This is My Song

by Richard Yaxley

  On cue, rain began to fall. Cars slowed to a crawl while on the footpaths people bent their heads and pushed stoically through the water-wall. As the rain strengthened Joe felt like he was in an aquarium, one of those underwater-experience sections where you wandered along a rubber walkway while overhead sharks glided, rays flapped their lazy rhythms and coloured bug-eyed fish flitted like impudent darts. He’d always seen such places as weirdly satisfying because you could be immersed in a world that was strange and unsettling but still be removed from it.

  When he arrived at the apartment, top end of Hardgrave Road, he was surprised to see light beneath the door. Inside, his mother was standing in the hallway, her face betraying a wretchedness that he had only seen once before.

  ‘It’s Grandpa,’ she said and Joe understood immediately, felt the peculiar whoosh of new wind in an old and dusty world.

  He assumed that she had been crying but couldn’t tell for sure. His mother’s face was blank. The apartment was muted, walls and furniture turned soft and absorbent. Traffic noise had become a humming from another planet. Planes had stopped their sky-splitting roars; outside the window, the sparrows that crowded the eaves were unmoving as they waited for enough sunlight to warrant a song.

  Annie came to Joe and held his shoulders. She said in a low voice, ‘I have to go to the home. They need him to be formally identified.’

  Joe nodded. His mother seemed thinner than yesterday. He wondered about that. People spoke of sadness or ill-health meaning lost vitality. Was vitality real, in the same way that blood and fat and muscle were real? And if it was real, did this mean that vitality – golden, treacle-thick? – could somehow evaporate, leaving the body as shrunken and brittle as a piece of dried fruit?

  Was someone’s grief a smaller, paler imitation of their death?

  Carefully, without making a sound, because sound seemed to be so wrong, he left his mother’s grip and put his school bag on the floor, against a wall. Annie pulled at loose strands of her hair, adjusted and readjusted bobby pins. A short time later she said, ‘Joe, will you please come with me?’

  She drove south to the semi-rural perimeter of the city. The radio was on but Joe blocked out the babble and thought more about his grandfather, this grave, mysterious man who had arrived in Australia a few months after the death of his wife, whom Joe had never met. As Joe had understood it, the plan had been for widowed, obviously lonely Grandpa Ullmann to live with Annie, Nash, Joe and their various animals at the farm. But that plan had fallen through when Nash departed before Grandpa Ullmann arrived. Suddenly the marriage was over, the farm sold and the animals repatriated to other carers or given away to kind neighbours. Their rental apartment in West End was cramped, and Joe’s grandfather’s health had deteriorated quickly, as if the cloying, thunderous heat of that summer, his first in Australia, had softened his bones and weakened his flesh to the point that it might tear, as casually and easily as wet paper. Eventually they’d managed to find him a room in a part retirement, part nursing home. The room, which overlooked a golf course, was a modern, shiny cell. But there’s no choice, said Annie softly, sadly. Sorry, Dad, no choice.

  Joe’s grandfather, too tired or sick to protest, had sat on a chair in his new room, doing and saying very little. One weekend a month Joe had caught a train to visit him. During his grandfather’s better moments they’d shared part conversations, but mostly they’d sat in a kind of semi-conscious repose.

  ‘So he can actually talk?’ Piers had asked.

  ‘Of course. If he wants to talk, he does. Otherwise –’ Joe shrugged. Was it really so important? He quite liked the emptiness of an hour or two with Grandpa Ullmann.

  ‘So he’s not –’

  ‘Not what?’

  ‘Don’t get antsy, I’m just thinking aloud. After all, the dude is in a home.’

  Dude? Piers did like to see himself as hip, ironic given his appearance (gangly, freckled, myopic) and interests (console games, online games).

  ‘He’s in a home. So what?’

  ‘Well, maybe he’s, you know, reached that point. Maybe he doesn’t talk much because he’s become – he’s a bit –’

  ‘Demented?’

  ‘Your word, not mine.’

  ‘What you were thinking. Anyway, he’s not like that. He just seems really tired and –’

  ‘What?’

  Living elsewhere, Joe had thought. His grandfather’s creaking body had come to Australia but his mind had remained in other places.

