by Robert Drewe
Of course her father-in-law, never Mick to her, was aware she had a thing about Christine, not Chris, thought it supercilious and, in the context of this weekend, lacking the boisterous affection of family.
His father’s generation of the Cleary clan – the Richmond publican side – had a tolerant habit, which they thought of as commendably Australian, of excusing a relative’s or family friend’s foibles if these imperfections were things like foolishness, overamorousness or alcoholism. (Most often, overamorous alcoholism.) Failings from farting to flirting were placed in this amorphous and uncriticisable category: ‘But that’s just so-and-so.’
‘Your sleazy friend Wayne Jackson just snapped my bra strap!’
‘Don’t take it personally. That’s just Jacko.’
An exception was imperiousness. It was snobby and haughty and downright un-Australian. It was, somehow, too English. Mick couldn’t bring himself to think, But that’s just Christine. Her sins of condescension and a certain nervous arrogance, though unremarkedon for twenty years, had quietly gnawed away at him. He saw her as his direct opposite.
In all his bank postings over the years he’d abbreviated the names of his staff. For the branch manager not to address his youngest teller Gary as Gazza, an accountant called Terry as Tezza, a loans officer named Sharon as Shazza, or the assistant manager (accounts) Darren as Dazza (even the old office cleaner Maurice was Mozza) was in his view not only to miss out on an endlessly amusing running joke (a one-way joke: of course they had to call him Mr Cleary), but to appear unnecessarily standoffish towards them.
None of those names would ever be on Christine’s list. She’d been confident her children’s names couldn’t be played around with by their grandfather. Not to be foiled – it was a matter of pride to Mick that he could jovially trivialise every name – from the outset he called Zoe ‘Zo’, Olivia ‘Livvy’ and Liam ‘Lee’.
Only on the eternal ‘H’ question had Christine won the day. Her dogged insistence had steered her children to aitch and away from Mick’s Irish-Catholic haitch, had even defeated Hugh’s solid parental grounding in the dreaded haitch as well, which he’d carried through school and on to university until she finally convinced him in second-year Law that no Melbourne barrister would ever taste silk with haitches on his breath.
‘Migraine,’ Christine said now, pronouncing it mee-graine.
‘I’m sorry, Chrissie. What brought it on?’
‘Maybe a surfeit of Clearys.’ This said with a small brave smile.
‘You can never have enough of us, love. Can I get you something for the my-graine? A cup of tea? Panadols? Shall I fetch Hugh?’
‘No.’ She shook her head rather too vehemently, winced and flapped a weak hand at him.
‘Then I’ll sit too, if you don’t mind. I’m buggered.’
He dragged a chair over to her, dropped into it, reached across and squeezed her limp hand. An affectionate clasp. His daughter-in-law after all. The hardworking hostess.
She didn’t return the pressure, and after a second her fingertips slid away bonelessly, leaving his arm outstretched and dangling. The old handshake putdown. He hated that.
‘So tired,’ she sighed.
He adjusted his hips in the chair. It was far too low and backsloping for comfort. Ridiculously low for him, for anyone. One of those fake-weathered ‘distressed’ Adirondack plank chairs that brought his knees up near his head. Down at ground level his new hip screamed.
‘I hear the Queen has a handshake like a dead trout,’ he said. ‘She has to shake thousands of hands so she deliberately never grips. Her hand just lies there like a wet fish so the other person lets it go quickly.’
‘Just warn me next time you want to press the flesh and I’ll muscle up. Maybe I won’t have a migraine then.’
Mee-graine!
‘Sorry to bother you, Chris.’ He’d thought better of joining her. Bearing down on the Adirondack’s armrests, breathing hard, he forced his body up. ‘I’ll just visit the little boys’ room.’
‘Oh, do you mind using the portaloos in the paddock? I’m trying to keep mess to a minimum.’
This affront made him draw a quicker breath, and make a sharp swivel and half-turn that further pressured his hip. Another deep breath. ‘Very wise. I probably would have pissed everywhere. Being an incontinent geriatric.’
Off he seethed down the stairs. Bad leg down to hell!
Safely at the bottom, he tried, not so successfully, to keep the anger out of his voice.
