by Robert Drewe
Perhaps she should have felt more sympathy for the grieving soccer enthusiasts, but to see the village men sprawled in the shade, nursing their mourning hangovers, or reeling, red-eyed and shouting, around the pig and chicken runs with their rum bottles, disgusted her.
Especially the teenage boys. With their elaborate hairstyles and soccer shirts, their macho posturing and lolling and spitting, they could have been idle and dissolute youths anywhere in the world. His mother and sisters had been killed or mutilated yet one hair-gelled boy walked past her carrying an iPad! For some reason the iPad infuriated her. They were supposed to be innocent remote Indians. The iPad was the last straw.
‘He was sauntering! I could have hit him,’ she fumed to Tom Bullwer.
Tom looked up from repairing his ninth rape victim and stared at her for a moment. Mosquitoes fed on his bald scalp. Although covered with a surgical tent, his operating theatre was still a thatched hut over a chicken and pig run. Leafcutter ants carried their trophies in a determined trail around him, purposefully avoiding his feet. The ants meant the weather forecast was fine. His patient was seven or eight.
‘The iPad boy? Acute stress reaction,’ he said. ‘Numbness. Detachment. De-realisation. Normal, wouldn’t you say, Thea? We do see it every time.’
‘There’s another boy walking around carrying hi-fi speakers and eating pineapple! Not a care in the world!’
Tom exchanged glances with Joséphine Laurent as Thea raged on.
‘See the election posters stuck up everywhere? Vote for sleazy Miguel someone-or-other. Will an election stop rape and murder raids? The fucking men are too drunk and crazy to bury their dead. There are pigs and vultures eating women’s bodies down in the plantain garden.’
Joséphine Laurent was busy deciding which wounds were so severe the survivors needed to be loaded into a piragua, then helicoptered to hospital in Panama City before they died. But whether being stretchered through the jungle, then hauled in and out of a canoe with plank seats, no shade and a wet floor would hasten their deaths. The usual dreadful quandary.
The two doctors spoke simultaneously, a little harshly. ‘Thea. Take a break. Lie down for ten minutes.’
Three days later the doctors were back in the piragua with the mestizo boy in the Brasil T-shirt and six Indian hospital cases, and motoring downstream to Birdshit Beach, where they were choppered out of the Darién Gap.
That was the first time in her professional life she had snapped. When it was all too much. Her haemochromatosis rant this afternoon was the second.
25
Ignoring a couple of waving and beckoning grannies bulging out of improbable red and orange T-shirts, Liam made his escape from the party paddock and forced smiles and polite handshakes and slipped into the house, which in contrast to the dusty hubbub outside did suddenly seem quietly countryish and farmish. Like Dad’s country dream come true. A homestead.
Only one hour on the Western Freeway and he’d be back in Melbourne, at Charlotte’s in Brighton, where, if her barrage of texts this afternoon announcing how much she wanted to see him at her impromptu party – her parents suddenly called away for the weekend – wasn’t the usual prick-tease.
It was hard to guess her SMS moods, the way the meanings leapt forward and then retreated, from the hottest smiley-faced raves to bored WTFs and YOLOs. But this time, this very afternoon as he was preparing for a weekend with the family ancients – and a shudder of excitement travelled down his body – Charlotte Falconer had sort of promised to be waiting. Sort of ready and willing. Or not. She had a way of teasing people. Of mocking him. Of making him feel both important and ludicrous. Both cool and a geek.
‘Do you know what I find weird about you?’ she’d said on the phone. ‘When you make that funny concentrating expression with your tongue under your lip. You do, seriously. A weirdo duckface trip.’
For a moment he was too shattered to talk.
‘Chill. Try-hards are often good lovers. Cool dudes just think about their own pleasure but the intense ones think of the woman’s needs.’
Far out! The phone pulsed against his ear. His head spun at those words coming from her sixteen-year-old mouth. Good lovers. Woman’s needs. Intense. Pleasure. And the words somehow related to him! Did she think he was hot? Jesus, Charlotte did his head in. Did she read that stuff in a chick mag or was she talking from experience? He had to see her. Finally, maybe, he’d get to do it.
