by Gregory Day
‘They’re so funny,’ squealed Libby, her knees bunched up under a doona on the couch.
Craig could see in his stepdaughter’s profile a younger version of herself, chubby and smiling, before the first signs of womanhood had come to arrest her. He considered riffling through all the other episodes of The Muppets he knew and telling her about them but realised that just about anything he said would pretty soon wipe that beautiful smile off her face. So he didn’t say a word, other than a hello to Liz and Reef when the current sketch finally finished.
When Liz had organised to have the Mambo bench done for him he couldn’t believe his eyes. He’d loved Mambo for a couple of years by then, especially Reg Mombassa’s designs. Now as he glanced at the novelty of the bench it occurred to him that it would be at its best in around twenty years, when it was old and faded a little – a genuine retro classic. Looking at the bench in the 2020s would be like pulling up lino in an old house and finding newspapers underneath with headlines about the end of World War II or the Petrov affair. Except this way the historical interest would be on the actual lino itself. And the humour would be intentional.
As Kermit launched into an effusive and spluttering introduction of a very unstable looking Karen Black, his eye fell on a section of the bench to the right of where he’d put his stubby down. On it was an image in crimsons and reds showing the Mombassa character Australian Jesus, dressed in a Mormon’s pale blue polyester suit, turning a fire hose on a very grumpy looking devil, cast as some kind of fat bouncer type with horns, whose head was just poking out of the ground. In the background, fires burned amongst the red-roofed suburban houses and the brown rectangular factories.
He was tired now, even too tired to become properly absorbed in The Muppets, where Miss Piggy was now holding court. He went over to the stove-top and found the fried-rice leftovers. Not bothering to heat it up he tipped it into a black Japanese bowl and went outside onto the verandah with his beer. The other three hardly looked up as he passed through the sliding door.
The rice was good, just the ticket. As he ate he felt some energy returning. He sighed, through his nose, with his mouth full. The night was quiet, but for the moths buzzing around the outside light under the eaves. ‘Fucking eaves,’ he said quietly to himself.
Earlier in the day he’d looked over a property with a carpenter at Woody’s Junction; it was a good solid house but the paint job was terrible and the eaves were mission brown. No hobby farmer from Melbourne was going to want mission brown eaves, he said, and the chippie had agreed. Not to mention turquoise primer trim around the windows. Now he noticed that his own eaves could do with a touch-up, the paint was flaking a bit. That’s only two and a half years of wear and tear, he thought. He took another sip of beer and another forkful of fried rice.
As he finished the food the energy drained out of him again, he felt exhausted. Still, tomorrow was nothing much, a couple of properties in Minapre in the morning and then the afternoon in the office tying up loose ends. As long as Colin was in a good mood it should be fine. And Colin seemed to have calmed down since going ballistic after they missed Ron McCoy’s property.
From inside the house he heard The Muppets ending and felt momentarily guilty about his thoughts in the car earlier on. She’s a good mother, they’re good kids, he reminded himself.
A few minutes later, Liz came out and joined him with a cup of peppermint tea. Her hair was down, bunching at shoulder length, and in Levis and a white t-shirt she looked good in the verandah light. She sat on the rail and asked him if the food had been all right. Then she told him how Carla’s petition about letting the dogs on the beach had been rebuffed by the council, despite her getting on talkback radio.
‘You’re fucking joking?’ he said passionately.
‘No. They knocked it back. They said it was too late, the signs were all up and to try again next year.’
‘What, do the signs fall apart in twelve months?’
‘I don’t know,’ Liz sighed.
She could feel a bit of extra aggression in Craig’s responses. She hadn’t even known that he cared about the dog issue.
‘They’re fucking hopeless at that shire,’ Craig said. ‘You ask Colin. He’s dealing with them all the time. I mean, really, what’s a bit of dog shit on the beach?’
‘Well, it does get stinky when there’s a lot of it. Sometimes in January you can’t get down the Heatherbrae steps without standing in it. That’s a bit much.’
