Minimum of Two Page 9

  ‘Dave and Debbie don’t have kids,’ Rachel said. ‘They wouldn’t have to think about it. It’s not their fault.’

  ‘Should have kept an eye —’

  ‘Oh, leave off, Jerra.’

  ‘Well, you’d think —’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It just shouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘Yeah, well lots of things happen that should never happen.’

  The look he got from her sent him to the back of the room where light filtered down clean from a skylight. He stood there, thinking of something to say.

  ‘Skylight’d save you money, Doc.’

  The doctor looked at him, brow askew, and went back to the business of helping Sam vomit. ‘There’s no sign of anything,’ he said. ‘Probably just had it on his lips.’

  ‘Christ.’

  Rachel began packing as soon as they got back to the beach house.

  ‘It’s not working out,’ she said.

  Jerra could not fathom her control.

  ‘No, it’s a disaster, eh.’

  She fell on the bed and hid her face from him.

  Jerra went outside and watched crickets leap out of the lawn to escape Sam’s trundling manoeuvres on the plastic trike.

  On the highway heading back, he leans across to where she sits rigid at the wheel.

  ‘Look —’

  ‘Don’t, you’ll kill me.’

  He opens his mouth again but she cuts him off.

  ‘There’s too much on my plate, Jerra. I can’t know about it, I can’t listen to you tell me how sorry you are or aren’t. I have to pass these exams. There’s no way I can live if I fail them. I have to not go mad. Okay, melodrama, violins, I know.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘It happens, Jerra.’

  ‘It’s over, it didn’t even start.’

  Sam sleeps between them, drooling and awry in his little seat.

  A hard, tiny sound comes out of Rachel’s throat. She pulls over and begins to take in long breaths.

  ‘Look, I can’t go home, just now,’ she says.

  ‘Wanna go back?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Want me to drive?’

  She shakes her head. ‘I need to be with someone. Away.’

  Jerra sits. The blue, dry land goes away from him in all directions. He sighs. ‘Mum and Dad are down at the Cut. You mean them, don’t you?’

  She starts the car.

  ‘It’s a hell of drive from here,’ he says.

  She gets into top gear and good posture and he sits back with his eyes closed.

  II

  It was dark when they rolled into the peppermint clearing, and in front of the timber cabin a fire sent sprays of sparks into the night. The smells of rivermud and peppermint and boiling crabs met them as they got out, and Sam finally stopped crying.

  ‘It’s Jerra, Tom!’

  The silhouette of Jerra’s mother came from behind the steaming old copper and met them in the dark.

  ‘Spare a bed?’ he asked as she smote him with kisses.

  His mother turned and bellowed back into the house. ‘They’re staying, Tom! Put some beer in the fridge! You’ve cut yourself. And Oh!’ She gathered Sam up and touched his tousled hair which seemed to glow in the dark. ‘What brings you down here to your old Granma, Sam?’

  ‘Disaster,’ said Rachel.

  ‘Unrelieved misfortune,’ Jerra said, and to his surprise, they each managed a laugh. Backlit in the doorway, he saw the reduced outline of his father. He looked worse.

  Piles of rivercrabs, red and steaming, covered the table spread with newspapers and battered china plates and bowls of brown vinegar. There was fresh white bread, mustard, beer and chili sauce, and as they ate and broke and sucked, dunked, smeared, cursed, Jerra watched as though he were not quite present. On Rachel’s knee, a revived Sam sucked the sweet, white flesh from crablegs. He reared and laughed his little screech at the sight of his grandfather with a claw on his nose like a clothespeg. The old man looked happy, even though the cancer had him for good now. Jerra watched his mother. Her tan made her leathery and easy to look at. She had broadened these past years and she seemed to have grown stronger. She took more of every kind of space. Right there in her balding armchair at table, she looked happily immoveable and he was filled with affection for her. He watched them all around this florid mess of crabs, the room full of eating noise and baby talk. His family, his blood. Oh, God it burned fierce in him tonight, the desire to serve to protect to be loyal unto death. No room for irony tonight, and the feeling grew in him, fattened and rose like bread in his chest until he threw down his fork and left the table.

