The Family Men Read online

  “Come on Harry, take pity on me,” says Margo. “Everyone’s away. We can have lunch, talk it over, chew the fat. You’ve had a stellar year but it can’t all have been easy. That’s a lot of pressure on a player with your lineage, second in line to the throne. But there must have been a morning or two you didn’t feel like getting out of bed, a training session where you wondered what the heck you’d signed up for. People love to hear about that stuff, not just the chockies but the boiled lollies too. Makes them feel like they’re part of it. What do you say?”

  For a moment he is tempted to tell her the truth, to say, get out your notebook, this is what I know. He clears his throat, a prelude to a confession, but then he pictures Laurie’s face, steam rising.

  He often thinks about the girl, imagines her getting herself ready, excited, packing her bag (make-up, fishnet stockings, new satin knickers, her sequined silver bra), the big night finally arrived, her special secret, the telly on in the other room, Jack shooting his mouth off, the usual shit – I could tackle her, or some such nonsense – a big dumb grin on his face, the rest of the panel laughing along as he bandies his innuendo because he is dressed in a suit and tie, a real gentleman, and is an excellent ruckman, but she doesn’t care, calling, “I’m going, Mum,” as she exits the front door, glass panels rattling as she trips off into the evening.

  Outside the air would have been cool, goosebumps forming on her arms as she walked. He imagines her hurrying along, trying to warm up, but not too much, she wouldn’t want to get sweaty, not if she could help it, kicking off her trainers, slipping on her high heels, the shoes clicking on the rutted footpath – tap, tap, tap, tap – a hollow bang, as though she was nailing up the city’s holes.

  The girl hurried along the footpath, the sound of her steps echoing in the cool air, her subterfuge powering her along, part thrill, part terror, being in possession of her first big secret, stage one in her escape plan for the west.

  It was not the kind of secret she could trust with her current crop of friends, concerned as they were with provincial interests – bands, boyfriends, clothes – picturing them confronted by a stern parent, witnessing the immediate crack, spilling her beans all the way down their fair-weather fronts. She had no need for it, to include them, their feeble guilt being offered up to her after the fact, their benign gestures of supplication as her dreams scattered in the breeze.

  At school the official curriculum determined that they investigate options for the future (training courses, vocational pathways), their formless youth plotted along an incompetence spectrum, barely able to place one foot in front of the next, balanced on the precipice of an inevitable abyss if they weren’t confronted with some basic truths (aptitudes playing second fiddle to opportunities). And for many of her peers it was justified, they didn’t have the first clue what they were going to do with themselves in the next hour let alone tomorrow, if challenged outlining a perpetual now of contentment defined by easy friendships and ongoing featureless stress-free jobs that would somehow sustain them into an effortless, nebulous adulthood.

  Not her though. She had long known exactly what she wanted to do, how it would unfold, had fixated on the future the way her peers fixated on certain celebrities, obsessing over their choreographed details, never fully processing the gulf between the world they inhabited and the one they aspired to know. Imagining themselves fully formed while she had always understood herself as a work in progress, viewing her adolescence as a waiting game, biding her time as a means to an end. Step one, get some cash together. Steps two, three and four, get out of town, away from her mother and her leery boyfriends, her mother saying, “Can’t you just be nice,” the two of them always at odds about it as though the girl shouldn’t mind these men accidentally walking in on her in the shower, insisting on coming into her room to kiss her goodnight before bed, running around with no clothes on pretending to play father of the house. But they weren’t her father. You’re not my dad.

  And now it had commenced. The countdown.

  She saw the railway station at the end of the road, the street lights like sentries, framing the way. She was nearly there. She took a deep breath before accelerating her pace; she wanted to remember this moment, to imprint it on her synapses so that she could retrieve it in the future, this shout-out from her past: the place where one chapter ended and the next part (the good one) properly began.

