The Family Men Page 3

  It sounded like something he wanted to hear.

  He was recruited under the father-son rule, a policy that allowed clubs to select the sons of past players who have made a major contribution to the team, but they would have wanted him anyway, Laurie said. It was only a matter of time before they came after him. His was a natural talent. He could have been anybody’s kid.

  His mother looks at him, her brown eyes boring into his skull, an expression he recognises from way back, invariably paired with some remark about him being so inscrutable it makes it impossible for people to get to know him (or if she’s had a couple of white wines then it might be tales from his infancy, particularly the one about how as a small baby he preferred to sulk by himself than have her comfort him).

  “I don’t understand what’s going on in your head, that’s all,” she says, part question, part exclamation, frustrated by this change in his demeanour, wanting to get to the bottom of it, the withdrawal, why her usually stubborn yet polite offspring has overnight transformed into this—

  She bites her lip because she doesn’t know what to call it, but whatever it is she’s had enough of it.

  “No one’s in any trouble,” he finally says, struggling to sound convincing. “I just don’t have anything to say to anybody right now. I need some time alone.” He might have added something about his inability to tolerate even the idea of his teammates, how everything is rearranged inside of him so that nothing about what he thinks or feels is certain anymore, that he can pin nothing down, but that would have led to an entirely different conversation, and he definitely isn’t up for that.

  The phone rings again. Diana looks to him. “Go on, pick it up.”

  “You get it,” he tells her.

  “Why should I answer it?”

  “Alright. Don’t.”

  She lets it ring ten times before relenting, hoping that he’ll beat her to it, but right when she thinks she has him broken, he reaches for another banana. She watches him slowly peel it down to the nub as she goes through the motions – hello, how are you, yes, everything’s fine thanks – then holds the phone out in his direction, announcing it is Laurie again.

  Harry pauses a minute to finish his mouthful before taking the phone from her. He stares at the mouthpiece as he swallows the fruit, then presses the “off” button on the handset and rocks back in his chair.

  Diana’s face is flushed. She looks like she might slap him. Do it, he thinks. Do it. Relishing the prospect of being put in his place like that, that his mother might lose control, really let him have it. But she doesn’t, she never does (not like that, not with them). She just continues to berate him for being unrealistic – “There’s always a lull in the off-season, you know that, what do you want me to say? This too shall pass? I thought my children would be more resilient” – lamenting his refusal to adapt.

  “Give me an example,” Harry demands, when she suggests he is behaving strangely, that his entire demeanour is uncharacteristically hostile, pugilistic.

  “What are you talking about, an example?” she says, gesturing at him slumped at the table behind a pile of blackening banana skins. “You, here, now, this is an example. You’re not a child anymore, Harry. It’s no way to live,” she insists, reminding him that he always has a choice, lest she be held responsible somehow for appearing to have allowed it, to have inadvertently given her permission for the business to devour him, to have eaten him alive. Just as it did his father (and so many before and since), at first quickly, and then slowly, until that was all that was left of the man, her first husband, her only husband, the husk of a career supported by a tired aging body governed by a mind too cosseted to cope with failure. “You’ve got to find a way forward, to be comfortable with who you are. You can’t let football dictate everything. You see that, don’t you? That you’ve got to have a plan. Otherwise, where will you be in ten years? At the pub? Crying into a beer that someone else has paid for? There’s only so long a player’s career can last. You’ve got to keep an eye on the morning after, take a long-term view, think about tomorrow,” she repeats as though it is a chorus from a song (now that is helpful advice, not). Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. The words ring in his head until he is so sick of hearing them he deliberately slams the door behind him when he leaves.

  Fucking bitch. He doesn’t need it right now. He doesn’t fucking need it. He takes off in the direction of the oval, at first walking, but quickly breaking into a run, the sky a pale shade of slate grey as though it wants to rain but can’t.

  That is the way the weather has been lately, the seasons distorted approximations of themselves that have got everyone into a tizz about heat and water levels and the future of the planet. Not in such a tizz that they do anything differently, mind you. Just enough to give themselves a headache. At the Club they started a recycling drive, installing three different coloured bins in the change rooms with transparent panels down the sides so you could see what was being put in them (rubbish, paper, bottles and cans), “Reuse Reduce Recycle”, the sticker said. A red rag to a bull. Within twenty-four hours the garbage had been stuffed with a truckload of condoms – all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy! – a photograph of the prophylactic wrappers finding its way to page one of the Herald Sun, sending Ted Parker, the Club president, into a tailspin, instructing Laurie to burn the offending articles immediately, which Laurie did, all players in mandatory attendance out the back beside the dumpsters (with the exception of Jack, sequestered at home, buried deep in the doghouse, taking a blow on Club orders), sending a great plume of black smoke against the muted sky. Matt reckoned it would have been visible as far away as Whittlesea.

  Jack made it his business getting in people’s faces, but especially the Fureys’. Pulling out of a pack at Harry’s first training camp, telling him, “I’ve got my eye on you, Nipper,” then a knee in the groin just to teach him a lesson, how to be a man; the two dynasties having long been at each other, an agonistic species constantly asserting how it’s done.

