The Family Men (13 page)

… I'm a sexy mama …

“Be quiet, can't you?” he says, as fists continue to pummel the door (or perhaps they are using something more forceful, a battering ram?), the frame visibly shaking as they hit it, the structure threatening to give at any moment.

Sometimes he mixes them up, the girls.
What happens at Sportsman's Night stays at Sportsman's Night.
He'll be dreaming about one and then the other will appear, her features miraculously reconfigured. His girl. His father's girl. Increasingly interchangeable. Neither of them clear enough in his mind's eye to definitively dislodge the other's image, to delineate whose role is whose, which one belongs in which man's fantasy.

*

The girl peered out at the crowd but from the stage you couldn't really see anything. That was the biggest surprise. The venue wasn't especially large, but the lights were bright and obscured the best part of the audience, the area beyond the first two rows an overbright unknowable galaxy. The girl fixed on a point at the back of the room, where she imagined the back to be, and performed to that, fashioning herself as Beyoncé addressing the camera, her secret admirer; countless people might be watching but she was dancing just for one.

Everything was so strange. She felt herself staring dead ahead, knew she was going through the motions, completing the steps as she'd been taught to do, but it was like she was watching herself at the same time, as though she was both herself and someone else, neither fully in or out of the situation. She had expected to feel nervous, had been worried that she'd forget the sequences, but she wasn't nervous at all. Or maybe she was but the feeling didn't stick long enough for her to focus on it. By the time she came back around to it she was thinking about something else.

Line formation, spin, dissolve, do it again.

It was over before she knew it. Act one.

Greta said she did well. Very well. That was good. Better than doing poorly. Good was always better than bad, though in all honesty the girl didn't really care.

*

Embrace the challenge
. That and
See it, believe it!
Positive affirmations, Club psychologist Judith's prescription, a daily mantra of platitudes to help him develop his winning imagination (in-house counselling one of the Club's non-negotiable conditions during Harry's hiatus). His father walks into the bathroom as he is running through them, practising making stupid faces in the mirror as he does it, his chin jutted forward (the skin drawing in around his scar), lips pursed in a cat's bum, though it might look like he is blowing himself a kiss, dumb idea either way, their eyes meeting briefly across the mist before the old man walks out again, quietly closing the door and that is the end of the matter, no mention of Laurie's house call, no indignant claims of being quoted out of context, no examination of events other than to say he isn't going to rehab again, no way, no how. They'll work it out at home. It was just a couple of drinks and given the situation, who can blame him? A few more days and he'll be himself again. Their lives turned upside down by a renewed round of interview requests, eager junior reporters camped at their front gate, keeping pace with their various errands as the two of them gamely persist with their routines. But this is exactly as desired, according to Diana, who doubts her ex's every move, right down to his choice of toilet paper. “Selfish turd. Couldn't he stay on-message for once, say something about the t-shirts and keep his mouth shut about the rest of it? What else did he think would happen? Really, tell me,” she says. “How else could this play out?”

Harry doesn't know. He just wants them to back off.

“Never mind, darling. They'll forget about you again soon enough,” she says, a truth as incontrovertible as it is irrelevant when reporters are knocking at their front door.

He's stopped listening to the phone messages, ignores the machine's incessant blinking. Margo has left him another one, something she wants to run by him (he isn't touching that) – carefully transcribed in his father's peculiar hybrid script, capitals and lower case run madly together on the back of a power bill envelope, the note slipped under his bedroom door like a peace offering – but otherwise they are all for his dad.

“You wouldn't say anything to anyone, would you, son?” Alan ventures the next time they are out in the car together, another bland afternoon en route to the pharmacy, the same banged-up white Corolla following them all the way to and from the shops. Meaning, especially your mother,
don't tell her about my little breakdown, will you? No need for her to know.
Like Harry has to be told (not that it has stopped him from telling her, and Father Murphy would have said something if he hadn't). Doubtful though that it would modify Diana's opinion. Set as it is already. Benevolent pity. Well, she might pity him a little more. But it is too late to be worrying about that.