  Out in the smoky dark he found the outhouse and locked himself in and waited. Sooner or later, he told himself, in a while it won’t seem so important. Perspective. Irony. Sense. But he waited in vain.

  Late in the night, when the others were asleep inside, Jerra played his father a song on the guitar. The lamp hissed. Mosquitoes pressed the wire all around the verandah. There was a melancholic pleasure in picking out the simple melody. He felt the strings emboss his fingertips, the vibration against his chest. He picked clumsily, handicapped by the gauze on his finger.

  ‘What’ll you do when you get famous?’ his father asked, pulling a blanket over his knees in the silence that remained.

  ‘I’ll never get famous, Dad. I just wanna get old.’

  ‘Yeah, boy, so did I.’

  Jerra bit.

  ‘Would you leave Perth?’ his father said without pause.

  ‘Oh, I’d miss the sun.’

  ‘There’s sun all over the world, they tell me.’

  Jerra laughed. Always the same game. When Jerra gets famous. He wondered whether it was a way for the old man to stave off disappointment.

  ‘You weren’t moping about me out there, were you?’

  He looked into his father’s dark, dry eyes and saw something new.

  ‘I was chucking up. Must’ve eaten something.’

  ‘I taught you never to lie.’

  Jerra found a chord and sang.

  ‘It’s a sin to tell a lie . . .’

  The old man looked away out into the dark and Jerra felt the chord die against his chest.

  ‘No, not about you, Dad. I can’t even believe that yet. No, it won’t beat you. You won’t die.’ He rested his chin against the smooth wood of the sound box. ‘No. I s’pose it sounds weird, but in there tonight I felt sort of . . . unworthy.’

  ‘Was it us?’

  ‘Me.’ Jerra tried to laugh. ‘Jesus, it’s guilt!’ Any moment now he was going to blurt it all out like a child. He ached to confess every kind of betrayal.

  ‘Things you don’t know about.’

  ‘Rachel and Sam. You belong to them.’

  ‘Sometimes I feel like pissing off like I used to. I haven’t measured up, have I?’

  ‘You’ve done orright, Jerra. You grew up through some rough business. You’re not too proud yet to be guilty. And you’ve had your losses.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jerra said, full of bitterness. ‘I’ve seen a few buried.’

  ‘You worry about the living. Like your mother says: don’t be bitter, be better.’

  ‘Want me to take you out in the boat tomorrow?’

  ‘What – for a last ride?’

  ‘Geez, Dad,’ he winced, ‘be better, for Godsake!’

  ‘Play “Danny Boy”.’

  Jerra picked it out, best he could.

  When his father got up to go in to bed a while later, he kissed Jerra’s brow and touched the guitar.

  ‘When a bloke finds out how long he’s got left, he knows there’s more to it, son. Stupid thing is, there’s always been more.’

  Alone, Jerra listened to the mosquitoes. He sat in his father’s reading chair. Frogs began to change pitch. A water-bird slapped away somewhere out on the estuary. He fidgeted with the small pile of books on the chair-arm. Beneath a volume of bush ballads he found The Book of Common Prayer and he lifted it in surp
rise.

  Morning light lay on the water. The boat turned at anchor. In the bow, the old man sat mixing pollard. Jerra saw the lines in his face and knew he was in pain.

  ‘Takes you back.’

  His father scattered moist grains across the water. Jerra cast a line out and heard the sinker pop the surface.

  ‘Remember the pelican caught out here in the net? Years ago.’

  The old man shook his head. His face was hard-set.

  ‘There were things I wanted to say that day, Dad.’

  ‘Boy. I need to lie down.’

  Jerra felt the chill on his father’s face. ‘I’ll take you back.’

  As he hauled anchor rope across the gunwhale, the boat turned lamely in whatever direction resistance lay.