But then the ‘weirdo trip’ remark broke free and stood centre stage. Funny concentrating expression. Try-hard. Duckface. How embarrassing were they? Was he hot or weird? He was more nervous and excited than he’d been in his life.
Inside, away from the vineyard dust and the crowd of unfamiliar relatives, total strangers to him, the homestead was a shady oasis. Thanks to the portaloos in the paddock and his mother’s stern sign on the bathroom door, PRIVATE – PLEASE USE OUTSIDE TOILETS, no one had invaded it.
To Christine a weekend of hundreds of freely imbibing and overeating Clearys had loomed as a sanitation nightmare. She was adamant there be no drunken second cousins’ dribbles on the floor, no sanitary pads stuffing the septic.
Outside, some Irish pop tunes were looping. U2, the Boomtown Rats and Pogues and Corrs and Cranberries. Musical Irishness was his father’s brainwave for Saturday evening. Some fortyish relative had come up with these elderly numbers on hearing that Dad had in mind a rollicking singalong of Botany Bay ballads and sea shanties, and, even worse, that his grandfather had suggested ‘Danny Boy’ and ‘Galway Bay’ and ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’.
Dad was clueless about any music before the 1970s and since the ’80s, so in the end he’d delegated the twins to look after it. Of course they’d had no idea of any song existing before Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift, or any music outside America, for that matter.
‘Forget all that crap. You need a live band,’ he’d suggested, mentioned a couple of Melbourne groups and made the booking himself. But now he didn’t plan on staying around to listen to them. Not after Charlotte’s party invitation had come up.
He took off his new watch, Hugh’s present for pulling off the prefect and cadet-officer double, placed it on the washbasin next to the toothbrushes, undressed, and stepped into the shower. I’m out of here before the grannies start Riverdancing.
The gift watch notwithstanding (he’d googled it immediately: a Breitling Transocean Chronograph; not in the Patek Philippe Platinum class but still nine grand’s worth of chronometer coolness, water-resistant to 100 metres), he could have done without the embarrassment of his father’s speech.
Bringing up cadets and school! All afternoon he’d found himself shaking hands and being kissed by geriatric nannas he’d never seen before, and didn’t plan on seeing again. In anyone younger he’d detected sarcasm in their congratulations. From their boozy smirks he knew what people were thinking: Well done, private-school boy! Young Liberals the next step? Perhaps a tilt at the prime ministership one of these days? They could all get fucked.
And that skinny dude in black with all the tatts, some sort of goth or urban-poseur distant cousin, had yelled, ‘Attention!’ and saluted. He could’ve decked the shithead.
What was all that crap about being part of a noble military tradition anyway? Was Dad expecting him not to get enough marks to do law? As if anyone would join the army with that endless Middle East bullshit going on! Dad had got cadets totally wrong. Being an officer was just part of the prefect deal, like the football or cricket Firsts, or a First Eight rower. The stuff you did if you wanted a prefect’s badge. You want the gold, you’d hardly go out for something gay like badminton or community service. Leave the chess club and shuttlecock to the Asian maths geniuses.
His final school year was coming up, then it was the gap year he’d wangled out of the parents, and it would be party time, big-time, in Vang Vieng and Phuket and Bangkok and Bali. London, too. Maybe New York. He was bailing out of school, out of Melbourne, out of Australia, so fast you wouldn’t see
him for dust. And he was bailing the bloody vineyard tonight as well.
Showered, shampooed and shaved, aftershaved and gelled, Liam exited the bathroom and slipped out the back door, thankfully avoiding relatives, to his Mazda2 Maxx. It sped him down the driveway towards the freeway and Melbourne and Charlotte Falconer, who thought him hot. Or weird.
On her phone on the homestead verandah, Christine heard the crunch of gravel and glimpsed a flash of metallic blue at the same time as a cloud of her son’s aftershave drifted out from inside the house.
26
The alcohol had helped. For a couple of hours of speeches and mingling on the paddock Mick had borne the discomfort, and the beer and wine had done a good job, but, Jesus, right now he needed to sit down.
But the hired chairs, though plentiful, were of the portable, armless, easily stackable type, and the sitter’s weight pushed the chair legs down into the soft earth of the paddock. If he sat on one of those, he’d never get up again. He needed a proper chair on firm ground, one that enabled his hips to be at least as high as his knees. A seat parallel to the ground, and preferably with armrests. Was that too much to ask?
