by Nick Earls
I said I was sure he was aware of the situation my family was in, and he was, and I told him about the talk that I believed had started the fight. I asked him if he would leave it to me, just this one time. I said it would be better if this became nothing. And he nodded and said, ‘Just this one time. But you come to me if there’s any more of this trouble. Come to me or talk to your house master. Talk to someone. We won’t have people saying things like that at this school. And your brother needs to know there’s a different way of dealing with it.’
He watched as I walked back to the two of them, and when I got there he turned and walked away. The other student must have been a head taller than Andy, but I couldn’t be sure since Andy was still winded by the punch and crouching. The other guy looked untouched, and he even seemed to smile as I came over. I could feel anger rising in me as I got there, with his insolent look and my brother bent by his punch and the things I knew he had said about our father. It was a physical sensation — hot and strong and crowding in on me. I was just about ready to hit him myself, and perhaps he could tell. The smile went away and he looked down at the dirt.
‘Right, you prick,’ I said to him, and the low menace in my voice surprised us all. It’s where the fight in me had turned, and each word took us further from me throwing a punch. ‘I just got you out of a Saturday, and that’s the last chance you’re getting with this one. Kiefer knows what you said, and I will make sure he nails you if you say anything like it again.’ I took a breath, and tried to sound more cool than menacing. ‘And if you do and it’s in front of people, those people can be witnesses in court if it happens to be defamatory.’
It was a crazy threat to make, and an extreme one — it was just a stupid schoolyard line that he had come out with — but I couldn’t and wouldn’t back off. He nodded, and said nothing. I still wanted to hit him, but the urge was waning. Andy was standing straighter now.
‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’ I said, each word measured out with its own share of the anger that continued to circulate in me. ‘Do you understand that this could be a whole lot of trouble for you, but that I’m getting you let you off just this one time? And that if there’s even a hint of any more of it, I will make certain you get everything that’s coming your way?’
‘Yep,’ he said, contrite as a bad dog. I had surprised him with my fierceness. It wasn’t like me at all.
It was only then that I recognised him as some kind of friend of Andy’s, someone who had been to our house, and I felt sad that it had come to this. I wasn’t angry then, not any more, and I told him to go away and I said, ‘Please, think this through. Think about what it might be like.’
And he nodded and said, ‘Yep, sorry,’ and he looked Andy in the face for a second or two and then turned and walked off.
Two of Andy’s shirt buttons were in the dust at his feet, and I bent down to pick them up. It was just us standing there now
‘You wanted to hit him too,’ Andy said, straightening out his buckled collar and smiling at me. ‘Don’t try to tell me you didn’t.’
‘Yeah, but I didn’t hit him,’ I said, in a way that would have annoyed him in other circumstances, a way that had too much big-brothering in it. Today he would take it, though. ‘He said Dad was a criminal?’
‘Yeah. He said that the only way it could all make sense was if he was in on it too. That’s what his father reckons.’
So that’s where we now stood. Our father was talked about in houses across town in the ad breaks during the news and over the papers at breakfast. Idle, slanderous theories were doing the rounds, and that’s just how it was. I looked for it in people’s eyes after that, and in their faces. I looked for their unspoken belief in that kind of idea. I went around wanting to fight them, but I managed not to since we had to move past this as a family and fighting would do us no good.
That day, though, it was just the two of us, Andy and me, on the edge of the oval with his dusty buttons, both of us wondering, without a word said, how long this would all last and when we would be through it.
I took him to the boarding house clothing pool and borrowed a needle and grey thread from one of the volunteer mothers who was working there and I did my best to sew the buttons back onto his shirt. I didn’t give our surnames, so we were only Matt and Andy, and his shirt had got caught on something and the buttons had come off. We were there with practically no story at all, and that was much easier.
‘I’m a lover not a fighter,’ Andy said once the mothers had left us to it and I was working on the second button. And I said, ‘You, a magazine and a box of tissues doesn’t quite add up to love, the way I look at it.’
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘even the best batsmen in the world need batting practice.’
He put his shirt back on, and the clean new thread seemed almost to gleam it was so obvious, but I knew only I would see it that way.
He straightened his shirt front and said, ‘Nice work. Mum’d be proud.’
‘Wait till you see the beanie I’m knitting you for your birthday.’ I knocked some dust out of one of his sleeves, hopefully the last of it. ‘No one’s going to know about this at home, though, right? They’ve got enough crap to deal with.’
‘I figured that,’ he said. ‘This crap stays here.’
It was later that week that my mother started talking about getting a job. My father had been gone from the office for a few days by then, and he had been up on the roof emptying leaves from the gutters, but he had cracked a tile and stopped. ‘I can’t believe I did something so stupid,’ he said, and it affected his mood for the rest of the day. It wasn’t until the next afternoon that he bought something to fix the tile and went up there again. He never got around to the rest of the leaves.
