The Last Thread

by Michael Sala

  ‘Nothing I haven’t seen before,’ my mother says.

  She does a piss, wipes herself and stands up to peer through the clear glass at me.

  ‘Thanks,’ she says, ‘for letting me share the bathroom with you, anyway.’

  Three weeks have passed since the break-up. Brian phones my mother most days to make sure that it is still over. After breakfast, as we are about to head out to look at places for her to live, he calls her and she retreats with the phone into my daughter’s bedroom. I can hear her sobbing. May is sitting at the coffee table, drawing a picture of dinosaurs and an exploding volcano. She is pretending to be entirely focused on the task at hand, but every now and again she glances towards the bedroom.

  ‘Oh, Brian,’ my mother keeps saying from the other side of the door. ‘Oh, Brian.’

  The call ends and she comes out into the living room and stares at all of us.

  ‘He’s so abusive,’ she says. ‘I can’t stand it. He kept calling me a fucking bastard, and this and that. Then he told me that he still loves me and wants me back. He says that we’re soul mates.’

  My mother collapses on the couch and begins crying, big, heart-rending sobs that shake through her whole body.

  ‘I don’t know what to do about it all,’ she says. ‘Really, I don’t. I’ve been through too much in my life. I just can’t handle it anymore. I can’t.’

  May quietly gets up, walks across to her and begins patting her on the shoulder, like she does with her dolls.

  ‘There, there,’ she murmurs. ‘It’s all right, Nani.’

  ‘He loves me and he wants more money,’ my mother goes on, hugging May for a moment. ‘He always wants more money.’

  ‘Well,’ I say, ‘at least you know that about him. Haven’t you already given him eighty thousand dollars?’

  My mother shrugs. ‘He spends it. Now he needs a different car. It’s the third car in eighteen months. He buys cars and sells them again for half the price. He makes all these stupid investments. I’m not giving him any more. It’s my payout money and I need it to survive and he’ll just piss it away.’

  ‘That sounds reasonable.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ She looks up at me.

  ‘Of course. You’ve more than paid him what you weren’t even supposed to owe him in the first place.’

  ‘Okay then,’ she says. ‘If you think so.’

  ‘Don’t let him pressure you,’ I tell her, falling into my role. ‘Don’t let him make you feel guilty. You’ve had enough of men bullying you into what they want you to do.’

  She nods and hobbles off to my daughter’s room again. I hear the phone ring, and her voice, softer than before.

  ‘I’ve done it,’ she tells me later as we sit down to dinner.

  ‘Done what?’

  ‘Given him the money.’ My mother shrugs and doesn’t look at me. ‘It’s only money, Michael. Sometimes you have to be able to see past that.’

  I stare at her a moment and then focus on the pizza sitting on the table between us. I begin cutting it into rough slices.

  ‘Well, he got what he wanted from you then.’

  ‘I did it for myself,’ she tells me, ‘for my own peace of mind. Not for him.’ She leans across the table, puts a hand on my arm and stares up into my face with a weary, tolerant smile. ‘You know, it’s okay to give advice, Michael, but you shouldn’t be that way when people don’t do exactly what you want them to do. That’s not being supportive.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say, and we start eating.

  ‘I hope you’ll have your mother back here again for pizzas every now and again,’ she says, swallowing a mouthful of wine, ‘after she leaves.’

  ‘Of course.’

  My mother wants to live close by. We’ll be living in the same city for the first time in fifteen years. She says that we’ll be like a proper family again. Every boy needs to have his mother close. On the other hand, she’s also been saying that she’s not sure if she can handle living in this town again with its oppressive familiarity, the painful memories of divorce and relationship breakdowns and heartbreak.

  ‘Of course,’ I tell her again. ‘Of course I’ll have you over for pizzas.’

  My mother looks at me, her mouth pressed into a firm line. I make myself smile and wink at May. I’m rubbing my hands together to warm them.

  ‘That’s what Brian used to do with his hands,’ my mother says, ‘what you’re doing right now. It’s very effeminate.’