  ‘Nothing,’ he’d said, closing off the conversation.

  Now Joe opened his eyes. Through the afternoon gloom, he saw a circular gravel drive and gardens filled with white flowers and lime-green leaves the size of dinner plates. The golf course was visible to his left, to his right a wedge of concrete steps that led to the portico of the home.

  He waited in a corridor while his mother spoke with someone official. It was very quiet inside, each individual noise having been further reduced to a fraction. Shoes did no more than touch the carpet. Trolleys rolled with respectful reverence. Staff in conversation did not so much speak as pluck words from the unruffled air, polish each one carefully within their mouths and float them back … mothers releasing baby birds on their first flight.

  A small lady behind a walker frame entered the corridor. She was bent low, her head like a tiny pale coconut. She looked at Joe and said, ‘Naughty.’

  Joe’s eyes darted. He said, ‘Pardon?’

  The lady came closer. She smelled of menthol. She leaned in and said, ‘Does Roger know?’

  ‘No,’ he answered.

  ‘Good,’ said the lady firmly. She smiled, her eyes crinkled, and she said lightly, ‘Oh yes. Yes indeed. Tempus fugit.’

  Finally Joe’s mother reappeared, walking alongside a stout, determined lady who wore a grey jacket with a butterfly emblem stitched onto the lapel. She introduced herself as Mrs Fox.

  Joe shook her hand politely.

  Mrs Fox said, ‘I’m sorry for your loss. Now, Joe, you can wait over here while –’

  ‘Wait.’ Joe’s mother, touching Mrs Fox on the arm.

  ‘Mrs Hawker?’

  ‘I’d like Joe to come with me,’ said Annie. She turned to Joe and her face was wild again, tremulous, the way it had been before. ‘You don’t mind,’ she said desperately. ‘Do you?’

  Was it wrong to consider this episode as a curiosity? He thought, you’ve never seen a dead human before; now is your time. Don’t shake, or be upset. It’ll be interesting, won’t it? You can check out colour changes. Touch the cool skin, if you dare. Hey, you’ve heard about waxiness and hollowing-out and the absence of whatever-it-is that we can’t properly define. Be good to see if these aspects are true.

  But a different voice came into his mind as well, and this was a voice that pealed with the insistence of a Sunday church bell. Joe, this is not a curiosity! The man is your grandfather. Shared blood! Shared! Okay, you’ve never known much about him because your mother doesn’t know and he’s never been inclined to tell you, tell anyone; however, the question must still be asked. You’re about to see your grandfather prone in death, you should shake! You should be upset? So, why not? Why aren’t you feeling sick at heart, wanting to cry or berate the gods or run and hide? In the face of this erosion of your already tiny family, why are you so flat-line, so beige?

  For pity’s sake, do you feel it? Feel anything?

  Mrs Fox, although reluctant, eventually agreed. They waited downstairs where it was cooler and the only sounds were footsteps overhead. The rhythm of the steps made them sound percussive, like an underscore.

  Something beeped and Mrs Fox motioned towards a door. She said to Joe’s mother, ‘Are you sure about this?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  They went through the door. Joe’s grandfather lay on a trolley, covered by a green sheet. An attendant with spectacles and thin arms stood respectfully at the head of the trolley.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘Yes.’
>
  The attendant eased back the lip of the sheet. Joe saw his grandfather’s face. He was immediately struck by how sharp Grandpa Ullmann’s nose and chin had become. His skin reminded Joe of the moulding clay they’d used last year in Art and his eyes were closed, revealing tiny veins like country roads on a map. He looked like a sculpted version of himself with – with the vitality gone.

  Inexplicably, something that hurt. Something trapped. Joe wanted to open his mouth to let it go but he didn’t because the something, whatever it was, was too deeply embedded.

  His mother had both hands on her cheeks. She murmured, ‘Oh, Dad. Poor man.’ She moved forward but stopped herself, as if it would be a sin to get too close.

  ‘Thank you, David,’ said Mrs Fox eventually.

  The attendant lifted the sheet back over Joe’s grandfather. A moment to breathe before Mrs Fox beckoned towards the door –

  The attendant said, ‘Excuse me.’

