The Best Kind of Beautiful

by Frances Whiting

  *

  Albert walked through the melaleuca track, listening to his boots stamp on the leaf litter, and the odd set-to between birds, shrieking and pipping above. People had no idea, he thought, how dramatic birds were, always fighting and loving and drawing their battle lines. It was the morning after the Music Under the Milky Way party, which had been, he grimaced, a mistake. An Albert Flowers–sized mistake. He should not have agreed to take the booking, he’d known it even as Natalie Bishop had said, ‘I do hope you’ll bring the mobile mixology bar, Albert, it was such a hit at Simon and Siobhan’s wedding, and the boys will be happy to see you.’

  He doubted very much if the Bishop boys, who were, of course, men with gradually retreating hairlines, would be happy to see him. But he liked Natalie, whom he had first met at the library when he overheard her asking Monty for books on natural pesticides and offered to help. Since then he’d been to Avalon a few times to work as a pair of extra hands in the garden, and it was Natalie who had suggested to her future daughter-in-law that she hire Albert for the wedding. He had also liked Siobhan Peters when he’d met her to discuss it at World’s End one night after work, still in his Green Team uniform and his calves streaked with dirt after a short tumble down an embankment. They’d found each other easily – Albert guessing the girl at the bar in the pressed linen shirt and chunky gold fob chain was Simon Bishop’s fiancée, and Siobhan recognising him from his description: ‘I’ll be in khaki, covered in dirt, and wearing a badge with my name on it.’ Albert smiled, remembering their easy conversation and Siobhan’s polite, feigned interest in his box weed problem.

  So when Natalie Bishop had asked him to work at her gala, he’d found himself saying yes, even though he generally avoided gigs that felt too close to home – literally in this case. His parents’ back fence met the lower edges of Avalon’s grounds, where a small creek occasionally still ran. Georgina Flowers was forever patrolling the boundary with her watering can, in the hope of running into Natalie Bishop and striking up a lifelong friendship.

  At the party he’d kept his head down, his hands busy pumping out Sidecars and Long Island Iced Teas, and his conversation limited to bar banter. A few women, including Sadie Bishop, had flirted with him, Sadie asking if he’d like to take a cigarette break with her at the bottom of the garden. Albert had said no but had offered her his coat because she looked freezing in some silvery slip of material, and Sadie had answered, ‘No thanks, Dad,’ and walked off, throwing a pout over her shoulder. He’d kept the line moving steadily and had been thinking about taking a quick break to see if he could find the moon flowers whose scent teased through the night air, when Oscar Bishop’s friends had descended on the line like magpies.

  Albert had automatically ducked his head, more out of habit than fear, but one of them had met Albert’s eyes and the past had come nipping at his heels. The thing was, Albert thought, kicking a stone along the path, their words hadn’t hurt him that deeply at all. Some sort of muscle memory had flinched at hearing them, but he hadn’t been B-B-B-Bertie F-F-F-Flowers for a long time now, and school-ground taunts no longer filled him with the dry-mouthed horror they once had. When Oscar Bishop’s mates had begun to peck at him, Albert had been filled not with any sense of humiliation but with a sharp and overwhelming urge to see his brother. To see Hamish step out from the line and say: ‘Boys, you’re embarrassing yourselves. Oscar, take your children back to the kindergarten, I think it’s nap time.’ But the sudden yearning to see his older brother materialise beside Natalie Bishop’s immaculate flowerbeds had not been because he needed Hamish’s protection – not now anyway – but because of how it would feel afterwards. What Albert missed was the after part. The walking off together, Hamish flinging his arm around Albert and doing imitations of his tormentors: ‘Mark McIntosh has a dick the size of the rubber at the end of a pencil,’ and the two of them laughing as they kicked a stone between them all the way home.

  Albert looked down at the stone he was now kicking and pushed it off the path with his toe. Missing Hamish felt like someone had dropped a knee to his chest and was holding it there, seeing how much weight his heart could take before he folded into himself.