At the Club they run a battery of tests: eyes, ears, chest, nose, throat. Harry sounds out the letters on the eye chart, large to small, as though he is scanning the crowd for familiar faces at the MCG.

“Now the other eye,” says Dr Preeta.

Harry switches his hand from left to right, blinking as his pupils adjust to the light.

“You look like a pirate,” she says, as he cups his hand over his eye socket. “Lucky you've still got all your teeth.”

“Mouthguards. Are you going to make me walk the plank?”

“No. But if you ever need to get up in the night, if you keep one eye closed like that you won't lose your night vision.” She brings her palms up to her face, alternatively covering and uncovering each eye. “That way you won't have to wait half an hour again before you can see where you're going.”

But what if he doesn't want to see? Can night blindness stop his dreams? His memories? Thinking of that night, the way the girls tottered out on stage, eighteen of them in team colours, in various stages of undress, as though each one represented a progressive frame in a short cinematic striptease. How the crowd leant forward, lurched to the flesh, a beery vapour enveloping the scene in its own hot humid mess. “Tits,” they'd called.
Live tits on stage
(that's what they'd been promised) as Harry clung to the bar, his heart thumping, fog swirling in the footlights (dry ice) as the women began to gyrate, the music so loud the sticky floor vibrated, a skeletal rattle, though the tune was barely discernible above the wolf whistles and jeers, just a steady drum through his feet and shins, a bass Jurassic caution. From the back of the room, his eyes fixed upon the girl: a blonde, young (too young?), in fishnets, high heels, blue hot pants and a matching sequined bikini top. She looked familiar – so many women looked familiar. Did he know her? Like the others, her eyes appeared closed, or perhaps it was just the angle, for as the group turned she seemed to return his gaze, as though she felt his stare across the writhing mass.

Harry covers both eyes with his hands, takes a deep breath. What he wants is to be relieved of this ordeal, to sleep a dark empty sleep that will carry him through to morning. That's what his father's pills do. Leave him dazed but wiped clean. Reborn. Does Dr Preeta have something that can guarantee him that?

“You want a sleeping pill?”

“That'd work.”

“Tell me about it,” she says. So, of course, he changes his mind.

At his next appointment Dr Preeta says there is nothing wrong with him. “The results have come in and you're fine. Physically, that is. Fit as an Irishman's fiddle.”

“That's good,” he manages, Dr Preeta smiling as he makes his way out of the office, though in actual fact he is disappointed, fucked up as that sounds. He would greatly prefer if there was something officially the matter with him. What can he do with an “all clear”? She may as well have handed him her jar of jelly beans.

Rosie has let herself into the shed, big muddy prints on the cement floor, though Harry smells her perfume before he has fully opened the door, the brackish fragrance heralding her visit like an omen. “It was meant to be a surprise,” she tells him when he doesn't say anything. “I needed a break from work.”

“What if Dad had been home?”

“His car's not here.”

It is still raining. Water hammers the corrugated iron as he opens the slatted window, hoping the fragrance will dissipate before his next workout.

There is nowhere comfortable to sit. He leads her back to the house where they fuck silently on his unmade bed, him withdrawing at the last minute to come on her thigh because he doesn't want to use a condom.

“Some of the girls at work were talking about you this morning.”

“Who? Which girls? What were they saying?”

“About leaving the Club. They saw you on the telly.”

“What of it?”

“Is it true? Are you going to quit?”

“What do you care? I didn't think you followed footy.”

“I don't know. I'm just asking.”

Harry isn't used to spending time with her during the day, the natural light illuminating the gaping chasm of their respective disappointments. When he looks down, the smears of her eye shadow are gathered so distinctly in the creases of her eyelids, it is as though someone has attempted to cross her out, to rule a line through an unfortunate chapter.

