The Last Thread

by Michael Sala

  ‘Yeah, funny all right,’ I say.

  I walk beside him and think of how strange it is to have such a father in our lives, for the two of us to be bound together and separated in that way.

  When our father surfaces in our conversation we call him ‘Dad’ once or twice for comic effect, but we always fall back into Andreas, because it is easier to resort to the ironic distance of his name. We sometimes argue about who looks more like him, and it’s me, of course, but I can’t put on his voice the way my brother does. And my father’s smile, with its easy confidence, its charm, that too passed down only to my brother.

  I stare across at Con, his face set, that brilliant glint in his dark eyes. I tell him that we have never talked about what happened between him and Andreas, that I’d like to. The thought terrifies me, but a part of me needs to know just more than the hazy detail. I know that he won’t tell Mum anything else. He says that he wants her to sleep at night. He shows his teeth and then stares off down the road.

  ‘We’ll talk about it,’ he says. ‘We’ll have a beer and talk about it some day.’

  11

  I’ve never been good at playing the host, and now my mother has come to stay for an indefinite period. Our first run-in is over a cup of tea. Before the fight, we go to a cafe. I walk ahead with my girlfriend, Emily, and my mother hobbles behind on a crutch, my daughter clinging to her free hand. I buy the coffees and we don’t talk much as we sit around the table with its view to the ocean, although my mother looks at me sadly sometimes.

  Emily and I hug as we walk home. An icy wind lifts from the sea and cuts through our clothes. I glance at my mother and see her struggling in our wake with a world-weary expression, as if she’s a refugee from some war carrying all that’s left of her belongings on her back. I don’t slow down.

  When we get home, Emily goes out to do some shopping. I want to lie on the couch in the living room, out of the way, free to roam in my thoughts for a while. My daughter wants to play chess.

  ‘Set up the board,’ I tell her, stifling a yawn.

  The house doesn’t feel like mine yet. Emily and I have only been here five weeks—we’ve barely finished unpacking the boxes, and now my mother is here. Still yawning, I get up and wander into the kitchen. If I’m going to get through the day, I need something more to wake me up. I put the kettle on, take the teapot on my kitchen bench, and drop in some Earl Grey. My mother loves a cup of tea. You always have to pour your guests the first cup of coffee and the last cup of tea—that’s what she used to tell me, just like her mother before her. I repeat the words now in Dutch, to myself.

  I watch her through the window, in the courtyard hunched over the book, broken ankle slung before her. I fill the pot with boiling water and glance at her one last time, sitting there all alone. Then I take my tea into the living room.

  My mother is in mourning because she has just separated from the man in her life. While I spent a few holidays around him, much of what I know about Brian comes from the stories my mother told me.

  He is fourteen years older than her. They met because they walked every evening along the same beach on the Gold Coast. I was there when they first spoke. He said hello, commented on the weather and walked on. I noticed a gold stud in one ear, a finely trimmed grey beard, and a watery looseness in his gaze.

  ‘What do you think of him?’ my mother asked as she glanced at him striding off in his white linen pants rolled up to the shins.

  I told my mother that I wasn’t sure.

  Brian had a PhD in theology, but he didn’t believe in God anymore. He suffered from a degenerative lung disease and couldn’t kiss with his tongue because he ran out of breath. His lips were thin and dry and tasted like the medication he took, so it was something of a relief anyway. He was also impotent. He made up for this, my mother said, with a passionate personality.

  Things did not take long to go sour between them. As their relationship began its long, slow disintegration, and my mother began to voice her doubts, he would come into her room at night, stand over her bed, and yell at her in his hoarse, wounded voice. He called her a bastard, a tyrant and a traitor.

  ‘You promised to look after me until I died,’ he’d shout. ‘And now you’ve made me waste some of the best years of my life!’

  He’d shout at her until dawn peeled away night. Then he’d go to bed to rest his exhausted lungs. He was approaching seventy, having retired at sixty-two, and he possessed the freedom of the days. Looking at his leather-bound events diary and appraising the hours available to him with a pen held to his dry lips, he often said that he wished he were dead. My mother told me sometimes that she felt as if she too were approaching seventy. Not a good seventy. She began talking more and more about leaving him to his misery, getting on with her own life, but one thing or another always held her back.

  ‘Maybe,’ my mother would say, ‘he’ll just die one day soon. You know? The universe always comes up with a solution.’

  My daughter is sitting cross-legged on the table, her chin on one hand. When I play chess with her, I have to find ways of convincing her that she’s winning, and also that I am doing my best to prevent this. May is now six and I have no idea where her passion for the game has come from. Checkmate, I tell her. She looks from the board to me, and back again, and realises that she’s beaten me. Disappointment flashes across her face. We’ve played two games and she wants to play a third.

  ‘No,’ I tell her. ‘It’s time to take your Nan to the shops.’