  *

  What did Jack say? That it was all good fun? The way these girls earned their keep? There was no need for anybody to feel bad. It was a game, part of their shtick, making a mission of it, competing for famous marks. And it was a far cry from that business with his dad all those years ago (though the past is never past). The situations were completely different. There was nothing clandestine about this. It was all above board. It wasn’t as though she was dragged out there against her will. She walked. Somewhat teetering, but of her own accord. It was a public engagement. She was being paid for her services. She was young but she had seemed obliging enough. Smiling. Especially at the beginning.

  Or perhaps that was the issue, she appeared too cooperative. Not exactly drunk. She didn’t flail. Yet not exactly sober either. There was something automatic about her behaviour, earnest yet robotic, a sense that she was doing what she had been told to do but without an appreciation of what any of it actually meant, the shimmying. They had all played along, the women. Keeping in time, running through the steps to the music. An ensemble entertainment. And then one was invited back for the finale. One and one only. By popular ballot. For a special solo performance. This is how he expects it would have been framed. As a privilege. An honour. A real feather in her cap. You’re the one that they want, honey. Quite the coup.

  For who doesn’t love being singled out? Every schoolboy’s dream, to be two points down in the final quarter, taking an unexpected grab on the siren, game changer, the commentators scrambling for the right superlatives as you kick the winning goal. But fantasies rarely find such form in real life. There are too many intangibles. Too many unknowns. So much room between beginnings and endings, an unfillable void between how it might be imagined and the various ways it could actually go down.

  And here again was another version: Once upon a time …

  The longer the show went on, however, the more convinced he became that whoever it was who had spun her that tale had omitted the end of the story.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been one week since my last confession and these are my sins: I lied to my mother, I lied to my father, I lied to my brother, I lied to my coach, I swore, I had impure thoughts, twice I took the Lord’s name in vain.”

  It is a fair list for so short a spell. He doesn’t mention the girl, what is really on his mind.

  Father Murphy pauses, allowing for the probability of what hasn’t been said – a lifetime of misgivings not long enough for the confession of most men’s sins (including those who view their sporadic unbosomings as more of an insurance policy, you never know, than any faith they might have vested in the Almighty) – before issuing some advice. “Go easy on yourself, Harry. There’s more to life than doing everything by the book. God loves your imperfections too.”

  Not according to Laurie, he doesn’t, thinks Harry, recalling the last time his coach took public aim at Alan, his go-to stooge, chastising Eddy (Jack’s brain-dead brother) for turning up hungover to training, comparing him to their father in the good old days, hapless and erratic. “Lucky for me the big man was out of commission so often or I’d never have gotten a game. He can put it away though. Drink us all under the table. I’ll give him that. You tell Senior, thanks,” he said in Harry’s direction, before issuing “Steady” an additional five laps (discipline); Matt laughing it off as Laurie’s sense of humour as Eddy chucked in front of the Williamson Stand, castigating Harry for being such a prig about it. “Who are you to question his authority? You don’t know what goes on behind the scenes. You’re hardly in a position to criticise. Try getting you
r own ducks in a row before you start telling everyone else what to do.” Glass houses and all of that. And finally, “If you can’t take the heat—” Such was the traction that one’s imperfections gained you at training.

  What Harry would like to have done is to have punched Laurie squarely in the jaw, forced him to shut his cakehole. That would have sorted a few things out, made everyone stop and take notice. Though sure as shit if he had, he would have had to take on most of the team as well. Nick would have been in there in a heartbeat. And Keith and Richie had never met a brawl they wouldn’t fight (those two being even bigger dickheads than Jack and Eddy, especially when they’d had a skinful – Harry still had the scar on his chin to show for their Rivalry Round celebrations), not to mention the rest of the coaching staff. Then he’d be saddled with a disciplinary suspension – beating up the coach coming under the banner of “insubordination”, the club having a zero tolerance policy when it came to players assaulting their office-bearers – so he could see it was always going to be more trouble that it was worth. Smarter just to look the other way and play on.

  But Harry keeps that to himself. “Yes, Father,” he answers as he is issued his penance, and then he ruminates all the way home.

