“I’ll do that, Bent,” I say, his nickname from primary school after he showed some other kid his hard-on. I dial Deneray the carpenter, ask if he can come back and reglaze a broken window.
Then I am alone in a T-shirt and boxers wondering how the fuck I’m here, not in my office for a bit on the last day of the year, a conference call and then early lunch at the bar with a colleague at Chaya, heading to meet Isabel for dinner. The eye of vengeance on that rock.
Panicked, I try Isabel but it rings straight to the machine. “It’s me. I’m all fucked up. Call me,” I say and listen as it records me breathing. “Please.”
I turn to find Sharen in the hallway watching, shrouded in the sex-soiled bedsheet. She stalks back up the hall, the sheet sagging behind her, getting caught on the arm of the pew. “Don’t tread on the glass,” I call behind her as she lets the sheet fall and walks nude to the room alone. I feel an awkward kinship with my father, caught mid-sentence on this phone. An early ingredient of his decline, his Gentleman’s Guide to Losing Everything began with such small cruelties.
I check outside to be sure the rental car’s undamaged, tempted to grab the key and jump in and drive. Track down my cousin Jenny near Great Western or Susie up in Kingaroy, let everything here return to its usual lunacy, an old woman quietly dying, grass in the autumn, horses weaving about the black skeleton of car. But now there’s an angry nude woman in my bedroom to whom I made a mad orgasmic promise. I delay the inevitable for a minute, find a dustpan and brush and an old cork board behind the spare fridge, scoop up the sheet as I head up the hall. But back in the bedroom the unbroken window’s wide open. Sharen’s gone.
My mother appears, already dressed, as I clean up the floor. She examines the rent in the headboard, takes the catapulted stone from the bedside table then. “They seem to be breaching the walls,” she says, looks up at the repair in the ceiling. “What did you do with Sharen?”
Now I see Sharen took back the flowers. “How come she was over here last night?” I ask.
“When I was on the loo she knocked on the bathroom window,” my mother says. “Told me she was looking for Reggie.” She sits on the bed and looks at the tumbler of murky flower water. “I’m a mother too,” she says. “I know what it’s like to lose a son.”
I don’t look up as I brush the last splinters of glass into the pan and toss them into the unlit fireplace.
“Don’t put them there,” she says. “Glass doesn’t burn.”
“That’s the least of our problems,” I say, lean the cork-board over the busted window and lie on the bed beside my mother in her Levi’s, to wait until the carpenter comes. The ornate plaster molding, the headless cherub in the middle of the ceiling. I look over at this woman who delivered me, helped me learn to keep my anger deep.
She picks up the tumbler of flower water. “It’s New Year’s Eve,” she says, drops the rock in the glass. Then she lies down on the bed beside me. “What should we do?”
“Wait for the return of the prodigal Reggie.”
“At least he’s loyal,” she says, gets up to leave. “Poor unfortunate Miss Venezuela.”
As I watch her leave, the magnified eye of the stone stares out at me from the green-tinged water.
A HALF-SLEEPING DREAM of a town, Poughkeepsie or Buffalo, somewhere it’s cold, or maybe it’s Russia? Dark Orlov horses galloping down through clusters of snow-covered trees, a provincial city on fire. A city where Isabel lives now, but she’s nowhere in the streets. Just mongrel dogs that bay like wolves. Then I wake and it’s Pip out on the veranda yelping, the thunder of hooves. Wary of stones, I jump to my feet and glance out the good window. The carpenter patiently waiting, leather-gloved, ready.
As I let him in he seems embarrassed that I’m only in my jeans. “Sorry I’m so late,” he says. “Had a job in Narre Warren. Took all damn day.”
“What time is it?” I ask. All I hear is the television from the sitting room behind me, and before me, a large pane of glass in wooden casing in the back of Deneray’s truck.
“Six,” he says.
“Jesus!” On the floor half the night then fucking away the fear and confusion, sleeping through the day. Everything upside down. This outbackwards land.
“Jesus is real, Mr. Rawson,” he says, observing me nervously; a half-naked unsaved lord of the manor, losing track of time. I precede him into the bedroom to pull up the Sharon-smeared sheets. Afraid he might suggest I read the scriptures or come along to Bible study in Beaconsfield, I leave him to it.