  My mother needs new furniture. She gets over relationship breakdowns by giving away as much as she can. I still have a lovely pair of nineteenth-century bronze candle-holders from a ship that she handed over to me at the end of her last relationship. They’re designed with hinges so that the candles always stay level. The ship might be going down, but at least you’ll be able to see the looks on people’s faces, the water coming in. As for the current batch of furniture, Brian said that he wanted it, but now he’s changed his mind and it is all sitting unclaimed in a shed in Myrtleford, the Victorian country town they moved to a few years after he retired.

  ‘This is Brian,’ my mother tells me. ‘This is exactly Brian.’

  Myrtleford is set among hills that were for a long time draped in lush green tobacco plantations. Myrtleford also used to be home to the Big Cigarette, a smoke stack painted to resemble a monstrous cigarette, defiantly thrust upwards from a tobacco-drying factory.

  Brian was never able to make many friends in this town. He said that it was the small-mindedness of country people, that it made them so aloof, difficult to communicate with, and resistant to ideas broader than their own. My mother told me that it was because he talked at people in this relentless way. He cornered them and didn’t listen to a word they said, lifting and raising one finger at them like he was conducting an invisible orchestra. After that, they would cross the street to avoid him.

  Things must have changed somewhere along the line, or perhaps they didn’t, but after the break-up, he warned my mother never to come back. It was his town now.

  The door to the living room opens. My mother hobbles in and puts down her Holocaust book.

  ‘Okay, I’m ready to go out and do some shopping! It feels like the dawn of a new era, don’t you think?’

  I nod, walk past her into the hallway, and stop beside the discoloured statue of an elephant, sitting on a cupboard near the front door. My mother gave me that elephant for my birthday, years ago. It’s cast in a single piece of bronze, and imported from India. When she gave it to me, it reeked of exotic spices deep in its hollow legs. My mother told me that it was over a hundred years old, that families in India were selling off these things so that they could buy washing machines and other electrical appliances. She thought it was a perfect gift for me, because she’d really wanted it for herself. She said that it could be our family heirloom. Right now, the trunk of the elephant is pointing away from the door. It always needs to be pointing at the door for good fortune; otherw
ise it’s bad luck.

  My mother speaks suddenly at my back. ‘Did you have a cup of tea?’

  I turn and follow her gaze to the teapot, still there beside the cup, on the coffee table. My mother is waiting for an answer. I wonder if I should tell a lie, but the pot is probably still warm to the touch.

  With one hand I straighten the elephant. ‘Yes. I did have a cup of tea.’

  She stares at me. ‘Why didn’t you ask me if I wanted one?’

  Now I do decide to lie. ‘I didn’t think of it. I just felt like a cup of tea, so I made one.’

  My mother looks from me to her plastered foot and back again.

  ‘Well,’ she says at last, ‘you could have asked me, you know. I wouldn’t do that to you. That’s not hospitality.’

  Hospitality comes from the Latin hospitalitas. Buried in this ancient word like a hibernating bear is the root of another word—hostility.

  When she first met Brian on that beach on the Gold Coast, my mother was forty-six and newly single after her third divorce. People never believed her when she told them her age. ‘Oh, really?’ they’d say. ‘And these are your sons?’ She did yoga twice a week, could stand on her head, was paying off her house, and relied on no one for the first time in her life. She was determined to keep it that way.

  Brian moved in two years later.

  ‘I knew that it was a mistake,’ she told me later. ‘I had such a terrible feeling in my stomach when he said that he wanted to move in. Dreadful.’

  ‘Then why did you agree to it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She hesitated. ‘Well I do know, but it sounds silly. He was crowding me out. He was over at my place all the time anyway. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I thought that if I let him move in with me, I’d get more time to myself.’

  After he moved in, Brian insisted on having his own room to sleep in. He told her that he’d be damned if he had to share his bed with a woman every night. At first he slept in the second bedroom of her house. When I stayed, I’d lie in the guest bed and hear the breath from his degenerating lungs carry across the floorboards, his cough breaking through like the wounded bark of a neighbourhood dog hemmed in by suburbs, but he rarely seemed to wake himself up.

  Sometimes he would get up early in the morning, groan and sigh and hack his lungs clear, and sit in his pyjamas out on the verandah staring at people heading off to work. When kids walked past on their way to school, he would wave at them and shout with vicious enthusiasm, ‘Give those teachers hell!’

  At other times, Brian liked to reminisce about the days when he himself had shaped the minds of young men as a high-school principal. He had left this position when women started teaching in the school, and he became the assistant director of a religious organisation instead. After this job, he retired and moved into my mother’s house.

  Living in the second bedroom of my mother’s house did not please Brian. He offered my mother seventy thousand dollars to convert her garage into a granny flat so that he could live there with the comfort of his things around him. My mother said that she didn’t want to owe another man anything again, but he described this money as a gift. Despite her doubts, she relented.

  Brian enjoyed working in the garden, though he didn’t like living in the converted garage after all—he thought it would work better as his study—and he moved back into the second bedroom. The rooms and corridors of my mother’s house became like the arteries of a heart-attack victim, all clogged up. Even the breeze had to bend in half to get through. Every day Brian wandered around the house in a depression that gave way to sudden bouts of rage. ‘What is my life for?’ he would ask.