When Andy and I got home from school, my mother was sitting on the front verandah, in the shade, and finishing off the chapel kneeler she had been working on. She showed it to us — it was still empty, still just the kneeler cover, but she stretched it out between her hands and we told her how good it looked. It was the third she had made, maybe the fourth. One had been like a church window, but this one was our house crest, with a Viking boat on it and some Latin writing.
‘I’ll take it to the school tomorrow, I think,’ she said. ‘We’re having a meeting about the fashion parade, so I can take it in then.’
She mentioned the fashion parade as though she had talked about it before but, if she had, I had paid no attention. I knew nothing about it. It would be another fundraising initiative, for rowing boats or sets for musicals or the school in Tonga that our school supported. My mother was very involved with those sorts of things. At the last school fair she had run a stall that had raised money for something, and she had sold raffle tickets to help the Tongan school.
Last year a group of the Tongan students had even visited for a week. We had put our names down to billet one of them, but they went to other families instead. I knew my mother was disappointed about that. She said it would have been a great experience for Andy and me, but it seemed like more than that. It seemed as if she had put the work in and yet somehow been deprived of her Tongan.
When they arrived, the Tongans were introduced at school assembly. They sang a hymn we hadn’t heard, and they did it in loud multi-part harmony. Then we sang our school hymn as some kind of return gesture, twelve hundred of us, and we tried harder than usual but we were still pathetic. We came from the great Anglican tradition of being a little embarrassed about hymns and the bad singing of them — singing that sounds as if you’re clearing your throat and bits of hymn are inching out almost by coincidence. The Tongans were surprised how bad we were. You could tell by their expressions.
In my second week of grade twelve, the headmaster, who I had ended up with for religious education that year, asked our class when they had last witnessed God at the school. We had to write it down and pass it to the front. The most common answer, given by seven of the students, was ‘when the Tongans came’. The headmaster was very pleas
ed with that, and he asked us why it had been the answer for so many of us. This brought about the usual awkward shuffling, and then someone said, ‘The singing,’ and someone else said one of the Tongans told him about their school’s patron saint. ‘And,’ the headmaster said, ‘because of the work we do with their school. It’s God’s work.’
No one had anything to add to that, because we couldn’t see much God in it. We sponsored their headmaster and we had built them a gymnasium.
On the way out of the classroom at the end of the lesson, I heard Chris Clarke say, just to the person next to him, ‘One of those Tongan girls was so hot, and we never get girls at assembly usually. It was like she was a gift from God.’ A few of us laughed and the headmaster asked what he had said, and Chris Clarke said, ‘Nothing, sir.’
He was right, though. We all knew which Tongan girl he meant, and she had been particularly hot. I don’t know which family billeted her, but Andy and I had talked about her in the bus on the way home on the day of the assembly, and about how cruel it was that my mother’s wish for a Tongan visitor had gone unmet.
My mother showed us her third or fourth kneeler, and it was clear she had made a very good job of it. With that, and the fashion parade and the tuckshop time she was putting in, she would surely earn herself a Tongan this year, or whatever was on offer.
‘I think this’ll be my last kneeler,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking about getting a job.’
The conversation had taken a turn I didn’t want it to. She looked at me for a response, but I didn’t have one.
I’ve always had an interest in fashion,’ she said. ‘I could make things. I could make clothes — one-off designer-type pieces. Or I could make jewellery. I’d like that as a job, I think.’
I could see past her into the house, through the lounge room and the dining room and into the kitchen where my father was wearing an old pair of shorts and staring out the window. My mother had never talked about having a job before, not ever. I had no views either way about whether she should or shouldn’t, but that wasn’t what this was about. There was no money coming in. This was fundamental. She was sitting there with her kneeler cover folded on her lap and telling us her idea that was some way short of a plan, her idea that had nothing to it, as far as I could see.
‘What kind of jewellery?’ Andy said, since one of us needed to give her some response.
My father would be back at work soon — that’s what we were all thinking. It’s what we were all hoping. It was no good with him around the house.
My mother made no start on her jewellery, as far as I was aware. My father took to calling his time without a job a ‘break’, and he would say things like, ‘I’m going to use this break to catch up on my reading.’ He joined the Hamilton Library and made one trip there, coming home with two books — fat, well-borrowed thrillers — that sat for weeks on the side table next to his seat in the lounge room. I didn’t see him read them, and I think my mother took them back when they were long past due, and she probably paid a fine.
He also said he might do some gardening, grow some beans and cherry tomatoes, but that idea was lost quickly enough too. His mother had grown vegetables in their garden at Ipswich, he said. She had always done that, and she gave her vegetables out to families that needed them during the depression, which was just before my father’s time. His father had been mining coal then, and kept that up for fifteen more years or so, until it got to his lungs.
One night I was woken by my parents talking loudly in the kitchen. I was in a dream when I first heard their voices, so it started as an argument between two people I couldn’t see and didn’t know. I was dreaming that I was flying low over a field, and it was night. No one else could fly, so that’s why I kept my flights to night-time only, but the moon was bright enough. Then the two voices started up behind me, arguing, as if the scenery and the rush of the air meant nothing to them. I turned around, and woke. There was a strip of light under my bedroom door and my parents’ voices were coming in from the kitchen.
