’ destined for university even then when I was doing the Woodwork and Agriculture alternatives to you Latin and Literature boys. Us country boys spent much schooltime as unpaid staff weeding the tennis courts or rolling the cricket pitch despite the big bucks our fathers were paying in fees and mostly left school after Year 10. I’m 44 YO. You must be about that too.

  I was Ranald Margan’s farming neighbour from the adjoining property near Coleraine until wool went down the tubes followed by domestic troubles and I gave up the land and moved to the city (Carlton).

  You might recall I ran into you one Friday evening in 2004 in Jimmy Watson’s in Lygon Street when you were there in the company of Kate Margan. Excuse me if I seemed surprised that night but from your joint embarrassment at being spotted ‘canoodling’ I guessed there was a ‘close connection’ between yourself and Kate. Obviously you weren’t a priest then! I knew her well of course, owing to her and her husband Ranald having the next property to mine. And I’d gathered at the time that they were having ‘difficulties’.

  Anyway I recently decided to have all our home movies scanned onto DVD and found the footage that I took of me and my family holidaying with Ranald and Kate at Lorne soon after their marriage.

  In that newspaper interview you talked about ‘dramatic life changes’ and it occurred to me you might appreciate some film of Kate. I’ve learned from my own life’s experiences that love isn’t always cut and dried, as me and my second wife Concepción have found after much criticism for me choosing a wife 6000 km outside the old Western District stud book.

  So here is a few frames grabbed by Photoshop from the footage. I hope you don’t mind me sending them to you. I check my email regularly, if you would like more information.

  Yours,

  Evan Ballantine

  eball@ozemail.com

  A slim, long-legged young woman in a bikini skips down a sloping beach and dives neatly into the sea. There is a backdrop of pines. In this old video it’s obviously summer. The sun bounces off the sand and much of the scene is glary and oddly burned-looking around the edges. But before she vanishes into the misty ocean a few seconds later, he recognises Kate.

  Then the picture dims – the sun is shining directly into the camera lens now – and as Kate stands, self-consciously aware of the camera, and waves theatrically back to someone on the beach, she’s barely visible, just a shapely silhouette in a pink haze.

  In the next scene she’s photographed lying on a towel, leaning on her elbows and smiling at the camera. She looks athletic; her bare stomach is flat, her breasts high and youthful. How old would she be here? She can’t be more than twenty-two. It, it, happened when she was twenty-nine.

  A lean, grinning young man with big teeth and a shock of dark hair appears now, lying languidly behind her, a cigarette in his hand. He recognises the teeth. Ranald’s. Ranald was in his class at school as well. Kate reaches back and absently pats Ranald’s tanned and hairy calf. Is there affection in the pat? Not especially. It looks perfunctory. But it’s a pat.

  She takes a puff of a cigarette as if she’s new to smoking and, still aware of the camera, stares intently at the sea as if she’s trying to spot Tasmania. What is she thinking?

  Of someone else? Of me? How he wishes, fears, and still agonises over that.

  This was the DVD that Evan Ballantine mentioned.

  This was the melancholy message. The one that made you drink. But he had another more recent message in his pocket, and this one could, perhaps, just maybe, ridiculous but, yes indeed, steer him towards the trailing edge of happy.

  8

  The bloody bank thing always reared its head. Frankly, Mick’s reaction to Doug was still all about his being retrenched from the State Savings Bank of Victoria twenty-one years before.

  After spending his whole working life from the age of fifteen, from junior clerk and message-runner and ballpoint-pen and deposit-and-withdrawal form replenisher straight from school, and through the bank’s expansion days across the state and the adoption of decimal currency and online banking, to eventually managing country and suburban branches all over Victoria, he’d been unceremoniously flushed down the toilet.

  He’d seen it coming in 79–80 when head office became shrewd about the true nature of modern bank
ing and brought in image-changers from some trendy agency – tieless twenty-somethings in jeans and sandshoes and crumpled linen jackets. Two of the young smart-arses had spent a day at his Bentleigh branch taking notes on clipboards and snapping surreptitious photos.

  ‘Just carry on as usual, Mick, so we can see how you manage things so efficiently.’

  ‘Pretend we aren’t here, Mick. Just go about your business.’

  Mr Cleary to you, sonny, he thought but didn’t say. Overfamiliar, insincere young suckholes. One of them wearing a disrespectful Hawaiian shirt and red sneakers, the other a collarless grandpa shirt. When they’d turned up their noses at the tea-room Nescafe he’d had Kelly the loans trainee run out for proper coffee and muffins. Naturally they wanted complicated coffees.

  The first treacherous action of the jeans-and-sneakers boys was to slash the word ‘Savings’ from the bank’s name. No longer the trust-worthy-sounding ‘State Savings Bank of Victoria’, suddenly it was the ‘State Bank’ and its emphasis was on correcting ‘outdated practices’, symbolised by the bank’s quaint, coin-savings moneyboxes, those little tin replicas of the bank’s head-office building that all the customers, from schoolkids to grandmas, had always liked.

  It was all about shedding the time-wasting, coin-counting tellers who emptied those quaint moneyboxes. And preventing little old ladies from coming in on pension day for a time-wasting chat about their savings books and their cats and their two-dollar weekly deposits.

  Make the sneaker-wearers queue up behind a rope and see how they liked it, for God’s sake. Suddenly there was a slur against old ladies and savings. Savings. Remember them? Nest eggs? Never hear of them now either.

  Naturally he’d protested at the customers-dumped-in-favour-of-shareholders turnaround, stressing the trusted position of the bank, and the bank manager, in the community. One Saturday night during this turmoil he’d come home from the football via the pub, fired up after a joyous one-point, last-minute Richmond win over Collingwood – always the sweetest victory of all – and written a sixpage letter to management from the suburban outreach of Bentleigh entitled ‘The Forgotten Man: the Local Bank Manager’.