The recovery period for a hip replacement was supposed to be six weeks. According to the rehabilitation material from the hospital, after six weeks you were allowed to drive again, play tennis if you were up to it (stick to doubles at first), and have sex (the underneath position).
‘It’s simple really,’ was the breezy medical opinion of his surgeon, Dr Mark Balsam, whose windburned cheeks and waiting-room copies of Cruising Helmsman, Offshore Yachting and Ski and Snow broadcast his own sporting interests and income level. ‘Your body will tell you when it’s ready for exercise.’ With a matey wink, Dr Balsam added, ‘If you feel up to it, sport, you should go for it.’
As he told the boys at the football club, ‘I said, “Thanks a lot, doc. Do you reckon my health fund will cover a sex donor?”’
He was now into his sixth week of recovery and compared to ordinary standing and walking around, sex would probably be a breeze, if he ever had some again. At least he could lie down; it was everything else that was difficult and painful.
Strange how a big family gathering like this – couples and children and pregnant women everywhere – made him feel all 1950s-Catholic again, with the subject of sex falling into the old fraught zone of lust and guilt. The papal evil of contraception that used to hang over everything. And then nostalgia and sacrilege immediately weighed in, too.
The topic confused him more than ever. Everything about it. The old and recommended rhythm method: the regularly fallible rhythm method that had accidentally produced Thea and Simon. And all those guilty experiments with not-quite-contraceptive contraceptives: douches and jellies and caps and appliances, strange and embarrassing plastic implements like water pistols. Never a real, banned contraceptive. Never a French letter. Then the pill came in and changed everything. Changed Catholic behaviour.
If he wasn’t careful, sexual thoughts could blaspheme the memory of Kath, his first, and only, sex partner. His wife. The mother of his children.
Dr Balsam wasn’t fussed about any aspect of his recovery. ‘It’ll happen. No special time limit. That gadget in your hip will last twenty years. It’ll see you out. Just use a stick until you feel you don’t need it.’
Mick hadn’t realised he’d need the embarrassing black metal walking stick this weekend. Willing his right hip to be limber and painless in front of all the relatives, especially that fitness freak, Doug Casey, he’d purposely left the bloody tin stick at home.
And there was no doubt his body was speaking now. It was shouting that it wasn’t up to supporting him on an uneven paddock all weekend with hundreds of people bustling around and bumping him. Even with Thea driving him from Melbourne to Ballarat while he sat in the specially cushioned passenger seat with his waist higher than his knees, the ache had begun by Werribee and kept up through Bacchus Marsh, and the stairs at the Carriage Inn had completed the job.
He blamed bloody George Bernard Shaw, and his getting Shaw’s name wrong again.
His unconscious certainly had something against that bastard Shaw. He was surprised to find that physiotherapy began just a brutal twenty-four hours after the operation; even more fazed to discover Shaw was a key part of learning to walk again.
George Bernard Shaw? The playwright had made only the mildest dent on his education sixty-odd years ago. But of course he’d heard of him. So why did his brain now forget his name whenever he needed to recall it – which, because of the relentless rehab exercises, was three times a day. Was dementia really lurking? The dreaded A-word?
In teaching her hip patients to walk normally again, and especially to deal with stairs safely and confidently, Rebecca Singh, the bubbly hospital physiotherapist, had outlined the approved order for them to set off on a ‘stroll’, as she called their rickety ambulation, and especially for climbing stairs. 1: Un-operated leg (Good Leg); 2: Operated leg (Bad Leg); 3: Walking stick.
To accomplish this, they had to chant George Bernard Shaw (Good, Bad, Stick). To go downstairs, they had to say the reverse: Shaw Bernard George (Stick, Bad, Good).
Mick’s two fellow hip patients were a former Wallaby – a giant second rower who’d suffered one hip tackle too many after playing sixteen rugby Tests for Australia – and an Armidale cattle farmer, and it was fair to say that Shaw had impinged on their cultural consciousness even less than on his. As coincidence had it, the retired Wallaby was now a northern New South Wales beef farmer too, and for four days the hospital ward conversation argued the merits of Angus beef and the Wallabies (good) versus Wagyu beef and the All Blacks (bad). Playwrights’ names were never in danger of entering the conversation.