‘I was always worried this house was overextending us,’ my father said. ‘Always. It’s much more than we’ve ever needed.’
‘You didn’t say that at the time. You never said that.’
‘I said it as much as I could. But I knew how much you wanted it. And I wasn’t planning for this.’
‘It should have been all right then,’ my mother said. ‘It would have been all right. If this hadn’t happened.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘Nothing. It’s just, if circumstances were different . . .’
She let it tail off there and when they talked again their voices were quieter, a background murmur. I got out of bed and went to the door. I could hear them if I put my ear to the keyhole.
‘I don’t know if I can do it again,’ my father said, in a low voice that made me think of the word ‘defeat’ from the paper a few Saturdays before — the article that started with the line, ‘Peter Sherman has mining in his blood, but it’s the dollars and cents that may be defeating him.’
‘I don’t know if anyone would give me the chance but, even if they did, I don’t know. I’m good out there, in the mines. This was never . . .’ I could picture him, sitting on a kitchen stool, and stuck for words.
I couldn’t listen to any more, but I couldn’t walk away, either. All I could do was stop the conversation. I rattled the doorknob and opened my bedroom door and tried to appear as if I had been sleeping until seconds before.
My parents both looked at me, like two people who had been working on some guilty secret.
‘Did you hear that on the roof?’ my father said, doing his best to turn matter-of-fact. ‘We think it was a possum, but we’re not sure.’
There was no noise at all and he was pointing at the ceiling quite unnecessarily, like a bad actor in a bad play. My mother was nodding. We would collude on this possum, and it would get us through the night and back into our beds. The guilty secret was mine now too.
‘Maybe that was what woke me up,’ I said. ‘If it’s just a possum we probably don’t have to worry about it. It’ll jump off somewhere.’
‘Right,’ my father said, and we all knew the conversation was almost done.
I lay on my bed for a long time afterwards, looking out at the stars and the hulking dark triangle that was the roof of the Hartnetts’ substantial house, and my heart went faster than usual, though I lay quite still. I was afraid, for the first time during all this. Afraid that there were plans coming unstuck that I hadn’t even known about, afraid that my view of my world was just like some wallpaper that had been stuck over what my world was actually like, and that it was actually insubstantial and at risk. And I was afraid that my father wasn’t who I had thought he was, because I was used to only confidence from him, and certainty. I didn’t know where he might take us after this.
SIX
My mother got a job not long after, but not one involving jewellery or fashion. It was the first paying job I had ever known her to have. It was at a doctors’ surgery on Racecourse Road.
I had seen where she had circled some ads in the suburban paper, and I had said nothing about it at the time. One of the better ones had read: ‘medical receptionist, part-time, must be dependable and well presented, experience preferred’ and this job sounded a lot like that one. I was sure she had no experience, though just as sure she would be dependable and well-presented, but I had no idea how a job interview worked, so no sense of how the ‘must be’ and ‘preferred’ parts would be weighted.
One of the doctors had two sons at our school, but they were in grades eleven and nine, so we didn’t really know them. My mother mentioned them when Andy and I turned up from school on the day she was offered the job. I think she had had the interview not long before and she was dressed in her interview clothes. She had just put a cake in the oven, and already the sweet smell of it baking was throughout the house. I wondered if the school connection had worked for her at all, or not. I susp
ected it might have.
She told us she would start the following Monday for training and, by the week after, there would be times when she would even be in charge, when the senior receptionist was on a break.
‘Its mainly paperwork,’ she said. ‘Keeping the files in order, making sure the doctors see results, making appointments, billing people. That kind of thing. And keeping the peace when the doctors are running behind and the waiting room’s full of screaming kids. That’s how it was today. A bit of a madhouse. I hope it’s not usually like that.’
She cooked roast chicken for dinner that night, and went to some trouble with it. There was a new kind of stuffing, and she had made enough of it to do bacon rolls as well. We all drank wine, and treated her job as an uncomplicated good thing, an adventure she had chosen to go on. My father toasted her, and the four of us clinked glasses over the table. There were candles, and she looked happy, looked like someone whose sense of anticipation had just been reloaded. It was definitely one of our better nights.
But the house was to be sold anyway. There was no way around it, apparently.
‘Its not a great time to sell,’ my mother said, ‘but it’s better this way. Better to take control. We’ll find a nice new place we can rent, and then we’ll buy again when the time’s right.’
‘Jesus. Moving?’ Andy said. ‘Moving twice?’
My mother said nothing — didn’t even pick him up on the ‘Jesus’, which I’m sure she would have done the month before, though in a way more about manners than taking names in vain.
‘We’re going to hell in a handbasket,’ he said to me afterwards, when it was just the two of us. Then he admitted he had no idea where we were going but he had heard the expression in a movie and had been waiting for ages to use it.