  “Ignore him,” said Matt, about as useful as putting Tony Liberatore in the ruck. Not that Harry needed to be told. That Jack was testing him was implicit. Less clear was how to make him stop.

  Harry runs until his lungs give out, the burning forcing his pace to a crawl until he can catch his breath. He’s never been one to pace himself, his style more the mad dash to the finish line, the late leg scramble, rather than the heel-to-toe chain of successive possessions – driving the coaching staff crazy (no “I” in team, etc., another of Laurie’s maxims, interchangeable with make it happen and sometimes less is more).

  A lack of faith, Father Murphy calls it. A crisis of confidence, whatever that means. Even his teachers used to tell him to exercise more control. Be harder for longer.

  Harry knows what they want from him, recognises the discipline of the marathon runner over the sprinter, eking out that energy over a longer haul, but he doesn’t understand why it is such a big deal. He isn’t greedy or ostentatious. His isn’t a hoarding mentality. For him it is more like swimming in a chlorinated pool without goggles. He knows vaguely where he is heading; it is simply a question of waiting for the right moment then taking a deep enough breath and pushing off until he touches the other side.

  *

  The girl ran up the platform just as the City train pulled in to the station. She was moving so quickly she nearly lost hold of her bag as she lunged for the carriage door, one strap slipping perilously off her shoulder as she attempted to reach for the handle before the train had fully stopped. At their last lesson Greta (her contact, the woman who’d recruited her) had warned her not to be late, the manager didn’t like it, and now she wouldn’t be, thank God. She was nervous enough already without having to incur the anticipated wrath of an as yet unseen boss.

  The rest of her gear was well concealed in her overnight bag beneath her nightie and hair dryer. It was the kind of scam she and Cassie often pulled, covering for each other when alibis were required or confirmations n
eeded to be given about time and place and who exactly would be going with them and to where, her mother having subjected her plans to the most cursory of examinations (nearly anything to sanction her leave pass for the evening, would forgive nearly any “acceptable” social engagement if it meant she and Ray, the fiancé, could have the house to themselves). Except that this time none of her circle had any idea where she was off to or with whom (they remained completely oblivious of Greta, the association having been kept separate from school life, confined to and around her part-time job). The girl was well aware that her mum would have a fit if she got wind of this current plan, even travelling on the train by herself being a major deal, men being on the lookout for girls like her, girls just like her, young, wide-eyed and alone, luring them with extravagant promises, before molesting them in some grisly basement or other then dumping them unceremoniously after slitting their nascent throats.

  She touched her hand to her neck. A light perspiration dampened her skin as her pulse quickened, the anticipation that had been building for weeks peaking now that the end of football season was finally here. She was strangely cognisant that the train was a portal between two worlds, acting as a bridge of sorts between her old life, the one she had known so far (claustrophobic, suburban, dull) and this new one (cosmopolitan, exciting, cool), it being up to her whether or not she’d ever go back, the reality being that if she didn’t make the effort to return, there was no natural way home, that from this point forward she could slip off the grid, lose herself in another realm altogether, and that she held the power to do this, that she was old enough finally to make herself disappear (if not literally driving away then perhaps securing a passage on the Indian Pacific, say, then finding a job in the west). The immensity of that fact gave her a moment’s pause, knowing she was capable of anything, a feeling that she told herself was still excitement, still a happy feeling, dispatching the less seemly implications of the insight (the isolation, the loneliness, the feelings of those left behind) in a mother-like sigh as she glanced at her smudged reflection in the carriage window, scratched and penned as it was with the hastily scrawled graffiti of other teens’ snatched attempts at garbled self-expression. Bazza woz here. Mica hearts Steve. Boyz rule! And diagonally across the top of them all in poorly executed 3D lettering, MEGAN IS A SLUT in thick red ink.

  The train hurtled on, the skyline closing from station to station, transporting her into the waiting unknown.

  *

  As Sundays go, it is pretty quiet. Harry jogs along, skirting rubbish bins and kicking at the gravel, doing his best to lose himself in the activity, one foot in front of the other, like at training, the street a coastal idyll of gently swishing gums and chatty parrots, most of the young children still corralled inside for lunch as he fights the impulse to throw rocks through the windows of the quiet houses, the domestic lull setting off a torrent inside of him.

  Again he asks himself how one day can look so different from the next. He doesn’t understand. His brain feeling like a shaken Etch A Sketch. Rattly. Incomplete. He can hear his dad. Bloody women. Back in the day, his explanation for everything. That and needing a drink. Not that it is the girl’s fault. Harry can’t hold her responsible for his state of mind, however much he might like to blame her for it, the world feeling like it is closing in around him, getting smaller and smaller as he tries to shut himself off from everything she’s touched, automatically ruling out possibilities as he attempts to control the spread, tying off the affected area as one might tourniquet a leg after a snakebite. No, he won’t shake hands with boosters at the Members’ Social. No, he won’t go on the footy trip. No, he definitely isn’t checking his email. Doesn’t want to know what is being said about him online. All he wants is for everything to go back to the way it was before. Set. Straightforward. Family was family. The team was the team. Each day had its own rhythm and routine. If he played well he was happy, if he didn’t, he wasn’t. He didn’t have to think about what it all meant or where he fitted in or what it was that he thought that he wanted. He didn’t have to think about changing anything. He hates uncertainty. His whole life has been about following in other people’s footsteps, sticking to a well-trodden path. He’s spent so much time trying to march in lockstep, the last thing he covets now is being forced to determine his own direction.