  They looked at him. His eyes cowered. He said, ‘Sorry, I don’t mean to interfere. It’s just, I couldn’t help but notice –’

  Uncertain. The man cleared his throat, focused on Joe’s mother and said, ‘I knew Mr Ullmann a bit. In the early days we talked. I was doing nights upstairs and he’d be out of bed. Couldn’t sleep.’

  Mrs Fox said, ‘David,’ but the attendant persisted, saying, ‘He wasn’t well, but back then he was sharp. Not to mention being one of the politest fellas I’ve ever met … I always thought it strange though, how he always used to wear a cardigan or a jacket. Even if it was stinking hot, the air conditioner broke down, didn’t matter. I used to say to him, Mr Ullmann, you want to take that off, relax a bit, and he’d shake his head or sometimes he’d say no thanks, Davy, but no.’

  Joe’s mother nodded. She seemed grateful for the anecdote but there was a new presence in the room, either oddity or marvel.

  ‘Did you know about his arm?’ asked the attendant.

  ‘David,’ said Mrs Fox sharply, ‘is this really necessary?’

  Joe’s mother had stepped in front of her, urgent now, also sensing the shift. ‘What about his arm?’

  ‘Well,’ said the attendant, ‘this.’

  He pulled back the lateral edge of the sheet. Joe tensed when he saw his grandfather’s bleached and hairless arm laid along the edge of the trolley like driftwood on a beach. He followed the attendant’s finger, pointing to a pale blue tattoo. The ink was faded but still clear enough that Joe could make out a letter and four numbers.

  B4198.

  They clumped back upstairs, Mrs Fox apologising profusely as they did so.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she gushed. ‘David is a long-time employee; he should know better. I don’t know what he was trying to prove. I’m terribly sorry –’

  Joe’s mother said, ‘Please don’t bother yourself.’ Her voice was faint but firm, a distant smudge on a blank wall.

  B4198?

  Once they were inside his grandfather’s room Annie asked for some time alone. Mrs Fox quickly agreed and scuttled away, her former solidity having been diminished by the attendant’s erratic behaviour. Joe guessed that she would be charging downstairs to confront the poor man, like a nuclear submarine spearing towards an ancient, barnacle-encrusted galleon.

  His mother sighed, sat heavily on the edge of the tucked-in bed. Already the room had been cleared and cleaned, ready for the next occupant. A sealed cardboard box had been placed near the door alongside an old brown case, polished and buckled.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Do you want me to wait outside?’

  She looked up, teary now, perplexed.

  B4198?

  ‘No, love, no. Of course not. You stay.’

  She dropped away from him and Joe heard snuffling. Private moment, or should he go to her, bend into a hug? It was difficult to know. The compromise was to edge a little closer, stand supportively in front of the amber-green light of the window and remember …

  ‘Joseph.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where is your mother?’

  ‘She’s at work.’

  Saturdays volunteering at the animal refuge … as if five days a week flat chat with the veterinary clinic wasn’t enough, but Annie Ullmann was driven to help the sick, maimed and less fortunate, always had been.

  ‘She is with the animals?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘This is no surprise,’ the old man had rasped unexpectedly. ‘Joseph, when we have time, I will tell you of the hawk.’

  When we have time? Grandpa, he’d thought, we have time, that’s all we have. You’re as good as bedridden in this solemn church-like space, I’m here too, there is nothing for me to do either, no assignments or singing lessons, no books, no friends, no poems (to scrabble with and wrestle and tear). We have time –

  But his grandfather had fallen back into that space, murmuring, always murmuring. The story of the hawk had never been told.

  Weeks later Joe had said to his mother, ‘Grandpa said something about a hawk.’

  A brief look of surprise before she’d gone back to mixing muffins for Essie’s birthday party. Essie, his sort of stepsister, was turning one, and his mother was making muffins. Joe shook his head. Wasn’t that approval? When it was Nash who had left, Nash who had quick-as-a-flash started a new family with Rebecca, Nash who’d refused to see them for months, citing illness, weariness, even an apparent prognosis of clinical depression? Nash who had always given reasons for not coming back but never given a reason for going?

