The Family Men (15 page)

“That's a way off, isn't it?”

“Is it? I don't know. You never know.”

“I take it you've been giving the matter some thought. Does that mean you're in or you're out?”

“Jury's still out.”

“If you're having that much trouble making a decision maybe you would be better off doing something else.”

Easy moment over.

“Fuck you.”

“Yeah, well stop making your problems my problems.”

The days feel perennially grey, a great tarpaulin draped across the city, the sky somehow lower than usual, lower and wider, like it is flattening out on top of him, flattening and pushing, draining him of colour the way a leaf is flattened and loses its pigment when pressed down by a book.

Harry pulls up outside of Our Lady of the Assumption about five minutes early but already people are mingling on the front steps, early departers, or others, like him, tasked with the job of collecting someone. He doesn't feel like waiting in the car, sitting there almost as awkward as being benched in the first half (
taking one for the team
, that's what his high school coach had called it, his tone of voice a reminder that Harry was lucky he hadn't been forced to take a couple more, and at fourteen you didn't argue with your coach, even when you were up by twenty goals and it was the one time that year your dad had been sober enough to come and watch you play).

Lately his dad has taken to lingering long after the service, chatting with the special ministers, helping to put away the collection, anything to prolong that semblance of autonomy, to avoid returning to the aegis of his son's scrutiny. It could be hours before he makes an appearance, leaving Harry feeling like a jilted bride.

Harry slips into the back pew, rests his eyes for a second and focusses on his breathing. Counting backwards from one hundred as slowly as he can. Another of the counsellor's exercises. A way of making the time pass. You'd think it would be easy, thinking about nothing, letting the clock roll down to zero but his mind is an amateur brass band, each discordant trumpet louder than the last, the past reaching into the present more and more insistently so he is as good as there again, Sportsman's Night, watching the show.

“Tits, tits, tits, tits, tits,” the players roared, flooding the forward area, the scene a fervent zoo of inebriation, the atmosphere so thick that the occasional sickly lungful of dry-ice smoke was actually a blessed relief from the alcohol and sweat and stifling pheromones. Packed in against one another, their bodies a tight scrum of desire giving off the disembodied chant, imploring the women to remove their clothes, until one by one the ladies took off their tops.

They were wearing pasties. Silver stars attached to their nipples that did little to conceal their breasts. Yet they were strangely chaste with the decals, like youngsters in bikini tops at the beach.

Nevertheless, Harry had a hard-on, despite himself, despite Jack whispering into his ear like a lover – “How's that? Could you tap a piece of that?” – as the women, some just girls really, jiggled and shook, the wry false modesty of their “adult” performance.

He starts counting again. One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven, ninety-six, forcing himself to focus on the numbers, to block the rest of it out, the girls, the boys, the music. Ninety-five, ninety-four … his feet pressed firmly to the floor, the present.

Alan is right up the front near the altar, has no idea Harry is sitting there watching him hobble about, bowed and limping as he stores away the wine, snuffs out the candles, almost impossible to believe it is the same man who once proudly snorted six lines of cocaine in one sitting, drank vodka shots for breakfast, Harry and Matt making hay as best they could, turning his recklessness into lemonade (“Sign this, Dad,” then flogging the autographed booty to their school friends). Years spent climbing on and off that transport, the toll like a winch, prematurely drawing him in, tightening. If Harry didn't know better he'd have assumed his father was an invalid visiting from the local convalescent home, that, or he was there on some kind of community service order.

The church is shabby modern. Built in the 1980s – blond brick, wood panelling, a simple pulpit, the walls adorned with large impressionistic copper plates depicting the Stations of the Cross, the carpet runners thinning regal Berber. There is no choir. Altar boys operate the tinny sound system.
Renée Geyer sings Songs of Joy
. Or very occasionally a local duo will treat them to an out-of-tune sampling of devotional hymns set to their acoustic guitar.