  Hamish had not given a stuff about Albert’s stutter, or his size. Hamish hadn’t bothered about Albert’s shyness, or his way of blurting out the first thing he thought of when he was trying to make friends, which was always the wrong thing. Once, when Georgina had pushed him out the door to ‘make friends with those nice Shaw boys’, he had wandered over to where they were shooting basketball hoops outside, stood silently on the edge of the game for what seemed like a very long time, then shouted – at least it had sounded like shouting in Albert’s ears – ‘I’m a vegetarian,’ even though he wasn’t.

  The first doctor his parents took him to for his stutter wondered whether Albert’s habit of saying the wrong thing was the source of the problem. Did it, Doctor Feldman mused to a big-eyed Georgina and fidgety Laurence Flowers, make him subconsciously trip over his own tongue in an act of self-sabotage? Albert and Hamish thought Doctor Feldman was full of shit, and thankfully so did the conga line of speech pathologists who came afterwards. Albert was thirteen when he began to stutter, an unusually late onset, everyone agreed. There had been no trigger, no internal warning system that he was going to have to start thinking about every word he said; he had just found himself stumbling over the first letter of butter when he’d asked Hamish to pass it to him over dinner one night. ‘Could I have the b-b-b-butter please,’ he had said, and he remembered being more interested than alarmed at the way his lips held the sound behind them, stubbornly refusing to let it go. Hamish had just slid the butter dish across the table and the moment had slid away with it, but the next day and the day after that more words began to trip Albert up.

  He grew watchful, doling out his words carefully while his parents listened so intently to everything he said that he found it was easier not to say anything around them at all. The speech therapists and pathologists and hypnotherapists – except for Doctor Feldman – all assured his parents that their son’s stutter was not psychosomatic. It was not the result of some terrible psychological trauma or an attention-seeking device, it was more likely genetic, they said, causing Georgina and Laurence Flowers to look sideways at each other. Albert didn’t know why he started stuttering, but he knew that it was worse at school, better when he sang, and non-existent when it was just him and Hamish building paper planes in Albert’s bedroom. They gave the plane designs names like ‘The Wasp’ and ‘The Stinger’, but their favourite was ‘The Comanche Dragon’, which Hamish said was quick and elegant and always landed where it was meant to.

  When Albert was with Hamish, making their planes loop and dive in Albert’s room, his words flowed like water over river stones. At school he increasingly fell over them, like someone had set out a trip wire, and Hamish began to walk him to his locker. It wasn’t the stutter itself that bothered Albert, but that he had spent most of his thirteen years on earth being embarrassed by the utter uselessness of his size, his lumbering body proving no good at any sort of football or basketball or any of the sorts of things it might have come in handy for, and in the end it had not been his body that would betray him, but something as small as his voice. It had pissed him off in the way that only a thirteen-year-old boy can be pissed off, full of anger that rose up through his fists, which he wrapped in towels so his parents wouldn’t hear him driving them into walls. That, however, was nothing compared to the molten rage that was to take hold when Albert was seventeen and Hamish got sick.

  Albert felt the forest cooling around him, the slight drop in temperature, and he kept walking, remembering when missing Hamish first really began, when it moved from what Albert thought of as a temporary state into a permanent one.

  ‘You cannot talk to the parentals about this because they, my brother, are currently floating down a river in Egypt,’ Hamish had said from his bed, a poster of Farrah Fawcett in a red swimsuit taped to the ce
iling, Farrah smiling down at his brother in a tumble of hair, teeth and erect nipples.

  Albert had screwed his face up at the old joke between them.

  ‘De Nile?’ he had asked.

  Hamish had grinned.

  ‘That’s the one. They are going to tell you and Addie that I’m going to get better, but I’m not. The oncologist has been straight with me, if not with them, though I can’t imagine why. Come here, mate.’ His brother patted the smooth part of the bed beside him and Albert sat on it, leaning into Hamish’s knees.

  ‘I’m dying, Albert,’ Hamish said. ‘It might be a year, it might be six months, or it might be six weeks, but it won’t be any longer than that, so you and I have to sort some stuff out, all right?’

  Albert nodded.

  ‘First off, I’m scared as fuck. Don’t tell the parentals that either, but I am and the only time I’m not scared as fuck is when I’m with you and we talk about shit like we always have, and we make The Wasp and The Stinger and The Comanche Dragon like we always have, or we play poker or listen to music, and you get all the words wrong . . .’

