The Family Men (8 page)

“You know, you can trust me,” Rosie says out of the side of her mouth as he stumbles over her zip. “Do you want to tell me? I know something's bothering you. It doesn't matter what it is. I'm good with secrets. I won't tell anyone. We can deal with it together. A burden shared is a burden halved.”

It occurs to him that she might have heard more than she is letting on. “Why do you think I've got a secret?” he asks. “And why would I tell you if I did?”

“Because you can't sleep. And when you do you thrash around like something's trying to get out. And you shout in your dreams. It's like you're possessed.”

“I've always talked in my sleep. I told you that.”

“Yeah, but this isn't talking.”

The car reeks of mustard dipping sauce. A small brown stain marks the back of her dress where Harry's finger first pinched the fabric. He presses his hands more firmly into her trunk and tries the circle again.

Startled awake at four in the morning, trying to latch back on to unconsciousness, a fuzzy image of his father in gumboots, something about an ambulance, random details from his dreams, receding, unable to be reconstructed. Fuelling his wakefulness, the music, as though someone has adjusted the faint volume up, up, his pulse keeping time or is that also an illusion?
One, two, three, four … one, two, three, four …
Fairly certain that he's dreamt the telephone call, though he can't be sure, someone might have rung – at this time of night it is impossible to know what is real and what isn't – telling himself not to stress it, even if it was a call it was likely just a fan or a wrong number. It doesn't make sense that it was Margo (she isn't a teenager). She'd just been fishing earlier on. Even if Jack and Eddy have been talking, if she had something concrete she would have said as much. That was her job, wasn't it, to fact-find, verify.
Do you have a comment? No comment?
What would be the purpose of her hounding him like this, making late-night calls then hanging up, if she already had what she was after? There was nothing to be gained. It could only get him offside.

He thinks again about the girl, mentally seats himself beside her on the train, her features blank, like an activity book yet to be coloured in, wishing it was possible, that he could transport himself there, that he could tell her to go home.

*

The girl felt a slight chill. She crossed her legs, then examined the pattern of fibres across her knees as the train rattled on, the steady stop-start of the stations metering out the journey with such regularity that the carriage began to feel like a world unto itself, the universe contained within its fluorescent-lit dimensions, the artificial brightness casting a distinctive pall across the faces of its inhabitants, mirrored back by the silver-tinged reflective windows. She surveyed the passengers – a young father down the other end attempting to corral his footloose toddler while his partner, left foot on the pram, fussed over her nursing baby; a woman two rows ahead lost in her Jodi Picoult novel; diagonally opposite an elderly man with sticky-taped glasses reading the
Herald Sun
; and several other passengers variously distracted by newspapers and iPods – wondering if her secret was apparent from her demeanour or if she looked like any other young woman on her way into town. Truth be told, she already knew the answer, but where ordinarily she might have been disappointed, in this instance it pleased her that she so effortlessly blended in. Granted, most of the passengers would have been alarmed to learn that she was still a teenager, but as a twenty-something, her appearance (at a glance at least) was unremarkable.

Would she have described herself as happy? Yes, excited and happy. And a little smug, harbouring a degree of pity for her fellow travellers, these denizens of the public transport system, members of that wider class of citizenry she typically dismissed as “people”, a collective noun meaning they had no clue. Uninteresting, boring, passionless, stupid.

Her mother was one of those people, always going on about “our” values and “doing the right thing”, as though anyone cared if she only bought Australian-grown tinned tomatoes or never used the clothes dryer, when in the same breath she hung on Ray's every word –
Jump! How high?
– like it was 1952 and her job to do whatever it was he told her, Ray trying it on with her when her mum wasn't around –
get me this, get me that
– the girl saying, “It's not a hotel,” then Ray calling her a stupid brat. Denying it later, of course (“A little credit please, as if I'd speak to your daughter like that”), her mother insisting the girl tell the truth, “You're lying, you're lying” (because she didn't want Ray leaving her like all her other boyfriends had) – “Why can't you just tell the truth?”
–
when the girl was being honest. Why should she say she'd done something that she hadn't?

The girl wasn't going to live her life that way. Pandering to other people. Day after day. Year after year. Always one foot in the grave. Her father certainly hadn't, taking off the first chance he got. Not that she blamed him. You have to go where the opportunities present themselves. That was her motto too:
You make your own luck
. She was also a free spirit. A maverick. An adventurer.

She dreamt about following in his footsteps, to Exmouth, Western Australia, where last she knew he piloted chartered sightseeing flights for Japanese tourists visiting Ningaloo Reef.

She could draw a straight line to it on the map. Right through the nation's centre, across the Nullarbor, past Kalgoorlie, then north of Coral Bay.

As soon as she could get the money together she was going to go. She had already asked her Big W supervisor for a reference.

*

Uniforms make getting dressed easier, donning team colours as liberating as they are constricting. Alan wears his grey suit, one of two suits hanging in his cupboard, the other, a dark gabardine, reserved for funerals and weddings and newspaper interviews, mostly funerals. The suit has the tired look of a hand-me-down, smooth and shiny after too many trips to the drycleaner, the pants forever being taken in or let out in line with his contracting or expanding waistline. Harry wears jeans. Jeans and a green checked shirt. The shirt could use a pressing but at least it is clean.

Head down, eyes on the ball.

Parishioners nod at them as they enter the church, Senior walking haltingly, like he's aged fifty years overnight (the stress, the sleeplessness, the pills), stopping for a brief whispered tete-a-tete with Dick Tipton, head of the finance committee, about next week's sausage sizzle, one of several fundraising initiatives for a new roof. Harry yawns as he crosses himself then takes a seat on a pew, examining the roster of initials carved in the backrest, the crude letters buffed by years of bored fingers tracing the coarse outlines. Above them, the peeling ceiling paint is patterned with oxidised possum stains.

