The Family Men Read online

  Laurie calls the house again. This time he doesn’t bother leaving a message, he just says his name and hangs up. Matt calls too, from LA. Doesn’t say his name but of course Harry knows immediately who it is, can imagine the palm trees visible outside his hotel window, the neon bright cocktail sweating in his other hand. “Call Laurie, you prick. He knows you were home this morning. He saw your car. For fuck’s sake, if he messages me one more time I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ve already told him to leave me out of it. I’m not your fucking keeper. Get your shit together. You’re embarrassing me.”

  So butt out then, Harry would like to say. But why bother? His brother has always done whatever he likes, whenever he likes. Which often as not involves telling Harry what to do. Or telling him what he thinks others want him to do. Anticipating messages from the coaching staff, as though he has some special insight into the workings of his younger brother’s sensitive soul, the only person who can effectively motivate him – “Jim’s going to tell you to pick up your defensive pressure in the forward half” – the other boys getting good mileage out of it. “Can’t think for yourself, Squeak?”

  “Need your brother to give you a helping hand?”

  “No, that part he can manage,” says Nick. “Right, Goodfa? No trouble putting the elbows to work.” The lads making plenty of sport out of it, so that next time Matt comes within spitting distance, Harry snaps: “Do you want to play or do you want to coach?” Everyone knowing the best coaches are often average on the ground.

  Not that Matt gives a stuff. “I don’t care if you’ve got your period, change your tampon and get on with it.”

  Harry thinks he detects the wail of a police siren in the background, the distant drone of authority. His brother’s soundtrack? Or is that Laurie’s?

  “Screw you both,” he mutters.

  He deletes the message without a second thought.

  Harry assumed it would have been easier with most of the boys out of town but it doesn’t make any difference. He still expects to see them everywhere, catches himself planning his movements, devising ways to avoid running into them when he goes out.

  Rosie is hankering for a thickshake. At McDonald’s, the drive-thru line snakes all the way back to the corner. “Let’s get out of here,” he says, dreading the idea of inching along for another twenty minutes, plenty of time for fellow punters to figure out who is behind the wheel and then heaven knows what. But Rosie is adamant.

  When they finally pull up to the order station her housemate, Katia, is behind the microphone.

  Rosie leans across to say hello.

  “Who’s your date?” asks the voice, knowing damn well.

  As Rosie makes the introductions, Harry catches a whiff of her BO, a sharp acrid smell mingled with the old-lady scent of lavender talcum powder. “What do you want to eat?” she asks him as she continues to peer up at the microphone, her head hovering above his lap as she orders.

  During the season it isn’t uncommon for him to devour two or three hamburgers in one sitting, especially before a game, but now it is the last thing he feels like, just as footy is the last thing he feels like along with anything remotely related to it, such as contracts or the other players or the women who are drawn to them. “I don’t know, some fries,” he says, partly to appease her, anything so they can move along.

  “Fries?” she repeats. “That’s all you want?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Did you get that?” she says in the direction of her friend. And then back to him. “You’re a barrel of laughs.”

  They drive to the Esplanade and eat staring at the swell, Rosie winding down the window but quickly raising it again as seagulls descend on the car, lured by the aroma of hot chips. “Careful,” he says, despite himself, as one dogged bird lunges at the grease-smudged glass. Could it happen? Could they join together and drag her from the vehicle? He allows himself the fantasy, her skirt billowing about her hips, plump legs kicking at the sky as her body is transported aloft by a mass of marauding wildlife.

  Rosie is unperturbed, diving into her nuggets with the enthusiasm of a fox raiding a poultry coop. “Look at this one,” she says, holding up one of the pieces.

  “What?” he says, thinking maybe she’s found one resembling the face of Jesus or Robert DiPierdomenico, that distinctive moustache (his mother is always looking at crap like that on eBay), but it is nothing as illustrious.

  “It looks like an egg,” she says, amused at the irony. “Which came first, the chicken or the nugget?”

  Which came first, the air or your head? he thinks, knowing it is mean, puerile, the stupidity making him grin. “I don’t know,” he says, glad for once for the distracting thrum of his mobile, repulsed by the idea that she might think they have shared a joke, that they have something, however small, in common. He is glad and then he isn’t.