As Rebecca Singh pointed out, the rhythmic GBS chant made it easier for legs and stick to coordinate and move to the same step. But her patients just couldn’t remember Shaw’s name. The ex-footballer grumbled, ‘Who is that Shaw bastard anyway?’
When called upon, George Bernard Shaw continued to skittishly flee from Mick, too. Perhaps it was the dozy effect of the painkillers, but faced with any stairs, Mick’s brain kept spilling out other writers with three names. Even with writers with only two names, his author knowledge was sketchy, but as he teetered on the brink, John Stuart Mill or Robert Louis Stevenson would suddenly spring from the cloudy depths. Once or twice, Arthur Conan Doyle.
Maybe those blokes would get him safely upstairs. No, they weren’t the ones. He’d have to stop, take a breath, and tell Edgar Rice Burroughs and Erle Stanley Gardner to piss off as well.
‘All right, naughty boys,’ sighed Rebecca Singh. ‘Forget Mr Shaw. Instead say this when you’re going upstairs and you need to lead with your uninjured leg: “Good leg up to heaven”. When going downstairs, say the opposite: “Bad leg down to hell”.’
So here he was at Whipbird six weeks on, and officially, medically permitted to play doubles tennis and have sex. Sex! How unusual, how ironic, to be told that.
More and more often he had vivid flashes of young Kath in their Clifton Hill days, how keen she’d been then, in that few months before lifetime responsibility began, that small window of sexual opportunity before the children began arriving and they tensed up. Oh, Kath’s awe-inspiring warmth, a furnace at twenty.
With that intense gripping heat, with no prior experience, no debonair know-how to fall back on, how on earth could he have come any slower and suaver as he, they, dearly wished back then? But age had fixed that problem. And with no pregnancy worries and contraceptive guilt that temperature of hers had, amazingly, almost been repeated – not quite, but almost – in the motel in Lennox Head.
‘Good leg up to heaven,’ he muttered to himself, as he climbed the six steps to the homestead verandah in search of a decent chair.
On the verandah his daughter-in-law was stretched out on a chaise longue, murmuring into her phone. As Mick thumped up the stairs towards her she said hurriedly, ‘Must go. Bye,’ and set the phone a
side.
‘Michael,’ she addressed him. A statement of fact rather than a hello. She was slightly flushed.
An attractive woman, he thought, not for the first time. Particularly when she looked embarrassed and awkward, as she did now. Especially appealing to a certain sort of man. The Hugh, lawyer, sort, he supposed. Hard to imagine Christine bathing kids’ cut fingers or baking cakes. Or ironing. He couldn’t imagine her at the ironing board, or whistling ‘Arrivederci Roma’. That was Kath every Tuesday afternoon of their marriage (Monday was washday): ironing and whistling and occasionally blowing the hair out of her eyes. The room full of that warm ironing smell, of heat on dampened fabric. Of her contented whistling. Arrivederci Roma. Hugh and Christine had a woman to do the ironing, in any case.
Christine looked discomfited. ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ he said.
‘You didn’t, Michael.’
‘You OK, Chris? What’s up?’
His contraction of her name enabled her to turn her phone-call embarrassment around, roll her eyes a little bit, sigh and compose her face into neutral. She detested being called ‘Chris’ or ‘Tina’, and even found the abbreviation of anyone else’s name annoying. At Melbourne University she’d been known as ‘Pristine Christine’.
Fortunately, any adult friends were unaware – and she’d made sure of this by dropping all the friends from Presbyterian Ladies’ College as soon as she left school – that her adolescent nickname had been Maffy. For her last four years at PLC she’d been known as Maffy Campbell, ‘Maffy’ stemming from an innocent, goody-two-shoes question she’d asked in Year 8 chemistry.
‘Excuse me, miss. What’s the chemical composition of hermaphrodite?’
They were studying iron ore and she was pointing at a red rock from the Pilbara on the lab desk, sucking up to old Walldrake. When the laughter died down, prim Miss Walldrake, a certain lezzo in the girls’ opinion, said coldly, ‘I presume you mean hematite?’ Christine instantly became Maffy and her teacher’s-pet status was lost forever.