Harry could have sworn there was a choir at the church they'd attended as kids. If you could call their visits “attending”, Easter, Christmas, the occasional confirmation or first communion, he and his brother like Switzerland, sandwiched between his warring parents, an anodyne territory regularly breached. At the time his thoughts were more concerned with his latest district carnival performance than with prayer, the service seeming interminably long. That's mostly what he recalled. That and working on his short kick and eating Chiko Rolls, their snacks on the way home (piping hot, he always burnt his tongue), purchased to offset the deleterious effects of the inevitable quarrelling which resumed seconds after they all returned to the car.

His stomach issues a decided rumble. He could go a Chiko Roll now.

Father Murphy makes his way up the aisle to farewell the remaining parishioners, ducking into a squat beside Harry when he reaches his pew, close enough that Harry can see the short flecks of ginger and grey stubble on his chin. “What do you think of this,” says the priest, closing his eyes and reciting a couple of lines.

“Say it again, Father.”

“
The nothings you can never put into words
. I thought of you when I read that, your situation.”

“What's it mean? Is it from the Bible?”

“No. It's a poem.”

“A poem?”

“‘Small-Scale' by Gig Ryan. She's an Australian poet.”

Harry laughs. “You're bullshitting me. Like Ryan Giggs?”

“Who's that?”

“Never mind.”

At the Point mist rises from the sea, the temperature of the water cooler than the temperature of the air, gulls gliding across its surface to escape the heat. Harry dives into the waves, head first through the surf, his thin blond hair pressed against his translucent scalp framing his face like an acanthus garland. There is more than a little malice in that black morass, the way its unrelenting purposefulness lands one wave on the shore after another. He ducks his head again, his chest swollen with breath. And then it crashes right on top of him, the thrust of the ocean.

Jock Riley, team legend and Club board member (also known as EG because he set such a fine example), had been roped in for the Sportsman's Night presentation ceremony. First he delivered the annual “Swinburne” speech, a bit of spruiking about Club glories, past and present, after which awards were presented while the boys ate dinner. The dancers returned to the stage, more modestly dressed in translucent Club-coloured chemises, taking it in turns to hand out the gongs.
There you go
and a kiss on the cheek:

Best Club Man
Most Improved
Leading Goal Kicker
Best and Fairest (First, Second, Third)
Most Courageous
Striving for Excellence
Best Finals Player
Player-Voted Award
Coach's Award
Rising Star
Best VFL Player

They were all attractive enough, the women, but Harry didn't really see the others, the young blonde having scope-locked his attention, the way she seemed to be there but not there, startled and slightly lost, like a foreigner at a tourist attraction wandered into someone else's family photograph.

He wanted to talk to her but not like this, dreaded the sound of his name being called, knew it was coming but almost tripped when he was invited forward, second-last prize of the evening.

He tried to smile. Who else could they have given it to? “Rising” what? Any other player would have been insulted.

Someone booed as he stumbled across the stage. Half-hearted. He didn't care. All he wanted was for it to be over, to accept his honour and to step down.

Laurie was up there. And Ted, the Club president, flanking Jock, all awkwardly extending their hands:

“Good onya, mate.”

“Give my regards to your dad.”

“Well done, son.”

Harry didn't dare look towards the women. One of the other dancers kissed him, presented him with his prize.

The trophy now lay atop a box of calendars in his mother's living room. Someone else might have been pleased to receive it but for him it was just one more in a house full of trophies, another placeless keepsake looking for a home.

Again his father wants to know what he is going to do. “You can't just sit around all day scratching your behind. This labouring work's a dead end.”

“Jesus was a carpenter.”

“Save your bullshit for Laurie, right. So—”

“So I don't want to talk about it,” says Harry, for the thousandth time thinking,
fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck off
.