  Hamish laughed, running a hand over his skull, tufts of hair like tumbleweeds sprouting from it.

  ‘Everyone else can barely fucking look at me, Albert. The blokes from school come and they look at the floor, and girls I like come and look everywhere but in my eyes, and Mum and Dad and Addie look away when it’s too hard, but you look at me all the time, Albert, in exactly the same way you always have. Do you see what I’m saying?’

  Albert shook his head. He had no idea.

  ‘I’m saying thank you, and I’m saying stop thinking that you’re shit, Albert. So what if you’re a bit bigger than other guys your age? So what if you can’t kick a ball, so what if you’re a bit shy, so fucking what if you stammer out your words here and there?’

  Hamish took Albert’s hand and put it on his chest – it was like covering it with an enormous saucer, Hamish’s ribs like sparrow’s bones.

  ‘You’re the only one who still looks at me like I’m bearable, Albert, and the only time I’m not scared shitless is when you are in the room with me, so what does that say about you? What does that say about you, little brother?’

  Albert shook his head again, as Hamish covered Albert’s hand on his chest with his own and pressed it.

  ‘It says you are the best, Albert. The best of the best. You are The Wasp, you are The Stinger, you are The Comanche Fucking Dragon. You are quick and elegant, and I promise you will land exactly where you are meant to – now fuck off and let me go to sleep.’

  When Hamish died a little after his twenty-first birthday – a limp celebration held in his hospital room where the nurses had hung balloons and a banner that said Happy Birthday, Hot Stuff! – Albert walked the same bark-strewn path he was walking now.

  It was the afternoon after Hamish’s funeral, which hundreds of people had attended, spilling out of the church onto the grass and listening to the service through outside speakers. There were past and present students and teachers from Hamish’s primary and high schools, members of his football and cricket teams and swimming and rowing squads, university friends and lecturers, people Hamish had worked in part-time jobs with, and girls – so many girls who had caught his eye or shared his bed or wished that they had. There was, it seemed to Albert and Addie, battalions of relatives they had never met before, and people peppered throughout the pews that nobody knew at all. Hamish had collected them all somewhere along the way. Hamish was the Pied Piper of East Elm, no shortage of people wanting to join his merry, doomed dance. At the wake, a horrendous affair in the church hall where the sun streamed in through the windows and everybody clung on to the idea that it was a sign from Hamish, Albert stayed long enough to be seen to have stayed, then he walked out the back door and kept walking. The Our Lady of the Bower church grounds met a little-used southern section of the Mount Bell State Forest that led to a short cut to the melaleuca track. The path dipped, then climbed steeply until it reached an escarpment overlooking the gorilla-shaped mountain locals called King Kong, the ape’s sleepy granite eyes half-closed and granite fists curled and tucked by its side.

  Albert stepped forward to the edge of a small rocky outcrop and reached into the backpack he had brought with him, his mother asking why he had that disgusting old bag in the church. First The Wasp, which wobbled a little before catching a slight upwind and dancing briefly across the valley on it; then The Stinger, which dived immediately and sharply downwards, hitting a bush not too far from its launching pad: and lastly The Comanche Dragon.

  Albert took his time, smoothing the plane’s edges and its tail, waiting until the breeze lifted, then he drew back his arm, opened his hand and let its paper wings take flight.

  Albert was heading to the same escarpment now, to swing his legs over the outcrop, scan the valley below and wonder where his brother’s plane had landed under King Kong’s sleepy eyes.

  After the funeral and the wailing that went on under the Flowers’ roof for weeks, Albert missed days, then weeks of school, the last term slipping by without Albert in it. When Farrow’s class of 1987 graduated, his was missing from the shower of hats tossed to the air. Instead he stayed in his room, or scanned the shelves in the library’s botany section, or took himself into the woods, his world growing smaller and quieter.