  At the oval, galahs congregate on the cricket pitch, picking over the newly sown grass seeds, their coarse screeching carrying across the field, competing with the low hum of the cars from the main road. He circles the pitch slowly, watching the way the birds stick closely to one another, never straying far from their flock.

  A beat-up old kombi van burns past the ground, its speakers blaring. He looks to the galahs, expecting the flock to alight, a great spray of pink and grey feathers shot against the pastel sky, but the birds scarcely look up.

  Complacent bastards, he thinks. He finishes tying his laces then gets up and makes directly for them, running hard right down the centre of the pitch.

  He keeps running, past the primary school, past the units where the paddock used to be, and then instinctively turns left in the direction of Dean’s. That’s what he needs, the easy company of an old friend. Someone he’s known his entire life. And he’s known Dean for as long as he can remember. They went to pre-school together. His mother has pictures of them as kids sharing a bath, he in plastic sunglasses, Dean wearing his “frog” shower cap. Dean looked like a cockhead even then. The same lopsided grin. But that is a person you don’t have to explain things to. Like why your phone is off or what you’re doing with your life. Or the reason you don’t want to talk to your coach. And why you don’t care if it pisses him off. Laurie is a big boy. He’ll get over it.

  Dean’s house is at the top of the road. As Harry slugs his way up the rise he doesn’t immediately notice the song, his thoughts still tangled up with his confusion, the argument with his mother. He is supposed to be on holidays, isn’t he? What difference does it make how he spends his time? But as he turns into the street the music catches up to him again, the insistent up-tempo beat, thrumming, never far away now, persistently refusing to let him put the incident out of his mind.

  Loosen up my buttons, baby … like the singer is asking for a favour.

  The venue had been so close they could have walked there from the hotel, a large fancy establishment at the top end of the city with champagne in the minibar and thick white robes hanging on hooks inside the bathrooms. Harry and Matt had adjoining rooms, each with a king-size bed, a suite if they’d wanted it to be, separated by a locked connecting door.

  Harry tried it a couple of times to be sure, then got his kit off and lay down on the floor (a wheat-coloured short-pile, soft under his skin), too late realising he hadn’t drawn the curtains, the flicker of fluorescent-lit office windows visible even from his supine position. The ceiling was off-white with a texturised finish and copper fire sprinklers. He briefly entertained the fantasy of setting them off, of igniting a match beneath the smoke alarm and evacuating the building, envisioning the damp huddle of people in partial undress congregated on the footpath below, the disappointed actors of who knows how many trysts.

  His tuxedo was sheathed in a plastic suit bag hanging in the empty wardrobe. He felt like an imposter as he slipped it on, the sleeves a margin too short, the legs a fraction too long. “We can have it adjusted,” Michelle had suggested, she could put in a word and it would be ready that same afternoon, but with a bird in the hand, Diana demurred (she didn’t like to gamble on other people’s largesse), insisted no one would be able to tell.

  He scanned the refrigerator – Toblerone, pretzels, juice, wine, spirits – contemplated a shot of whiskey for courage, then slipped an unopened Jack Daniel’s miniature in his pocket.

  Time called on second thoughts.

  Matt banged on the wall when he was ready to go. Harry took one more look at himself, checked the position of his tie, then headed out. They met in the brightly carpeted hallway, game faces on, m
ore acquaintances than relatives, their only obvious familial commonality the infamous pedigree of their shared last name.

  But you keep fronting …

  “Shut up,” he says to the quiet road, briefly closing his eyes, curtains drawn against a dreary sun, meaning, leave me alone, go away, stop. Illogical, closing one’s eyes to hush an imaginary sound; wouldn’t covering one’s ears make more sense? Hear no evil. Or is the seeing part and parcel of the hearing, all dimensions of the same memory? A single moment that has stripped him of his capacity for calm, his world having become a catastrophe of noise in that fraction of space in between the before and after. Why, why, why, why, what? Everything a question now, everything conditional. Prior to that night he hadn’t spent too much time thinking about what he was thinking: he’d have an idea or not, he’d act on it or not. There was none of this friction, this battling within himself for a comfortable point of view – did he do the right thing, did he have any choice, what other options were available to him? – a commotion of ideas jockeying for prime position.

  He feels light-headed. Almost there, he can barely catch his breath.

  Half time in the changing rooms at the MCG, the whiteboard covered in a mess of instructions about percentages and marking contests, clearance rates and hard ball gets. “Think about your decisions and choices,” instructed Laurie, drawing an arrow between teamwork and execution, praising them for pulling together to close down the opposition’s space, building momentum, not letting the home side play their game.