He doesn't want to talk about a lot of things – like his past or his future or the other night when he found his father broken down on the kitchen floor, his composure strewn like the jigsaw puzzle, scattered in a million pieces (thinking of the first time his mother walked out, TAB stubs sprayed across the living room, Alan swallowing diazepam like aspirin, coming down from a week-long bender – now that was a morning after). It is plain his father doesn't want to talk about it either and Harry is more than happy to remain ignorant of his father's particular demons spelled out for him in all their idiosyncratic detail. Or so he thinks. Except that this wilful Lethe allows for figments of his own invention, projections created in his own image, and thus he imagines them the same as his father's; an equivalent palette of sorrows, one colour bleeding into the next, there being no clear distinction anymore where one torment starts and the other ends. Which girl is it who keeps him up at night? Whose injustice does he cry for? What is it that he is losing, has lost?

What he wants, what he'll miss, is mud. The kind his grandfather called jungle muck. The thick, slimy, New Guinean sludge caked on his boots after a game. In summer, dust blackens his feet, wedging itself between his knuckly toes, so abrasive, it is the very opposite of slick.

Even when he's been surfing, his toes remain filthy. A melanoid souvenir. A visceral stubbornness. A refusal to be wiped clean.

Rosie knocks on the front door.

He answers in his bathrobe, his hair clumped, eyes puffy from watching too much TV.

“What?” she says, as he stares at her in disbelief.

“I told you not to come here. Not unless you rang first.”

She laughs. “Oh, lighten up. A few of us are going to the movies.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think?”

He glances back, knows his dad is dozing off on the couch. Surely it is alright to leave him alone for a couple of hours. He probably won't even notice Harry is gone. “Okay,” he says, “but not as a couple or anything. We're not holding hands.” Not that she has ever tried to hold his hand. Not in public. But he knows what she is after, that unspoken desire for legitimacy, has long had an inkling of it, a dogged shadow of an idea that is now forcing its way into the open.

She watches him disappear barefoot down the hall, the light from the telly flickering through the frosted glass door, separating the living room from the front entryway.

At the cinema, Simone looks like she has a football stuffed under her jumper. Lank hair, thick ankles, she is up the duff, easily six months gone. In the ticket line, as she waddles along beside Katia and Katia's boyfriend, Pete, Harry has to remind himself that he knows her, that she isn't just another faceless mum.

Inside, they throw popcorn at the girls. “Fuck off,” yells Rosie.

“Stick it up your arse,” calls Simone.

Picturing Simone in Grade 2, flat-chested with lace-patterned white knee-high socks.

Stick it up your arse
.

She wouldn't have said that then.

They sit through nearly two hours of
The Devil Wears Prada
. Ladies' choice. The girls' rapt faces flickering before Anne Hathaway's simpering attempts to impress her vicious boss, played by Meryl Streep, while he and Pete and Pete's mate, Chris, wait it out (junk time), such is the price of consensual sex. The theatre is barely half full. Usually he likes going to the movies, especially during the day, sitting in the dark, as indistinct as everybody else, a matinee reprieve from reality. But since the press conference he feels like he can't get away, that he is conspicuous even here, an aura of infamy surrounding his very being.

Rosie sits across the aisle but her presence is so immediate she might as well be sitting right beside him. Every time he looks across she is looking back at him. Or she isn't but he can feel her thinking of him, as though she's just been looking but has managed to turn away in time – a clumsy strategy, faking her intermittent interest in the film, so that he won't notice her obsessing.

His skin feels itchy. He imagines himself blushing, the red patches clawing up his pale neck. Back at Rosie's flat, he tries fucking her but finds it hard to sustain any interest, the sound of Katia and Pete rooting in the adjacent room off-putting, or perhaps he has had enough of ferreting about in the knickers of this girl he doesn't care for. “Maybe we should call it quits, I think we should call it quits,” he says, as she pumps again at his penis as though it is her fault (poor technique, she worries), meaning the whole relationship, not just this current botched attempt at sexual congress, the idea of being free of her an immediate relief to him, realising this is what he's wanted for a while now, to politely tabulate their score and move on.