  It is Margo trawling for gossip. “Do a girl a favour, give me something. It’s a slow news week.”

  “What kind of gossip?”

  “Let’s start with Sportsman’s Night. Jack and Eddy are back, they suggested I talk to you.”

  Rosie, her mouth full of chicken nuggets, is wiggling her thin pencilled eyebrows, a wordless attempt at asking who it is.

  “Why? What did they say? I told you there is nothing.”

  “Come on Harry, this isn’t my first rodeo. Why won’t you tell me what happened? They always haze the rookies. Club initiation. Whatever they call it. I know there would have been a strip show, but I’m getting the impression there was something else. What did Jack mean by saying they had to ‘blood’ you? In my notes I’ve got, quote, ‘We had to blood the young fella,’ end quote.”

  Those motherfuckers. He remembers stepping off the lift that night smack into the middle of a Probus tour group on their way out to dinner, thinking maybe he should just keep going, home, right through the middle of them – the shortest path between him and the street – the muted atmosphere of artificial lighting and mellow muzak already getting under his skin. He’d wanted to be outside, to breathe fresh air, but Matt grabbed his arm before he could get any purchase on the idea, pulling him back like he was a wayward child on a tear at the supermarket. “Steady on. The taxis are this way.”

  “But it’s just around the corner.”

  “You’re not walking. We’re not walking.”

  The taxis were lined up next to the fountain, barely twenty metres from the exit. Even so, the doorman summoned one with his whistle. “Have a good evening, sirs,” he said, holding the door for them.

  The vehicle smelled of air freshener, a small sachet swinging from the rear-view mirror, the same overwhelming floral scent as in the hotel, or so it seemed to Harry, wondering how the driver could spend an entire shift in the car without wanting to throw up.

  Margo presses him again but Harry shakes his head. “No. It’s not true. They’re just fucking with you. You know what Jack and Eddy are like. They’re probably still stoned on something they took in Phuket. Anyway, I’ll have to ring you back. I can’t talk.”

  “Sure you can. Come on. Did they make you dance with the girls? Did they treat you to a special lap dance?”

  “No, really. I can’t.”

  “Don’t brush me off, Harry. We’re mates. There must be something.”

  “Bye, Maggie.”

  “Who’s Maggie?” says Rosie, the second he is off the phone.

  “Mind your own business, okay, Big Ears?”

  “I was only asking. There’s no need to be so shirty.”

  Rosie is fond of aphorisms. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. What goes around comes around. Actions speak louder than words. “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me,” she adds.

  “Good. Drop it then, alright?”

  In geometry, an oval or ovoid comes from the Latin word ovum, meaning “egg”. Off the top of his head he can list the basic properties of ovals – smooth, closed curves that don’t self-intersect, with at lea
st one axis of symmetry. It is one of those factoids he picked up at school (science), that and a couple of useless grammar rules (English) – “I before E except after C” (so much for “science”). No wonder he can’t spell.

  A football oval, like the ball itself, has two axes of symmetry.

  “Turn around,” he says to Rosie, forcing her cheek against the glass. “I want to try something.” He puts his left index finger against her shoulder blade and attempts to trace the outline of a playing field in a single gesture, a complete rotation without lifting his hand before returning to the start point. As he presses his fingers into Rosie’s back, he wonders if perhaps this entire episode hasn’t been a set-up designed to land him in a shit sandwich. Jack makes no secret of his enmity for the Fureys, that’s what happens when you’re always cast as second best, but to drop him in it like this – had to blood the young fella – what an arsehole. Though what did Harry expect? Good blokes, my arse. Ted could stick that in a pipe and smoke it. Jack was a fucker. So was Eddy. He didn’t care if they were always first to volunteer for the Good Friday Appeal. There was “giving back” and then there was giving something back. The real question was, had he said enough to make Margo go away?

  “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.

  Penitential Rite, Roman Catholic Mass

  I confess to almighty God

  and
to you, my brothers and sisters

  that I have greatly sinned

  in my thoughts and in my words

  in what I have done and in what I have failed to do

  through my fault, through my fault

  through my most grievous fault;

  therefore I ask blessed Mary, ever-virgin

  all the angels and saints

  and you, my brothers and sisters

  to pray for me to the Lord our God.

  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.”