‘I hope your my-graine gets better, Chrissie!’
There was some sort of percussive music starting, he noticed. A band was warming up with a crescendo of drumming. Then it stopped. He snatched a glass of red from a passing waiter and launched into the Richmond song as he limped off to the portaloo.
The club tune, pinched from ‘Row Row Row’, was catchy and a couple of elderly Kennedy and Casey men raised their glasses in his direction and joined in the song, as did a couple of pirates.
‘Oh, we’re from Tigerland. A fighting fury, we’re from Tigerland...’
27
The sun was setting and in the trees above the creek the birds were beginning their dusk chorus. Sighing, Christine thought about rousing herself from the verandah chair. Her headache, actually a tension ache rather than a migraine, was easing. The sun dropped behind the trees, the portable barbecues were firing up again and she could smell gas and cooking oil. Someone banged on a drum, boom-tick-boom-tick.
A few more excitable relatives were singing now, and a kookaburra territorial ruckus in the gum trees began to compete with the singers and the stuttering drums. A guitarist found a chord and lost it again. Christine’s phone wriggled in her lap.
Hi Ma, soz 2 bail big rello party but got rly cool invite 2 good 2 refuse & I couldn’t find U anywhere 2 explain. Say soz to Dad. Shouldn’t drive back tired so will stay nite in Melb. C how sensible I am? Can U put new watch away safely? Left it in bathroom and Dad will freak if he sees I forgot it. CU tomoz. XXX Liam.
She tried to call him back but of course his phone was already turned off. She left a voice message, followed by a text: Where are you? Ring me now, Liam!
For several minutes she sat staring at her silent phone. Teenagers! She checked her messages. Nothing. It occurred to her that she hadn’t seen the twins for several hours either. One after the other, she dialled their phones. They were turned off, too.
A light breeze drifted over the verandah and she raised her face into it and took six slow deep breaths, exhaling each one to the count of six as recommended by Shoshanna at yoga. From the paddocks came a woman’s shriek, followed by an explosive burst of male laughter.
‘It’s just a little grass snake!’ someone yelled, and a dog barked.
Her phone rang again and she answered it. Of course it still wasn’t Liam. Dusk was falling fast and the last rectangle of sun slipped along the verandah and disappeared down the steps. Eventually, the phone call over, she sighed deeply and went inside to freshen her make-up for the evening.
‘No show without Punch,’ she said to her face in the bathroom mirror.
Clouds of her son’s aftershave still lingered in there, reminding her of the distinct and incorrigible boyness of boys, and of how cross she was with him. Liam’s fragrance was an entity in itself, his wakeful state heralded each morning by a miasma of aftershave that flowed through the house and preceded his physical appearance in the world by about twenty minutes. And when he finally did exit the bathroom, groomed and pink (and taking far longer in there than his sisters), his aftershave vanguard, ‘Apollo’ by Ralph Lauren, entered the kitchen about 10 metres ahead of him.
‘Why so much aftershave, Liam?’ Why any aftershave? Did he even shave yet? ‘You wear aftershave to school! And you go to an all-boys school! Is there anything you want to tell me?’
Far out, Ma. It wasn’t something he thought deeply about. It was just what you did. Part of the daily bathroom process. And chicks liked it. Appeal
ing to chicks was a bonus. Chicks in general. Chicks in the mall. On the street. On the tram. After school. Who knew when a cute babe was going to bob up?
In her adolescence, Christine recalled, boys liked to smell of football liniment. So strong it stung the senses. Wintergreen and Tiger Balm had a masculine, sporty, even valiant cachet, even if the self-linimented boy had not been injured at football, was in no danger of injury because it was actually the off-season, and he didn’t play football anyway. Girls were alleged to swoon at a whiff of liniment. But it used to give her an instant headache and make her wheezy.
She always preferred the smell of an unperfumed male. The rush she used to feel after making love, when she stood under the hot shower and the sharp male smell – the spicy tang, the spermy, sweaty underlay – slid from her skin and burst around her. How long since she’d had that feeling?