“This too shall pass,” he says as I go. I don’t tell him his quote’s not from the Bible. And, anyway, what if it doesn’t pass? The eye still watching from the glass of water. “Once you get it cut and installed,” I tell him, “can you board up both windows properly and add a bolt to this bedroom door?”
On my way to shower, the blast of the television draws closer from the living room. My mother, I surmise, glued to the cricket. India or Pakistan. I peek in to see her face in case it isn’t. She’s sound asleep, her sensible brown leather shoes and her pale blue socks on the floor, her blue-veined feet crossed on the pouf. Maybe she’s waiting for Reggie to come in from the heat and bathe them. The rise and fall of her soft floral shirt, her breathing seems normal, her expression still fierce, even in sleep, both oblivious and knowing.
I let the water run warm, rinse myself of the night and the morning, the stream running down my face until all the hot water is gone, and still I stay, imagine being under a waterfall up in the Whitsundays, Dunk or Lizard Island, the places where Americans go when they visit. Drifting on my own along some tropical river, no Sharen or civilized, earnest Isabel. If it was just me on my own so I could see life clearly, maybe even be someone new. But how do you shed the skin of a family, really? These arms already peeling from this angry sun. The gay Beverly Hills dermatologist told me, as he froze off eleven moles, that most of the damage was already done, growing up here as a boy on a farm. No hat, no screen, no nothing. Maybe a shrink would say the same, and then what? That I need to be back here to change, not just swanning around LA pretending like everyone else. Still, the idea of processing and child of origin issues, or working it through, whatever they call it, makes my skin itch.
When Deneray’s finished, I pay him his hundred and thirty dollars. In Laurel Canyon it would be three times as much, even with the exchange rate. I count the bright colored bills; they feel like play money, think of the dull greenbacks that all look the same, how the ones look just the same as fifties. Everything lost in the shuffle. I can’t be truly here or there.
“Happy New Year, son,” says Deneray. But I’m not his son. I am my father’s, I’ve proven that. The three black horses have survived the night, watching me over the fence, judge and jury. I go down to consult with them and they lean toward me, smell my neck, taking turns to nuzzle me, working in their unusual unison. No squeals or bites just the scent of them like nothing else, their cautious gentility. If I could just have been raised by these dark creatures with hooves, perhaps there’d have been dignity. I had my own great ponies, George and Paddy, the pair of grays, and Thunderfella, who won “best educated under saddle” at Sydney Royal, even though he’d eat you alive if you wanted to catch him in the paddock. I come from carnivores.
FROM THE CAR, I see the dog nosing the air from beside the camellia, its farewell silent as the flowers, trotting behind as I roll down the drive, through the open gate by the stables. Thunderfella and Patch down near the Pond Paddock fence, shadows under the trees. Waiting to be stolen. I hope Reggie’s okay out there. Armed with stones of his own. He’s more a David than his father. I just hope he knows what he’s doing.
I turn onto Langdon’s Road with a quiet desire for violence. The sun dips low in the sky, my eyes peeled on the fields, for Sharen or Reggie or Walker, haunting me each in his own way. On Station Road, I pass the rickety fence of the caravan park. Music bumping. Everyone celebrating the last red sunset of the year. Booze artists by a barbecue in sho
rts and wife beaters, the dull far-off thud from the band starting up at the pub and the first light of trucks on the highway, their headlights wipe my eyes. Down here, as I hunt alone for Sharen amid some country white men singing “Rolling on a River.” Last year I visited Isabel in Manhattan in the snow in the dizzying crowds of the unexpectedly sanitized Times Square. The glittering ball dropped to a roar as Usher ushered in the New Year and then we walked back downtown to the W on Union Square. In the room we drank champagne, watched Pan’s Labyrinth and made love.
In the Tooradin Pub, the noise of the some local grease-haired band spreads out over the crowd, over the bar and the rows of dark bottles, the beer-sweat smell of the people. Welcome to the Hotel California. Really? Nothing changed since 1977, as if punk and hip-hop never existed. Cloudy collapsing over his pint, the only one not dancing. I take a flute of touted Tasmanian champagne from a tray that’s waiting, swallow it fast, and lean up to the bar. It’s so sweet it’s almost undrinkable, the fizz running high in my throat as Mavis appears in a red hip-hugging Christmas dress, reties her plastic apron.