  I emphasise the gesture and laugh, throwing a glance sideways at my daughter, who giggles back.

  ‘You and Brian have a surprising amount in common,’ my mother says. ‘That’s probably why you didn’t get along.’

  My hands stop. ‘I’m nothing like Brian. There are plenty of reasons why we didn’t get along. Besides which, whether I got along with him or not is hardly the point now, is it? I’m not the one that left him.’

  My mother doesn’t look at me anymore.

  ‘I was just making a little joke,’ she says. ‘You shouldn’t take yourself so seriously.’

  After dinner, we walk side by side, through the backstreets of inner-city Newcastle. The sun has dropped and the cloud-ribbed sky is giving in to darkness. The air is hazy with salt. I think of how I lived for the first time in this neighbourhood as a ten-year-old boy. To one side, in a gloomy, cramped street full of narrow terraces, I can glimpse the house where my mother moved us after she’d left my first stepfather. The street hasn’t changed much. The terraces look exactly the same. Twenty-five years have passed since it happened, but I can still imagine my stepfather there, out on the footpath, crowbar in hand, hammering at the door, demanding to be let in.

  ‘He’s a bastard,’ my mother says suddenly. ‘He’s a bloody fucking bastard. I won’t forget this.’

  ‘What? Who?’

  ‘The money. Brian.’ She offers a helpless shrug. ‘He’s just relentless. He’s like a vulture, circling around my life. I barely have enough money to survive, and he knows that, but still he puts this pressure on me. All that talk of love! Would you do that to someone you loved?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘That’s not love.’

  ‘Maybe you need to stop talking to him on the phone.’

  My mother hugs her arms to her chest and gazes down to the cracked concrete of the footpath. ‘He seems so alone. I feel for him, you know. I just feel so sorry for him.’

  ‘If you talk to him every day, you’re keeping him in your life. I feel like he’s here in the house with us.’

  She glances at me sideways, a shrewd look in her eye. ‘Okay. I know what you’re getting at. It’s not as easy as you make out. One day, maybe, you’ll see what it’s like.’

  I don’t say anything.

  She gives a short laugh. ‘You’d think I’d be used to it, wouldn’t you? The men in my life only ever take advantage of me. They just take. They don’t understand how to give. Maybe men just don’t.’

  She drops her head and hobbles along faster. For a long time, she used to walk faster than anyone I knew, and all I could do was try not to get left behind. But those days are probably gone for good. Now I have to slow down.

  ‘Yes,’ she mutters after a while. ‘He’s not the first man to take advantage of me.’

  ‘Wait,’ I say. ‘Didn’t you give Brian the money for yourself? For your own peace of mind?’

  She doesn’t answer straight away.

  ‘That’s right,’ she tells me at last, her tone firming. ‘That’s right.’

  We walk on in silence.

  Over the years, Brian became increasingly frustrated with my brothers and me. It would come out in conversations with my mother, which she faithfully relayed to us in every detail. He said that we were too selfish and arrogant to learn from an older and wiser man, and that he had bent over backwards and practically grovelled for our sake. He had tried to educate us, to give us the father that we’d never had, and we had treated him with disdain, refused the
hand of friendship. We were no better than his own children.

  When my mother began to speak more often of her desire to leave, he said that she too had failed to learn anything from him.

  ‘You desperately need to be taught a lesson,’ he told her. ‘I could teach you so much, and you’re just going to walk away from all of that. It’s tragic.’

  ‘I know,’ my mother said. ‘I know.’

  ~

  I used to visit them a bit on the Gold Coast, but in Myrtleford, I visited them only once. My mother wanted to see May for Christmas. On our arrival, after seven hours of travel, Brian ushered me straight back into his car.

  ‘The men in the house need to go for a drive!’ he declared to my mother and May. He clapped me on the back. ‘Don’t we?’