‘What? Are you with Carla or against her?’
‘Oh, I’m with Carla, but that’s her point. She just wants them allowed on the beach at the beginning and the end of the days. That way you avoid the overkill and everyone’s happy.’
‘Yeah, right.’ Craig shook his head.
‘What?’ Liz said. ‘What’s wrong?’
He shook his head again, and exhaled loudly through his nose. She waited.
‘Well?’ she finally said.
‘Well, it sounds to me like you’ve got something against dog shit on the beach too! Fuck, Liz, it’s not the dogs who muck things up, it’s the people.’ Now he began to shout. ‘And fucking city people like us come down here and fuck the coast up. You should go and live in Albert Park, or Sydney, if you wanna get around with little doggy-poo bags when you go for a walk on the beach. It’s crazy!’
Liz’s body had straightened against the rail as Craig’s volume rose. This was right out of the blue. It wasn’t fair.
‘We’re not fucking up this coast,’ she said angrily. ‘I love this coast.’
‘Well, the dogs love it too.’
‘Oh come on, Craig, they’re dogs, they’re not people! I mean, I like dogs, but come on.’
‘You don’t get it, do you? It’s not the dogs, it’s the fucking attitude.’
‘Stop swearing, would you. Reef will hear.’
‘Oh yeah, he’s never heard a swear word before, has he? Never heard a fuck or a shit.’
‘Did you have a bad day or something?’ Liz asked him.
‘No. Not particularly.’
And then he got up abruptly and went inside to fetch another stubby.
Liz waited. She pressed her back against the rail, feeling the evening chill in the wood. She wasn’t sure whether or not he was coming back. They never fought. Craig was normally so laid-back. She suspected Colin Batty was giving him a hard time.
Inside she could hear him talking to Reef now, saying goodnight, telling him to go to bed. His voice was gentle. It always was with Reef. He had this way of teaching his boy. With Libby, of course, he was all at sea.
Craig came back out through the sliding door with a stubby and his guitar. He sat down again, took a swig and started playing a blues tune without singing.
‘How’s Colin?’ Liz asked.
He never liked it when she asked a question while he was playing. He was in the middle of a song, for Christ’s sake.
‘Better,’ he squeezed out.
Liz nodded to herself and stared straight ahead, across the verandah at their bedroom window. A cast of bitterness came over her face. So he shouts at her and then plays a song and drinks. What is this?
‘Do you still love me?’ she shot out.
He turned his head towards her and dropped his jaw.
‘Liz, I’m playing a song, all right? Of course I still love you.’
She couldn’t believe her ears. He flattened his hand over the strings and then started picking out a Leo Kottke piece he’d been trying to learn. It was a slow midwestern rag. He’d nearly got it sussed.
Liz stood up straight again. ‘You can’t just pull out your bloody guitar in the middle of an argument, Craig! What the hell is the matter with you all of a sudden?’
He could see her face redden, even in the half-light. He stopped playing.
‘Well, how are you?’ he asked her sarcastically.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Well, how are you? These days?’
‘What are you trying to
say?’
He started picking at the strings again.
‘Craig!’ she shouted.
He put the guitar down and took another sip of his stubby. Then he stared up at her with a bored look on his face.
He’s so hard, she thought.
Craig drew in a deep breath and blew it out noisily. He couldn’t sustain it any longer. His shoulders dropped.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s just a mood.’
Thank God, Liz thought.
‘I’m just tired,’ he said. ‘Just tonight.’
‘Did you surf?’
‘Nah. It was crap.’
‘What did you do, then? You weren’t home for dinner.’
He took another big breath. ‘Oh, I just sat in the car and watched. Just unwound a bit.’
‘Yeah, right, obviously,’ Liz said.
‘Yeah, right,’ repeated Craig.
There was silence for a few moments, just the moths by the light. The TV was turned off inside.