She sat on the edge of the bath – the wonderful old bathtub with the lion’s-claw feet that she’d begged Hugh to buy when they were married, that they’d transferred here to the country where it fitted in more harmoniously – and dialled Liam again. His phone was still turned off so she left a voice message and also texted once more: Pick up! We need to talk now!
The ongoing anxious drama of boys. How could her son be so infuriating? Turning his phone off to give her the slip. He didn’t deserve the absurdly expensive watch. He didn’t appreciate how lucky he was, how fortunate his life was compared to others. How spoilt!
She was angry with Hugh anyway for giving him the watch without consulting her. And for somehow making it a special paternal award – another stupid male-bonding, lifetime event. Another important family decision happening without her consideration and active participation. Like holiday destinations, choice of cars, even the purchase of the bloody vineyard. She’d left Hugh in no doubt she resented being sidelined on the watch issue.
Then again, the watch had helped stiffen her resolve. It somehow facilitated matters, added another entry to her side of the marriage ledger.
The watch. Where had Liam left it? She looked around the bathroom now: the washbasin, the cupboard shelves, the toilet seat, the windowsill, every surface. It wasn’t anywhere there. He must have been mistaken. And – oh, no! – there was a disgusting pool of urine on the floor.
While she was pondering this repulsive discovery (There’s no alternative! I’ll have to clean up this mess!) the twins burst into the bathroom. Zoe had a supportive arm around Olivia, who was sobbing and dishevelled. Seeing their mother there gave the girls a start, and Zoe began crying, too.
‘Girls, what happened?’
But the twins were vomiting, one in the bathtub and the other in the basin, and didn’t answer.
28
The band was still warming up. Making a meal of it, Willow thought. Look how cool we are, we’re a band! Four thin, biker-jacketed, black T-shirted and stovepiped youths that Liam had organised from Melbourne. Wasted Promise. Or was it Dead Reckoning? Or Post Mortem? Anyway it was some such new-wave, post-punk name that Willow found depressing these days.
Their name had slipped her mind already, but she was snatching at straws, recalling Dr Brandreth’s death-metal questions and hoping that in her father’s present state their morbid vibe might cheer him up. Maybe their youth, their arrogant, unearned confidence, might also inspire him to recall his own early brash days. Give him the old flash he used to talk about. So she had a word with them.
‘Guys, could you do me a big favour and play “Tight, Tight Jeans” or “Friday Night Girl”, a couple of Spider Flower’s old numbers?’
The boys looked blankly at each other.
‘My father’s Sly Cleary from Spider Flower. That’s him over there. I know he’d appreciate it.’
They looked at him, deadpan, and at each other again, and then at Willow, as if she’d asked them to play ‘Happy Birthday’ or ‘White Christmas’ for someone’s grandfather, of whom there seemed to be many examples present at this gig, and the old homeless-looking guy staring at them looked like the prime specimen.
‘Can’t do it, man,’ said the guitarist, who had English public-schoolboy-style floppy hair, a wispy scarf around his neck, and, most probably disappointing to him, smooth rosy cheeks, like someone from Eton who was trying to join the Hell’s Angels.
‘We prefer to do our own material,’ said the keyboard boy, who at least had a few hairs of chin stubble.
‘We don’t actually do covers,’ the guitarist said. ‘Or old-style, Happy Meal pop shit.’
Covers! Jesus Christ, Willow thought angrily. You’re a sulky private-school teenager doing an anniversary gig in the boondocks. Pull your finger out!
‘Sly was a big name,’ she said. ‘In the days of proper rock music. He backed the Stones. Ask your parents.’ Tears were welling. ‘And now he’s sick and you’d be doing him and me a big favour.’
‘Not in the contract,’ said the keyboard boy.
‘Contract? You wish,’ she said. ‘I thought Wasted Promise would be more musically generous than that.’
‘Malice Aforethought,’ the Eton-Hell’s Angel corrected her.
‘A tosser of a name, by the way,’ she said, as she strode back to her father.
Unlike Spider Flower – a proper name for a rock band. He’d come up with it after drunkenly walking face first into a fresh spider web hanging off the frangipani by the verandah. A common North Coast summer occurrence, drunk or sober: wiping the sticky strands off your head, slapping and squishing against your cheek any spider still residentially involved, and swearing resignedly, especially if the web had caught a few bugs and you copped a faceful of blowfly and moth corpses as well. These days her father just left the web on his face.