  We drove up and down the main street and he pointed out the post office and a couple of cafes and then he drove to the outskirts of the town to the road sign that indicated its outskirts, where dense green paddocks full of cows stretched towards hills covered in pine trees, beyond them the quiet mountains, peaks edged in snow. He pressed a button and the windows slid down.

  ‘So this is it,’ he told me, ‘the paradise in which your mother and I live.’

  He waited. I told him it looked beautiful, and then neither of us said anything for a while.

  ‘I could take you further if you like,’ he said at last.

  ‘That’s all right,’ I told him.

  On the drive home, our car ran out of petrol. Despite how much he paid for the cars, Brian only ever put a small amount of fuel in the tank because he didn’t want to spend too much money on the act of driving itself. The car broke down in strange places, though my mother didn’t have the heart to tell him that she thought it was his fault. While we walked to the service station with a jerry can, Brian talked at length about his sense of mortality, the meaning of his life.

  ‘I can’t figure it out,’ he said. ‘I have all of this wisdom, this wealth of knowledge in my head that I want to share. There is so much I could teach people. I have come this far and I have no idea what to do next.’

  I was thinking of all the stories my mother had been telling me about him for years, the intimate details that she had shovelled into my head so that I could understand what her life with him was like.

  ‘Maybe,’ I suggested at last, ‘all you can do is enjoy the little things.’

  The visit to Myrtleford was also the last time I saw Brian. Towards the end of my stay, his mood deteriorated and he got into a fight with my mother. It started over their dog, an old golden retriever. He’d bought her the dog as a present, but had started threatening to run off with it when my mother cooled on their relationship. Or kill it.

  Now May wanted to hold the leash while they took the dog for a walk. Brian told her no.

  ‘Why can’t she walk the dog?’ my mother asked. ‘She’s only here for a few days, for God’s sake.’

  ‘She needs to learn a few lessons,’ Brian said. ‘And if we don’t start now, she could end up like you. You women need to be told no every now and again. Life isn’t fair and we can’t always get what we want. Now it just so happens that I want to hold the leash, and I have every right to hold the leash if that’s what I feel like. I have more right to that than she does.’

  ‘Don’t be a child,’ my mother said.

  ‘You’re putting her before me,’ Brian said.

  My mother clenched her fists and stared back at him. ‘She’s my granddaughter!’

  We were standing on the street. I walked off with May, who was crying. I started tickling her to make her laugh. My mother and Brian talked some more. Then Brian threw the leash on the ground at her feet.

  ‘I do this with an open heart!’ he shouted and went back into the house.

  The door slammed. I stared after him, more in wonder than anything else.

  ‘I’m not putting up with this!’ my mother said.

  She followed him inside and told him to leave. She said that enough was enough and that she would be much happier without the misery that he put into her life. He said fine, that he wanted to go anyway, and he jumped into his car, revved it, and tore off down the road.

  The next day, I got out of bed at the sound of his voice. Brian was standing in the hallway over my mother with his finger thrust in her face. In a breathy, rapid tone, he was telling her that it was shameful, what she’d done, telling an old man to leave his own house. He would never leave, not until she’d become a better person and accepted what he had to teach. The size of him, the way he hulked over my mother, even the beard, reminded me of my first stepfather. My daughter was hiding in her bedroom.

  ‘Brian,’ I said, stepping into the hallway, ‘you need to calm down. You need to stop shouting. You’re scaring my daughter.’

  He turned on me with that rigid finger trembling between us. ‘Don’t you dare tell me what to do!’

  My mother touched his shoulder. ‘Please leave, Brian.’

  ‘I won’t!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll never walk out that door.’

  ‘Brian,’ I said, ‘listen to her. If a woman tells you to leave her house, you really should.’

  Brian left in the end, to stay with his son who lived in the next town along. But the next day he came back and he approached me as I loaded the car ready for my trip back to the airport.

  ‘How is the great orator going?’ he asked.

  I told him that I was fine. He moved between the car and me. There was hardly any space between us. He spoke in a low, rasping voice. ‘I want you to know that you’re an irrelevant prick and that I’m never going to listen to a word that you say ever again.’