‘Well,’ Liz said. ‘I’m off to bed. Reef’s got to go to that wildlife place tomorrow so we’ll all be up early.’
Craig nodded. Liz slipped away, through the door, back into the house.
He felt sad now. He watched the light come on in their bedroom behind the curtains. Heard the beeps as she set their alarm. He picked up the Maton again. Strummed an open chord. Then he went back to the Leo Kottke tune, not because he wanted to finish learning it but because its mood suited his. Like a lot of Kottke’s slower tunes it had an old-time melancholy about it, from the days of the American Civil War. There was a sense in the music of something significant or sad just having happened. And something golden being lost forever.
SIX
A HANDSHAKE WITH DOM KHOURI
The day before Dom Khouri came, Min insisted that she and Ron give the house a spring-clean. Ron had expected this and even though, as he said, they weren’t selling the house itself, he knew his mother would take the visit of an important and wealthy man as a cue for him to get down on his hands and knees and scrub the floors. Once upon a time she would’ve done it herself but her old bones just wouldn’t let her anymore. By ten in the morning, though, after Ron had completed half the rooms of the house, old Min was up the paint-flecked telescopic PMG ladder cleaning out the spouting.
When Ron had mentioned to his friend Sweet William that Min still did this job, Sweet William couldn’t help himself and before long virtually the whole town knew about the ninety-eight year old lady being up the ladder. It became a public measure of Min’s state of health. As long as she could still see her way clear to climb that ladder, with her son dutifully holding it for her back down on the ground, everyone knew she was fit as a fiddle. Of course Ron and Min both knew that she had slipped a bit healthwise, but you climbed a ladder with your feet and hands not with your crook lung, and you never had to bend, so, for the time being at least, there would be no stopping her getting up there.
It was a day of significance and from up where she stood in her slacks and apron and rubber dishwashing gloves, Min could see the whole blue expanse of the ocean spread before her. A large blunt-looking ship was quite close in. And the usual dozen or so black cormorants, with their wings spread like monsignors perched on top of the Two Pointer rocks.
The contents of the spouting were the same as ever: pine needles, leaves, galah-down, she-oak nuts. There were also the usual miscellaneous items and oddities that she would never have imagined ending up on a roof. This time it was a pink plastic bait-holder from a craypot, a golf ball, and a half-full pouch of Champion Ruby tobacco. She figured that Ron could have absentmindedly thrown the golf ball up there but as for the rest of it, well, it must’ve been the birds. Magpies, currawongs, kookaburras and sometimes even seagulls and cormorants scuttled and roosted on their roof from time to time. They were all scavengers of sorts.
Ron waited patiently at the bottom of the ladder, seemingly unfussed that his tiny old mother was doing a job he probably could have done a little more efficiently. She enjoyed it, and there was no telling her otherwise. And he was no spring chicken anymore, anyway.
When Rhyll Traherne had wondered aloud whether or not Min had any say in the selling of the land, Min had assured her oldest friend that she had agreed wholeheartedly with the idea. Ron wasn’t getting any younger, he’d turned seventy-four that April, and with her catarrh and the scarring the doctors had picked up on her lung it was silly not to consider it.
In the kitchen one night over crumbed tupong, Ron had run it by her and was genuinely surprised she thought it so sensible. Her lack of resistance meant he had to go away and think about it a bit more himself and over the next month the idea proved itself in his mind. Min hadn’t any specific thoughts in her head about how much of the land they should sell, where any new boundaries would be or whether or not they should advertise it on the market, so Ron took charge. Min was happy for him to do so. All she was concerned about was them having enough money to see her through any illness and that the property didn’t become a millstone around her son’s neck. It wasn’t as if they had need of the space anymore. The land was just idle, and Ron had to keep mowing it. This way he would only have half as much to mow and he could afford a ride-on mower to do it with, anyway.