Arms at his sides, overcoat hanging below his knees, he was standing now at the edge of the crowd as if waiting for a bus or, from his hangdog expression and the slump of his shoulders, for a funeral procession to pass. His fly-away hair fluttered in the breeze, reminding her of the fallen bird’s nest she’d found a few weeks before.
She’d given him an overdue haircut on the back step and a myna had scavenged the fallen hair clippings and made a nest out of them.
The pale bird’s nest of her father’s hair was strange and beautiful. Remarkably soft and fluffy, it was bound around with spider web and a red thread the bird had filched from the edge of the doormat. The nest fitted neatly in the palm of her hand and held a tiny blue broken egg of such frailty that it made her gasp.
Before her father thought he was dead she’d loved hearing him reminisce about the old days, about forming his first band at school. With him on the piano, plus a trumpeter, a boy on clarinet, another kid strumming a bush bass made from a tea chest and a broomstick, and a drummer with a borrowed drum from his sister’s marching-girl band, a cute little green drum with ropes down the side.
‘No guitar. We weren’t ready for rock’n’roll then. We played at the school dance. Just jazz. The trumpeter had a dented cornet. We gave him a month to learn “Golden Wedding” and he stuffed it up on the night. We played “Body and Soul” and “Take the A Train” and no one recognised them. I didn’t recognise them myself! And Kevin O’Halloran with his marching-girl drum going rat-a-tat-tat thought he was Buddy Rich trying to be Gene Krupa.’
At these memories her father would laugh so hard he’d start to cough, and he’d thump his chest and flick away the joint he was smoking and keep laughing and coughing until he hawked and spat over the verandah railing and tears ran down the creases in his cheeks.
How long since she’d seen such liveliness in him, she wondered. Not since long before the Cotard’s. Not since her mother departed with the horse enthusiast, Monsieur Dressage, as her father bitterly called him. Not since Sly’s days as a local rock star. Not since the American tour.
And his intention had been so different, in his mind so honourable: for Tania to accompany him. The band was aghast. Bad joke, man. A wife on a rock tour? On the road? Seriously bad creative karma. What sort of fuckwitte
d, fun-denying whim was that?
He insisted. ‘I want you to come with us, Tania.’ To see the band – and him, of course – finally making it in the Big Time. And to make amends for all he’d put her through over the years. America!
Of course it didn’t work out. The other members, especially Marco Atkins, the drummer, and the bass guitarist, Dane McHenry, played up, and he soon reverted to his old tour habits himself. America had ended up being the last straw for Tania Cleary, sending her fleeing to Brisbane six months later with Monsieur Dressage.
‘I’m cleaning up my act’ was how she’d put it to Willow one afternoon soon after their return: a firm declaration issued amid deep breaths and grunts from her yoga mat. ‘Before it’s too late.’
Fifteen-year-old Willow understood her mother was saying while I still have my negotiable assets. As soon as she hit the home tarmac she’d begun daily yogalates and the Weight Watchers diet, stopped smoking her faux working-class rollies, curtailed the wine, had her teeth whitened, cut her hair in a blonde bob, dropped both rock-chickdom and North Coast hippiness entirely, all these efforts intended to bring the assets into peak shape – top condition for forty-one, at least.
The stateside tour, supporting Esau’s Pelt, a hot US band at the time, had not exactly put Spider Flower on the international music map. Disastrous was the key word from the few music critics who paid them any attention. As it turned out, America and the Monsieur Dressage aftermath were the last gasp for her father’s mental state as well.
Back in her mother’s early Weight Watchers and yogalates days, in her still-on-the-premises (though separate-bedroom) days, before the onset of her father’s being-dead condition, before Cotard’s really put him under, Willow chose a moment one midday on the verandah when the sun was barely peeping over the camphor laurels (‘over the yardarm’, as he liked to say) and he was sipping the first Jameson’s of the day, to ask him, ‘Why did you agree to support Esau’s Pelt in the first place?’