“Howdy,” she says, clearing glasses from the bar. “Having fun yet?”
The sound of these people pretending it’s midnight already, two girls dance as they play pinball, the low stench of beer in the carpet and the walls. The old fisherman’s photos seem kind of lonely. Lonnie Ridges from the fire brigade moving against the rhythm of his dowdy Norwegian wife. Cloudy crouched beside me keeping watch over his beer and chips. I order a vodka martini, “Grey Goose, if you have it.”
Don Barlee, his face so red he looks like a furious sheep, dancing with a girl I hope is his daughter, Jimmy Saddler swinging around his wife who was always nice. No sign of Sharen when she said she’d be here. “Smirnoff, I’m afraid, love,” says Mavis. She hands me the martini glass and I take a good gulp, feel the sweet fire of vodka in my throat. “That should cheer you up,” she says. “The band’s from down Warragul way.” Her accent with that nasal barbed-wire twang.
“What are they called, Cold Storage?”
Behind the bar an ancient photo slipping sideways in its frame, a cow or an ox pulling a cart from a swamp. The beast being beaten with a branch. Now I remember the way vodka lowers that line between me and sadness, leaves a vague, unpredictable starkness. I think of my mother locked up in her mansion, the saddle of guilt, but I’m still relieved to be here.
Mavis gives me a wink with a blue-shadowed eye. “Let old acquaintance be forgot,” she says.
“Should old acquaintance be forgot,” says Cloudy, correcting her without looking up from his drink, and the band plays a version of Stephen Stills’s “Love the One You’re With.” Maybe proximity is my problem. I feel myself getting restless, cruisy, the girl who leaned over the pinball machine is making her way to the floor. “How’s it working out?” asks Cloudy. I look over as he runs his fingers through his sweaty hair, his bulbous beetroot nose. More couples dancing, the pinball girl joins a group of young single women doing faux mod moves in a group, raucously singing the lyrics. Well there’s a rose in a fisted glove, and the eagle flies with the dove. The vodka is strong.
“Oh Sharen,” says Cloudy, looks over with a wet-eyed blink, his bottom rims like bloody rivers. Everyone knows bloody everything. I look up at the fly strip hanging from a hook in the ceiling covered with tiny brown bodies, like a dead snake, then down to the purple veins of a plump woman dancing, flipping her cork sandals across the floor to slide her bare feet.
Concentration slip away . . . because your baby is so far away. I order a second martini and search through the crowd. Maybe Sharen was really upset. I resist the impulse to leave, why shouldn’t I be here? I went to primary school with half these idiots. Bobby Genoni cheek to cheek with his wife Vicki, from a dairy farm down near Drouin. We used to call her Vicki Verka, as in vice versa. Elegant here in what looks like a swirling vintage Pucci dress, paisleys of blues and lime green, her hair “done up” for the occasion. I wonder what she’d look like nude. Long-legged, quiet, biding her time.
“Haven’t seen your mother in here since we had that Back to Tooradin,” says Cloudy.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“She wore that pretty blue dress and her hair all permed up.” He coughs into his sleeve. “How is the old girl?”
“Stubborn as a mule still kicking,” I say. Left alone on her last new year on earth. I scold myself but tonight I’m not playing. I’m not who I was, the last boy on earth. Those shoes feel way too small. I finish the drink and order another.
Through the fray of bodies dancing, I catch sight of my father sitting down at a table on the far side where the jukebox was. He looks crumpled and sad, his dicky hips have him anchored to the chair. Poor old bugger. He used to get up and dance with anyone. He had his moves. Now all he has are his eyes out on sticks, alive with longing. A wife in one house and a girlfriend in the other. Still not enough. There are breeds of men who want more than they’re entitled to and end up getting less. I fooled myself that I wasn’t like them.
With the second martini flaming in my head, I weave through the group of carousing surfer girls beneath the red and purple disco ball, their tan legs and breasts made even darker, objects of my father’s helpless stare. They boogie around me as I move with my drink held up in the air. The short one with beach-dyed hair smiles as I glance down at her cutoff jeans and Billabong sandals. “Hey,” I whisper to her, head past to sit with my father. Hey sister, go sister, soul sister, go sister.