  His eyes widened fractionally as he said this, and then he lifted his fingers and thrust them into his ears.

  ‘I’m not listening, I’m not listening, I’m not listening,’ he chanted, his watery eyes unwavering on mine. He was wearing a golfer’s cap with a red pompom on the top. The pompom shivered with each nod of his head. The tip of his nose was pink with fury. I looked at him for a moment, and then walked back inside.

  ‘He’s fine,’ my mother assured me with a weary smile. ‘I know how to handle men like him.’

  ~

  Four weeks have passed since she’s left him and Myrtleford for good, and my mother and I are house hunting, driving along the streets of Newcastle from one inspection to another.

  ‘Newcastle just doesn’t change, does it?’ she says wearily. ‘No matter how much it changes.’

  I stare straight ahead and turn up the radio. ‘In some ways.’

  My mother is depressed but trying to keep her spirits up. We are driving along Stewart Avenue, past one of the many streets in which we used to live, Alexander Street. On the left, beneath a gloom of figs and gum trees, is one of my old primary schools, Hamilton South. On the corner of the next street along from our old street stands a house that is mainly hidden by a high, dark green fence.

  ‘It’s for sale,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nikki’s house.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says.

  The other day, I wandered through the house on the internet. I looked at all the rooms, which are done up, almost unrecognisable. The floors are freshly polished, the walls are painted white. If a family still lives there, they clean up well after themselves. The house is behind us now, and Mum doesn’t look back.

  ‘I miss her,’ she says suddenly. ‘Every Christmas, I think of her again. It was worse when I lived here, though. Much worse. You know, a city just becomes the memories you have of it.’

  We both fall silent. While Nikki was my closest childhood friend, his mother, Susan, had been my mother’s best friend, although that didn’t really occur to me at the time. Nikki and Susan both died in a bus crash, along with Nikki’s father and thirty-two other people. This happened three days before Christmas, and six days before the Newcastle earthquake, when I was fourteen. They are gone, and yet the house that they once lived in looks the same from the outside, and you can a
lmost pretend they still live there. The only missing thing is the mulberry tree that once stood in the backyard. It’s been killed off like most of the mulberry trees in Newcastle. I’ve walked past once or twice as an adult and leaned against the fence with my cheek. You can still hear the hum of the pool filter on the other side.

  ‘They weren’t happy, you know,’ my mother says.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Susan and Paul. They’d been living apart for a while and they’d just got back together for the trip to see their family in Newcastle.’

  ‘I never noticed that they weren’t happy.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t. You were too young.’

  It’s hard figuring out how or why people stay together sometimes. I never understood how Brian and my mother stayed together for so long. Emily tells me that there is usually a payoff when two people stay together, that each of them must get something out of it. If you can’t see it, you’re probably not looking closely enough.

  My mother used to tell me that someone always has to play the hero, in every relationship. She played the hero with Brian. When you play the hero, you are the one that forgives and that lets things slide. The hero rises above the flaws of other people.

  I started hearing from my mother about being the hero after my divorce from May’s mother. It was only May and me back then, and my mother started coming during holidays to stay with us. May always looked forward to her arrival. We’d go on day trips. She’d get spoiled. My mother had always wished for a daughter of her own. If the three of us went to the movies, May would bring along a pillow for my mother, for her bad back. They slept in the same room together and May would wake her up in the middle of the night to have conversations with her. But my mother always stayed longer than I wanted her to, and I’d always feel my life getting tangled up in hers. I’d feel as if I was drowning.

  This time around, May thinks it’s great that my mother is staying with no end in sight.

  ‘She has it good,’ my mother says, over a glass of wine, after I’ve read May her stories for the night and she’s asleep. ‘Such a happy girl, and no wonder, really. I wish that I’d had it half as good as her. No one ever read me stories every night. No one ever made me feel so special or looked after my best interests in the way that people do for her. They still don’t.’