“Rain, rain, go away, come again another day.” Rosie rolls over, drapes her arm across his midriff. “Don't you love that rhyme?” she says. He can hardly stand to look at her, let alone to feel the touch of her body as she presses herself against him, tackled – the tangle of legs, the taste of blood in his mouth. He turns his back to her, closing his eyes, willing her to leave.

Shouldn't you be getting back
, he suggests. Or perhaps he just thinks he does, the clunky numbers on his digital clock clicking over the minutes as she prattles away about the locum pharmacist, English, just granted his residency visa, filling the room with small talk about his travels (six months in the Northern Territory preparing tranquilisers for alcoholics before transferring to Bondi where it was all drug overdoses), proposing plans for joint activities, as though they are a real couple, impregnating his sheets with that perfume (he is going to have to do laundry now when she leaves), making no secret of what she wants, to insinuate herself into his life. She is like his mother in the way she has it all worked out, how he should renew his contract and then the two of them can move in together. She describes a three-bedroom house. Nothing fancy, it can be single storey, but it will have a carport and enough room for a clothesline and a barbecue and somewhere for the children to play out the back.

“How many children?” he asks, though he knows his mother would never green-light the match – Rosie is too skanky, too needy, too not good enough for him.

She smiles. “Maybe three.”

It is news to him, the specifics, but not really. He can see this is the direction it is heading, the obvious way she is expecting it to go (more than six months and most girls assume you are engaged). Just like his mum and dad had been, and her mum and dad. Love and marriage, horse and carriage. And baby makes three. Or four. Or five.

Except that they aren't really together, much as he and the Club aren't really together so much as proximate and convenient, an untenable way to continue a relationship.

His thoughts run to bunk beds. Bunk beds and unflushed toilets. And his mother's endless carryings on (still) about all their dirty washing piling up on her laundry floor (“Will you two ever be old enough to wash your own clothes?”), the strictures of happy family life beyond him for the time being. No wonder his dad had left them. Not that he'd had much choice. But Harry can see that this is the way it might have happened. One too many straws and he was off (pushed!).

“I don't know why everyone goes on about your brother,” says Rosie. “You're much better looking than him.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, definitely,” she says. “No doubt. Guess what, I think I'll take the afternoon off work.” She adjusts her position to the side and he feels her chapped lips begin to inch across his exposed spine.

The house feels dark, gloomy, the blinds drawn, windows closed, but he is reluctant to get up and turn on some lights lest she mistake it for an invitation to stick around.
Can I have a cup of tea?
and so forth. He wants her out before his father returns. Not that the old man would object too strongly to there being a lady in the house (he'd have a nerve if he did), but Harry doesn't want Rosie getting too comfortable, asking questions, presuming an intimacy borne of blurred boundaries and forced politenesses. Right now he has no tolerance for his dad's shtick, the gentleman celebrity in his ratty clothes, trying to cover the gap with a chipper mood.
Pleased to meet you, young lady
, and all that crap
.
And Rosie would suck up too. All the way up. It makes him wish he could replay his father at his worst. Let her listen to a grab of that and then see how much she likes him.

Now that the word is out, people want to know what he is going to do. Harry's an expert at avoiding eye contact but they still stop him in the street and demand explanations:
Will you be back next season, Harry? Will we see you training again on the home ground?
But what to say? That they might? Probably. He doesn't know. He isn't even sure what the questions mean anymore, beyond the obvious – whether or not he'll be listed on next year's roster, if he still considers himself part of the side. It is the scale of the issue that stymies him, its breadth. Pinioned there between the everything he's ever done and the everything he'll ever likely do, the possibilities looming larger than the universe, greater than any footy field he's ever played, the answers as unknowable as the vast pale sky stretching above it.

Walking along, absent-mindedly bouncing the football, he directs his thoughts to his next meat pie. Curry or onion? With or without sauce? Angling the ball across the cracks at just the right pitch, up, down, without a hint of top spin, so that the ball returns to the matching curve of his hands as though attached by string.