  His stutter was more pronounced after Hamish died, but not, Albert thought now, because Hamish had died, but because he had stopped practising the words and sounds designed to unlock his teeth, lips and tongue. He had found it increasingly difficult to speak to people he didn’t know well. The worst ones were the people who jumped in to supply the word for him, as if he didn’t know it, or they couldn’t stand the suspense for a second longer. ‘I’ll just get my b-b-b-b,’ he would say, and inevitably some kindly woman with lipstick on her teeth would say, ‘Book? Bag . . . Bike!’ Albert wanted to tell them all to b-b-b-b-bugger off.

  He began to spend more time in the Mount Bell forest, taking the less popular trails where there was very little chance of having to make small talk, and where, despite all the evidence to the contrary, his brother could still be found. Months later, Hamish Flowers would turn up at home, lazily talking to Albert from his bed, or appearing in the television room, smiling from the couch. But for the first few weeks after Hamish died, the forest was the only place Albert could hear his brother in his ear saying: ‘Don’t worry about Stinky Bates, a girl I know kissed him and said he had an old wad of chewing gum in his mouth.’ Albert remembered Steven ‘Stinky’ Bates at Hamish’s funeral sitting in one of the pews and chewing gum, his jaw constantly moving throughout the service. Albert wondered if it was the same piece.

  That Albert did not graduate from Farrow did not bother him at all. He remembered watching his classmates whirl past the windows of Bougainvillea Gardens the night of the school formal; he’d slouched down in his car seat and spun his tyres as he’d driven away. So much fury inside of me then, Albert thought. Nothing of it left now, sitting down at the outcrop’s ledge, in the shadow of the mighty Kong. He had first begun studying horticulture through a correspondence course, following Georgina Flowers’s insistence that he ‘do something’. He was driving her mad at home, his broad frame getting in the way of all that wailing. Surprisingly, it had been Laurence who had brought home the brochure, tossing it on Albert’s desk and saying, ‘Might be worth a look.’ It had been worth so much more than that.

  Albert’s love of plants deepened, and his rambles took him further and further afield from Mount Bell’s trails and brought him small, emerald green and muddy brown slices of peace.

  Hamish had left him some money, which Albert hadn’t touched and had thought he quite possibly never would. But when Marcia Mittford, a girl he knew vaguely through Addie, told him she was leaving East Elm and had to sell her mobile cocktail business, he bought it. He purchased every last piece of it: the van, the bar, the alcohol, the shakers, the stirrers, the plastic blue mermaids and the ti
ny paper umbrellas. He was nineteen and he had no idea what he was doing, but Marcia’s price for her business was the exact amount Hamish had left him. He took this as a sign from Hamish at a time when he still spent his days searching for scraps of his brother.

  His journey from Albert Flowers, bedroom hermit and roaming woodsman, to Albert Flowers, Mobile Mixologist, was surprisingly smooth. He spent an afternoon with Marcia taking him through the cocktail list, learning how to make the perfect martini, slicing maraschino cherries and salting tequila glasses, then falling into bed with her afterwards, Marcia bestowing him with the great gift of finally ridding him of his own maraschino cherry.

  After that, everything became easier, like someone had expelled a little air from his tyres.

  ‘This gig is made for you, Albert Flowers,’ Marcia told him from between the sheets during that long afternoon. ‘All you have to say if you don’t feel like chatting is “What can I get you?” or “Shaken or stirred?” or “No, I don’t want to come home with you,” and I can promise you that you’ll get a few offers.’

  Marcia bartended his first two events with him before she left, and Albert found she was right. Most people were happy just to get their drinks and go back to the party. But at his first solo gig and the next few after that, Albert found his hands busy and his lips loosening. When he ducked behind the bar, when his fingers found their way to his lower back to tie his apron, when he was Albert Flowers, Mobile Mixologist, his mouth, he found, unlocked. Albert progressed from ‘What can I get you?’ to ‘How do you know the bride and groom?’ and ‘I’d recommend a Manhattan, if you want something a bit sharper’ to finding himself in loops of conversations with the lovelorn, the disenchanted and the really, really pissed. He was two people: Albert Flowers, stutterer, loner, brother of the dead guy; and Albert Flowers, Mobile Mixologist, teller of stories, ‘the secret ingredient’, a client wrote in a recommendation, ‘to every successful party’.