  ‘Mum. The hawk?’

  ‘Oh, that was nothing,’ she’d told him. ‘Childhood stuff. Nothing at all.’

  When his mother indicated that they should leave the room, Joe picked up the box and the case.

  ‘That old thing,’ said Annie with a rueful smile. ‘Can’t believe he kept it all these years.’

  Outside a fresh sea breeze had lifted humidity away from the earth. Released from the blanket of heat, the gardens breathed more easily.

  Joe sat patiently inside the car. Trees shimmied and dipped in the twilight.

  His mother gripped the steering wheel. She was coiled tight like a spring when she whispered, ‘I’ve just realised, I have no parent.’

  He remembered the girl called Zoe. One Wednesday morning last year her father had died. Like everyone at the college Joe had heard how it unfolded: Zoe being called out of class with her books – always an ominous sign – and not returning. Rumours had fired through the classrooms and grounds, the gym, the chapel until finally, the following day, confirmation.

  Dead dad.

  Within the hour, a modification.

  Suicided dad.

  Now the school was agog, anxious for narrative. Suicide was so much more interesting than plain old death!

  Throughout the day, a network of conjecture and debate.

  Hanged himself. Shot himself. Jumped off the Story Bridge (traction there, given the frequency). Took poison (too female and European). Electrocution (stupid). Deliberate car accident, drove into a pole. Or did the car-hosepipe-carbon monoxide thing.

  Consensus: hanged. From a tree. In the backyard. This was community Cluedo, a macabre guessing game.

  It was a time when Joe had begun to fully doubt and dislike the planet or, more particularly, those who peopled it. No one had asked or postulated why Zoe’s father had died, not when the how was so fascinating! In their eyes Zoe was now depersonalised. She was the cardboard cut-out Victim of an Event. No one cared whether her scrambled mind would rebalance, whether her torn heart would repair and regain itself. No, what they wanted were details, the insider’s view. The Event laid bare so we can share it immediately – online would be great! – and make like we’re important because we know. We know!

  But then, unexpectedly, something to love – Zoe herself, returning to school in a state of dignity. Somehow she had soared to a higher plane, a place where she’d confronted the most difficult of all learnings and incredibly found ways of understa
nding them. Zoe returned and Zoe continued, a strategy that confused the gabbling mass. She should have been bereft, a snotty teary mess of confounded agony. Instead, she was a queen.

  Joe loved Zoe for that. He loved her even more when, at November’s graduation ceremony, the school audience stood as one (horror of horrors, they’d been instructed to do so by the Principal) and applauded rapturously when Zoe crossed the stage – and she didn’t look at them. Not once. Head high, carriage unaltered, Zoe had kept walking, resumed her seat, waited until the end, left alone and caught a taxi to a new, more truth-filled life.

  Zoe’s higher plane. Filing out of the auditorium as part of yet another manufactured, supervised line Joe had thought, maybe, just maybe, the planet did have hope.

  His mother suggested their favourite coffee shop, Fraise in Melbourne Street. They ordered twin flat whites and the waitress asked if Joe wanted food, a sausage roll or perhaps the lemon tart: it was notable, award-winning.

  There were competitions for lemon tarts? He smiled politely, declined. His mother, piping sugar into her coffee, punctuated the warm air with a series of sighs.

  ‘Joe,’ she said eventually, ‘that number. Did you see –’

  He nodded. His mother said, ‘I’ve seen one before.’

  Joe hadn’t, but he did have an inkling. Something that he had once read, a tiny bell at the back of his mind –

  She said, ‘We were in Sydney, before you were born. Your father had a contract, two weeks’ photographing for a house design magazine. I wandered around by myself.’

  She paused, sipped her coffee. Joe, watching her, was surprised to find an elegance in his mother’s actions, the poise with which she lifted and lowered the cup. Less than an hour ago she’d been reduced, now … She said, ‘I went to this museum in Darlinghurst. I thought it might be interesting so I did a tour. The guide was an elderly lady. She had lovely blue eyes. During the tour she rolled up her sleeve and there was a number. Same colour and style.’