  He isn’t even sure what the problem really is. If there is a problem. And if it wouldn’t be easier to just cut to the chase and issue a blanket apology to everyone who was there. Though what would he be excusing himself for? A lapse in judgement, would that cover it? No, he knows that won’t do. People are rarely satisfied with such abbreviations; they greatly prefer the grisly details laid out for comprehensive public dissection, something to get their teeth sunk into. The situation might have felt less fraught if he’d been clearer about it himself, what it was that he had found so unsavoury, why he’d felt the need to behave as he had (then and since then), instead of struggling with this overwhelming sense of failure and regret, it being so unlike him to get “caught inside” (even when he was surfing, he rarely got trapped within the sets). Everything had been on the level. Certainly he hadn’t done anything wrong. Technically, nobody had done anything wrong. Or had they? And if so, was his reaction a sign that he should feel proud? Hadn’t he declared something about his capacity? Shown them something of himself. Too much though, or maybe not enough? So hard to gauge. That being the sticking point with his brother, he is sure of it (Matt begrudgingly returning his trophy to him the following day, Harry loath to touch it), why Matt gives him the third degree, Matt usually being the one to lead the charge, especially at work, though not sure what one would call it in this case.

  It wasn’t as though he’d mulled it over beforehand, it was implausible that he could have, there was nothing to consider. He just went with his gut. A split-second decision, an involuntary response, he was acting purely on instinct, overcome perhaps by the music and the heat. It was only afterwards that he computed the consequences, had some distance on the way his behaviour might have been interpreted by everyone else (the disgusted expressions on the boys’ faces still visible in his mind’s eye – what is wrong with him? – he doesn’t need it spelled out to know they’d happily smack the shit out of him at the first opportunity).

  In the kitchen his mum watches him plonk himself in front of the fruit bowl without so much as a good morning as he reaches for a banana, biting off the stem, the tough fibrous peel no match for his continuing preoccupations. “How was Mass?” asks Diana, not really caring about the service, she’s long given up believing in the promises of organised religion, her ex-husband has seen to that, but the Club encourages the boys to attend, good public relations, they say, and she is happy enough to let her kids play along – one cup is as good as the other – especially if some of that credit is attributed to her productive influence. Credit where credit is due.

  Harry shrugs, takes another bite of the banana. He knows what his mother wants, a report on who he’s seen, which of her friends were there, which ones weren’t, who was sitting with who, anything interesting they might have said or done. Typically he would have entertained her with a few choice guesses at what was being discussed in the confessional – the provisional status of Sally Connolly’s soul a safe bet, having recently abandoned her husband for the very married arms of her youngest’s fourth-grade teacher – but that was before, prior to what he has come to think of as “the day”, the pivot point delineating time as belonging to then and now, a marker after which everything changed, the old rules no longer applying. Now he doesn’t have the inclination for those kinds of frivolities, as though to go along is to be complicit in some aspect of the same game, a game in which he doesn’t want to participate. It irritates him that his mother even asks, most of the time telling him to save the details for his dad, that she doesn’t want to know, preferring to keep her head in the sand – I’m over it, a standard refrain. She doesn’t really care now either, he knows that too, aside from the fact that he is reluctant to divulge anything, to pander to her curiosity. “It was the same,” he garbles, his mouth still full of banana, “exactly the fucking same.” Thinking of the crowded anteroom of smokers and gossipers, two-thirds of the congregation, the women like slutty mourners in their black lace and short synthetic skirts, the men more interested in that parade of push-up bras and hair extensions than anything Father Murphy had to say about grace and salvation.

  Diana stops scanning the newspaper and turns to him. “Pardon me? What did you say?”

  Harry feels the sea stir inside him. He briefly closes his eyes, a breakwater against the rushing swell at high tide as the ocean strains for the shore, the image of the girl tumbling then dissolving as a sandcastle might beneath an oncoming wave, as his mother starts again, berating him about his language and everything else. “That’s very nice, Harry. Very nice. A lovely way to speak to your mother. Is that how you talk to Father Murphy? Do you talk like that in church? I don’t know who’s worse, you or your father.”