  My mother says it was apparently not for cleaning or cooking. She worked as a nurse and would come home from a ten-hour shift to a messy house and then she would clean and cook for him—he would eat dolefully without noticing the food—and afterwards they would sit on the couch together, crowded in by his possessions, and watch television.

  The television kept things quiet. If my mother did her own thing, if she read a book or started painting or talked on the phone for more than five minutes, Brian would pace up and down the house, breathing through his nose in short, agitated bursts.

  ‘That’s just great,’ he would say at last. ‘I guess I’ll just amuse myself then.’

  When I came to visit them, which I did less and less as their relationship developed, Brian would tell me what a remarkable woman my mother was. In his breathy and yet booming voice, with that expository finger bobbing between us, he would describe her strength, her moral courage in the face of all the adversity in her life, and her remarkable beauty and generosity. He would describe these things as if I’d never encountered my mother before, as if he were trying to convince me that, one day, the two of us should meet.

  But he would fall into a savage depression if I or anyone else stayed longer than a couple of days. He would lock himself in his room or, in the days when he still lived in his own place, disappear completely. When I or my brothers had gone, he would return and tell my mother that she was far too close to her sons, that it wasn’t natural, that a husband should always come before the children.

  ‘But Brian,’ she’d tell him, ‘we’re not married.’

  ‘Oh, we might as well be,’ he’d answer morosely. ‘We might as damned well be.’

  It’s two weeks now since the break-up. As we sit together over breakfast, my mother’s gaze swivels from Emily to me. There are tired lines in her face, and I wonder if she has slept at all. Her eyes are rimmed in red and have a brittle, glassy appearance, but she’s trying for a cheerful smile.

  ‘You two sounded like you were having fun last night, in the bedroom,’ she says.

  Emily looks across at me. I pretend not to notice.

  ‘Yes,’ my mother goes on, stirring her cereal, making a whirlpool, ‘it sounded like you were having a great time together. At least someone in this house is. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to make that claim.’

  Emily gets up at that and goes off into the kitchen, where she starts cleaning up, clattering the pans and dishes together more loudly than usual.

  ‘Oh, she’s such a good girl, isn’t she?’ my mother says.

  I make myself smile at my mother and follow my girlfriend into the kitchen.

  Three years after Brian moved into her house and made it his own, my mother decided that the only way to get rid of him was to sell her house and move to another state. It was as if she was dealing with a catastrophic termite infestation. She sold her house near the coast at a bargain price to one of Brian’s friends and moved inland, but Brian decided upon the state and the town, which he had passed through as a young man, and he even chose the house that they would live in together.

  ‘Together?’

  I ask my mother how this had happened, when she had only sold the house, which she had loved, and moved in order to leave him. She says that it is a difficult thing to explain. She says that love is mysterious.

  I ask her if she was ever in love with Brian.

  ‘I was only ever in love with one man,’ she tells me without hesitation, ‘and that was your father.’

  Working as a nurse in a small country town in Victoria was not a happy change for my mother. The pay was worse and there were no ward assistants, so she had to do her own lifting.

  My mother has always been prepared to do her own lifting. When I was a kid, she could rearrange the furniture in a living room in the space of a couple of hours. I’d come home from school to find a different house to the one that I’d left. I used to wonder at that superhuman strength of hers, her energy when it came to shifting anything—the heaviest objects in her house, herself, her family.

  Late one night, at the hospital, while attempting to move an obese eighty-year-old from a bed to a chair, my mother crushed part of her spine. It gave way, like old rotten wood supporting a bridge. Childbirth, she says, was nothing compared to the pain she experienced then. And so, at fifty-four, she was finis
hed as a nurse and after three years of punishing legal battles, endless medication, and operations that fused her lower spine but did not cure her terrible pain, she received two hundred thousand dollars to last her for the rest of her life.

  During that time, with both of them at home, things deteriorated more rapidly. Brian felt betrayed. He’d been expecting more than two hundred thousand. And although the hospital paid a cleaner to take care of the house and my mother still did all of the cooking, he complained that he had become nothing but a chauffeur, waiting to drive my mother around, hemmed in by her physical limitations.

  ‘Where are your beloved sons now?’ he would ask her. ‘Why aren’t they here now? If they are such good sons, if they really love you, then why aren’t they here taking care of you?’

  I would get these accounts from my mother. I was never sure how she answered or which words were his and which were hers. My relationship with my mother was held together by holiday visits and phone calls since she’d left Newcastle, fifteen years earlier. She’d lived in the Northern Territory, Queensland and Victoria, but she sounded the same when she called me from every place, at least until she started taking the medication for her back. My mother told me that she had trouble thinking and remembering things clearly because of the medication. But whenever she related the things that Brian said about me, I would shift uncomfortably.

  Late into the night, I hear her moving around the house. Creaking up and down the stairs, groaning and sighing as she moves between her bedroom and the bathroom, the kitchen and my computer, which she uses to communicate with her sister overseas and my older brother in Sydney.

  I am standing under the shower, letting the water prickle on the skin of my face, when the door to the bathroom opens. My mother comes hobbling in and sits down on the toilet. I turn away from her.