When Min considered what her dead husband might have thought about the whole thing she came to no obvious conclusion. On the one hand, Len McCoy had been attached to the land he had bought with his own sense of independence and initiative, but he was also the least sentimental man she had ever known. So bugger thinking about Len, she decided, not out of disrespect for his memory but because once again she couldn’t really fathom him either way.
Of course they couldn’t sell the house side of the block, so all the graves would be safe. Ron told her it made sense to sell the headland side beyond the line of the woodpile and so she agreed. Funnily enough, Min discovered then that she felt no deep attachment to the land other than to their half with the graves on it. It was all the same, she reasoned, whether it’s the McCoys who own it or some bigshot from Melbourne.
Dom Khouri, of course, was more from Tripoli than he was from Melbourne, in so far as he’d been born in the ancient town on the Lebanese coast and had grown up on the streets there, raising himself as a street urchin without any family to speak of. When his mother’s brother, Anthony Taweel, appeared unexpectedly when Dom was fifteen, to inform him that he had been living quite prosperously as a hawker, and now as a glazier, in faraway Australia, and that the young man should join him, Dom jumped at the chance.
But when he arrived on the Re Arethusa at the Port Melbourne wharf in 1955, he had tears in his eyes and woe in his heart at the very prospect of the place. In his gusto he had wanted to get out of Tripoli, but halfway through the journey across the world – in the middle of the Indian Ocean, in fact – something had changed. Homesickness for the streets and citrus-scented bazaars and the people he knew hit him with a gnawing persistency that stayed long after he’d settled in his uncle’s house in Brunswick and begun his apprenticeship as a glazier. As the years passed and he finished his apprenticeship, married, had children, and developed his uncle’s business, Taweel Glass, from a small glazing concern into a major construction company, the dull ache had never entirely gone but he had replaced it with an iron-like determination to succeed. If he was going to have to live in what the Neapolitans on the Re Arethusa had called the sfintere, the arsehole of the earth, he was going to have to create his own version of dignity. And it was possible. Look at his uncle Tony. He had managed a remarkable life, and he’d arrived in Australia unannounced and completely alone. Already Dom Khouri could sense that, unlike Tripoli, where there was little work and a morbid consciousness of his own disadvantage always hanging in the air, Melbourne had a naivety, and opportunity for someone like him. And now at least he had some family, and no barrier to success other than a lazy type of racism. But he found that being a dago was no hindrance in his working life. Some of his Lebanes
e friends believed otherwise but Dominic Khouri, like his uncle Tony Taweel, had the common touch, and an innate understanding of the suffering behind most people’s daylit faces.
In the early days, when he first took over Taweel Glass and he would give a customer an extra service for no charge, he made it seem as if the double glazing, or the retouching of the sills, the additional grouting or the free pane of glass, was an acknowledgment of their difficulties, not just a garrulous gift that was good for business. He did, in fact, have a heart for giving, and a resilient attitude from the hardship he’d endured in Tripoli and the unexpected wrench of his migration. As he always said, ‘money is like the glitter on the water, but the water is the thing’. In Dom Khouri’s life of successful exile, that water was a symbol of the blood that flowed between people and within everyone. It was the crimson fluid of his town on the old landlocked sea, the town whose bustle and catcries he missed on a daily basis.
On the day he arrived to look at the McCoy place and talk things over, the weather was sleety. The ocean was the colour of lead and as far from some golden Mediterranean memory as possible. As was the case on squally days, not a bird could be found within half a mile of the house, excepting the bristlebirds, who huddled in the warren of the tea-tree and bearded heath underneath the gusts and who lived their existence so shyly that they were hardly ever seen even in good weather.
Dominic Khouri emerged from his immaculate Peugeot in an old gardening slicker and headed down the driveway towards the house in the rain. By the time he’d reached the back step he was drenched and he stood for a time under the narrow fibreglass awning there, removing the slicker and shaking himself down. Ron was on the toilet but Min had seen him coming and made her way out of the kitchen to greet him before he had to bother to knock.