“G’day, son,” says my father, toasts with his Pimm’s as if he’s glad I’m here. Two men alone while the whole world dances, our eyes hooked on the sight of three surfer girls threading their bodies, wheeling arms in the air and laughing, singing along. Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir? Still in the seventies, the bass so loud the speakers drum the floor, no room for conversation. My father who still believes he’s in with a chance, and I can’t help checking out the Minogue-looking girl who noticed me. This is what we have in common. Flesh as an escape. Coochi, coochi, yaya. Sharen emerges from nowhere into the throng, shaking her tits, a pink bikini top under a short see-through blouse, a blue turquoise pendant that matches her eyes swings about dangerously, the same white mini that now has a gold-link belt, stamping her bare feet into the floor with the beat, joining the swirling surfer girls. Her nasty grind says she clocks me but she won’t look, only at my father, sliding her feet across the sweat-and-beer-damp floor. Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir? She tries to get my father up to dance and I feel the panic rise in me. Fucking Sharen. She knows he can barely stand, but he struggles up, eager to take her hand. I throw her a hard look but she pours all her goddamn into her grin bearing down on starstruck Earley. Don’t, Dad, I want to warn him but he wouldn’t want to hear as she drags him doddery and dangerous to the floor. He tries to keep balance as she pulls him, then he’s out there trying hard to make his old moves, his smile seems false and otherworldly, his hips about to fail him, a body kept upright by the need in his eyes. Sharen swings about him, thrusts at him from behind, mocking, her gaze on me all hot and mean and what you gonna do about it? Braiding hope and hate and lust like a charm, then she leaves him out there on his own. She latches onto someone else who kisses her. My father puts on his silver-tooth smile, pretends it’s funny as she moves on to yet another, makes my heart scramble up.
I weave through the smell of booze and armpits to retrieve him, put my arm around his bony shoulders and sit him back down as Mavis, who misses nothing, delivers us each a drink. As he raises the glass my father’s hand is shaky in the purple light, he’s pale and heaving, out of breath. “Dad, what if you went home?” I ask. “Spend the New Year with Elsie.” I try to spot Sharen among the thrashing bogans.
He throws his head back, an attempt at a laugh. “You don’t like the competition?”
I take a swig of fresh vodka. “Sharen was fucking with us,” I tell him but the words don’t even compute. For him attention is attention, however flee
ting. An infusion of blood even though he looks totally drained of it. He waves like some tragic celebrity at English Dick the painter. The hotel thumping like a disembodied heart. American woman, listen what I say-ay. The canyon I can barely remember, the Christmas I could have had.
“I can’t bear to watch you gawking at those girls,” I say.
“You sound like your mother,” he says.
If only I wasn’t like you. Too drunk to get into it with him, I should go outside into the warm salt air, but the band begins a rendition of Prince’s “1999” and I make out Sharen in the crowd, above it, lifted high and swung about by a tall city guy in a black polo shirt and a square shovel beard. I lurch through flinging arms, weave past the surfer girls to grab Sharen by the wrist. Her bracelet stabs my sore hand. “How dare you do that to my father,” I shout and her face goes mean with disgust.
“You did it to me,” she says, her blue eyes and red-smudged lips. Disgust at ourselves and each other, reeling away I let her hand go and she throws her arms around the guy, then turns. “Fucking Rawsons, think you can have everything,” she spits at me, kisses his big beard mouth.
Hazy with Smirnoff and loose on my feet with the beating guitar. “What are you even doing here?” I yell. “Fucking Ned Kelly wannabe.” But he’s puffing up for a fight and I almost fall as I try to slug first, catch sight of Bobby Genoni bursting through, florid eyes and sunburned nose. It’s his fist from the side that sends me to the floor.
BEING CARRIED THROUGH the parking lot, the thrum of frogs, Lonnie Ridges at my feet, the red sheep eyes of Don Barlee above me, surrounded by stars. My father limps along beside, reaches to touch my arm. “I’m okay, Dad,” I tell him, my head as if it has nails inside it, the stitches seeping in my hand. I close my eyes. My skull seems to throb beneath my skin.
“I’ll look after him,” a woman’s voice. “Earley, you go home.”
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