  “What do you care? It’s not like anyone’s paying attention. No one gives a shit about that stuff.”

  “Is that so, mister? I think you’ll find plenty of people are paying attention. Not that your father can ever be counted on to point these things out to you.”

  “At least Dad goes to church.”

  Diana brushes it off. “Now you’re being ridiculous.”

  The phone rings. “That’ll be your girlfriend,” says his mother.

  “Very funny,” says Harry, but he makes no motion to move.

  The two of them sit staring at each other, waiting for the ringing to stop. They’ve been playing this game for days now. The home phone ringing off the hook, Harry refusing to answer it, refusing to take any of his calls. Not from his coach, not from his friends, not even a long-distance one from his brother. “Maybe I should answer it,” says Diana. “Have a bit of a chinwag. Tell whoever it is a thing or two about what goes on around here.” She leans towards the phone, thinking it might goad him into snatching it from her, a dramatic confrontation that will trigger a watershed moment between them, but it doesn’t have any effect, Harry continuing to hold her gaze, his eyes slightly off-focus.

  “Look, are you avoiding somebody or something?” says his mother, trying a different tack. “Are you in some kind of trouble? You can talk to me. Tell me what’s going on.”

  But where to start? Harry can’t see a way to make sense of it for her, to describe what he is feeling, isn’t clear that there is anything to describe, beyond what she already knows, that he is agitated, having trouble sleeping. Certainly there are the events themselves, facts are facts, but they are none of her business (what happens at Sportsman’s Night stays at Sportsman’s Night). And if they are none of her business then none of the other stuff is her business either, not the rage or fury or resentment or insanity of it all – is it his fault? – not understanding why he doesn’t want the same things as the other guys (is it proof that he doesn’t have the goods, why he’s taken one liberty over another?), is second-guessing his primary inclinations.


  It isn’t something he ever imagined himself doing, dressing up like that for work, not something he equated with the job, though he probably should have. He’d watched his father do it often enough, for the Brownlow, for the Best & Fairest dinner, for Sportsman’s Night. Showering, shaving, trimming his nose hair, and then dousing himself in aftershave, the smell lingering like an arsonist’s accelerant, still detectable in the house for hours after he’d left. It had always been bittersweet, that ritual, attending his father’s preening for the outside world, the intricacies of his process of self-improvement, his elaborate protocols for separating himself from them; the young Harry mimicking his moves at the vanity mirror, soaping up his face then employing a toothbrush instead of a razor, peering under his nostrils for overlooked bristles, all the while knowing that his mother was already locked and loaded with her latest grievances, ready to be unleashed the moment his dad returned. Or, if his parents went out together, that they’d be arguing long before they got home. Either way, keeping it up until the early hours of the morning, his mother looking especially ragged the following day, a wicked hangover to match her deathly complexion. “Why don’t you go outside and play?” she’d say, her head in a fog of cigarette smoke.

  It wasn’t a suggestion.

  Why don’t you go outside and play.

  He and his brother still said it now when they were trying to get on each other’s nerves.

  What is clear to him, what has always been clear to him, is that “play” is all he has ever wanted to do. It has never been about anything else. Not the attention nor the accolades, the false gods of statistics and popularity contests (winning the Best & Fairest three years running, tallying his weekly Brownlow votes, narcissistic displays of showmanship); his is an unvarnished vocation. Pure. Unbred. He lives and breathes football.

  That was the very point Laurie drove home when they first discussed his recruitment, that joining the team was his road to freedom, his opportunity to fulfil that ambition. “It’s time for you to put football front and centre. No more fitting it in around school; training late on Wednesday nights, your parents driving you to the game on the weekend. Those bush leagues aren’t serious,” he said. “They don’t have the stuff. Not like you. You’re better than that. You know that. It’s time to take your game to the next level.”