At the Club their prayers typically take the form of game-related requests – for physical prowess, athletic dominance, that ineffable something on the field to give them the winning edge – the losses and injuries put down to bad luck, weather conditions, general distraction or foolishness, the whimsy of a higher power. They never pray for forgiveness or absolution of their mistakes, never attribute their poor fortune to unworthiness, a sign of God's disapproval.

He tries to listen but his thoughts keep trailing off, to the swell, to the taste of Rosie's cunt in the morning, the dampness beneath her breasts; how he reviles her and yet is drawn to her, the way she collapses everything, reducing it to its most basic component parts. Sex. Procreation. Death. They could be together forever and he'd never have to do anything for himself again. It is at once appealing and repulsive. Everything about her is at once appealing and repulsive.

After the service, when he gets up to enter the flimsy confessional, a teenage girl blows him a kiss.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been one week since my last confession and these are my sins.” He is sure everyone in the church can hear him, his words bouncing around the booth like an echo chamber, but he reels them off nonetheless. “I lied to my mother, I lied to my father, I lied to my brother, I disrespected my coach, I swore four times, I took the Lord's name in vain.”

“You only swore four times?” says Father Murphy. “And you've been here three times in as many weeks. Is there something troubling you, son? We've been seeing a lot of you lately.”

It is a fair question. He and his brother have always gone to church but only so often that they can't be accused of not going, their mother at pains to stress that the choice of St Augustine secondary college was less about her spiritual beliefs than her interest in them receiving a private-school education; their father's public profile affording them privileged status, the school happy to offer heavily discounted fees if it could claim the old man as one of its own.

Harry tries to answer the priest, saying something about girls, about how everyone's obsessed with them, like Dean, watching his big over-muscled body lumbering after this woman at the pub, twirling her under his arm, then nearly tripping on the dance floor as he stumbled after her, how it was like witnessing a car accident, the way he pursued her, an absolute train wreck, the stark loneliness of that one-on-one play. Knowing it would never happen on the field (
one in, all in!
), how even if the team was losing, there was a unity in the side, a sense of pulling together, everyone knowing which position they were supposed to take, who they were dogging, who they were defending, whose back they were supposed to have. But it doesn't come out right. Finally he stops. “That's all, Father. Thank you, Father. Everything's fine. Amen.”

Alan is poised to go in as Harry comes out, an eager commuter late for work.

Harry counts parishioners as he waits for his dad, noting that the girl who'd blown him the kiss just before is now sitting with the Tiptons. She isn't their daughter, Erica, is she? He doesn't recognise her at all. Two teenage boys sit on the other side of the aisle, near the side exit, watching him watching her, the seconds dragging. As he and his father leave, the two boys approach them with footy cards to sign. “No problem,” says Harry, scrawling his name across his picture. The old man is flustered but Harry is ready – often as not he forgets his watch but he usually remembers a pen. He doesn't want to think about sex anymore and yet sex is all that he can think about, images of naked women in compromising positions populating his imagination, intruding on his thoughts as attentiveness might intrude on a dream so that it becomes impossible to keep dreaming without becoming aware of its own violability. Masturbating in the bathroom. A model from a Kmart catalogue. The neighbour's Jack Russell running up and down the side of the house, yapping, as he is showing her a thing or two, and then right at the crucial moment her face morphing into Andrea's, the Club's yoga instructor, with her impossibly chipper grin. He experiences a sensation almost like pain. And then it is over. He is free of it again as his heart beats so loudly he expects he should be able to hear it thump above the barking, the emptiness of the bathroom like the emptiness of a football stadium an hour after the game. Thinking of running through drills on cold winter mornings, frozen grass snapping beneath muddy stops, the way his coach always says he has quick hands. He smiles to himself, the crude irony, as he wipes his come off the toilet rim, his mind white-hot, an electric blur, everything shimmery like a mirage, the whoosh of nothingness howling around him like the wind.

The shed out the back of the house is set up as a makeshift gym. It is nothing much: a bench press, some weights, a “strive” motivational poster on the wall. The place has a strong whiff of fertiliser about it, a combination of Blood & Bone and dirty socks that can be overwhelming on a hot day. Harry pulls back the latch, the rich loamy scent greeting him like a punch in the face.

Here, at least, he can leave the rest of the world behind.

He gets started with some warm-ups: star-jumps, squats, push-ups. Those standbys he's been doing since he was a kid. The Under 9s lined up on the school asphalt, leaping and bending, handballing back and forth, the teacher yelling “both hands, both hands” until the action became rote.

That's his skill, what he's always had over the others. The way he can zero in, shut out anything in the moment that he doesn't need. Doing circle work, Eddy testing him with a misdirected ball to his face, the same crap he's been pulling since they were in kindergarten, but Harry catches it and pumps it on, his reflexes as twitchy as a prize fighter's.

Everything in the shed is just as he left it the previous afternoon, the barbell in the same position against the wall, his lifting gloves on the stepladder. He and his father usually take turns spotting for each other, assiduously recording their progress in an exercise book bound with a grubby rubber band, each figure written in pencil, never pen, insists his father, because too much is already indelible – mistakes can be made but ink is not easily amended. Harry dutifully dates the top of the page and gets to work on his abdominals.

Two hundred sit-ups and ten sets of the plank later – one minute on, one minute off – until his muscles are burning, he stops and scrutinises his naked midriff.