  In the twilight before dark, Jerra and Rachel left Sam with his grandparents and went walking. The air was warm but the mosquitoes were not out yet and sounds of the bush were muted. They walked on a soft clay path between blackbutts. Bracken rose at the base of the trees. The ground felt damp and sunken. When the path was wide enough they walked abreast. In the narrow sections Jerra took the lead and held out a hand to fend off spiderwebs. For a long time neither spoke. Jerra felt the callouses on his fingertips. They tasted brassy in his mouth. He looked at the ugly sutures in his index finger.

  ‘I s’pose your mum and dad walk down here a lot.’

  ‘Used to. Mum still does, I s’pose.’

  ‘I like her. I like them both.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘We could turn out like that if we tried.’

  Like what, he thought. Old and dying? But he checked himself. Try. Be better not bitter.

  ‘Yeah I guess there’s worse ways to turn out.’

  ‘How is it with your dad?’

  ‘We talked.’

  ‘Did you know he prays?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘He told me. He was frightened to tell you. You must have jumped down his throat when you were younger.’

  Jerra felt bracken sliding across his flanks. He smelt her near him. He reached and touched her and they stopped walking.

  ‘Yeah. I did. I didn’t understand.’

  ‘What about now. Do you understand now?’

  ‘Not really. Maybe you need to be dying to understand.’

  ‘Your dad said we were always dying. He’s pretty wise, in his way.’

  ‘Geez, you two are thick as thieves.’ He felt her flesh cool beneath his palms. ‘I’m not dying. I’m living.’

  Halfway across the distance between them as he leant out to kiss her, the undergrowth exploded and shadows showered up in every direction.

  He cried out in fear.

  ‘Quail,’ Rachel said.

  In the silence he heard the blood beating at his throat.

  Death Belongs to the Dead, His Father

  Told Him, and Sadness to the Sad

  I

  WHEN JUNKIES CAME into his café to nod and mutter and make cloths of themselves on his tables, The Man knew he was looking upon death itself. But he served them because when he was a boy in Naples he had learnt to walk straight and not look over his shoulder. Death belongs to the dead, his father told him, and sadness to the sad. On this street, far from Naples, there was death, there was sadness, and he did not look over his shoulder. He served the dead, took their money, and walked straight.

  But the street and the café were not without happiness. In the afternoons people sat in the bookshop down the road and gossipped as they flicked through books they could not afford, while their children made their faces hideous against the plate glass to shock passers-by. Old men on the stoops smoked and called to one another in strange tongues. Drunks woke beneath the Moreton Bay figs in the park to discover that death had not claimed them in the night. Taxi drivers double-parked to complain and shake their heads in contentment before the peak hour. And in the evenings, before the café was full, the old pub on the corner was jammed with young people and the roar of music from a band whose guitarist wandered out to play twenty-minute solos to strollers-by. Cars slowed up to listen. People stepped over the long cord that trailed him; they smiled and were confused. Detectives came every night to get him off the street, but they did not beat him up, and when they were gone he would hang out the window to shoot riffs into moving cars.

  During the mornings, though, there was mostly sadness. The street was forlorn and the junkies came into the café, and there were people with hangovers or marriage problems or people who seemed worried about how they looked. It was in the mornings that the Dying Gentleman began to come in.

  Each day the Dying Gentleman sat by the window and looked hungrily out at the passing traffic. He sat with his hat on the table and his brogues flat on the floor, and sometimes a thin beam of winter sun would give his head a tonsure. At first, The Man, who knew a hungry person when he saw one, offered him the breakfast menu, but the newcomer shook his head and asked for a cold glass of milk. His lips barely moved. The Man listened: it was the voice of death. He got the Dying Gentleman his milk and heard the voice of death thank him.

  It soothes my stomach, the Dying Gentleman said. He put a white hand on his belly and moved it across. He had never been handsome, The Man guessed, but you could see he had once been young and vital. He was wasting. It looked like cancer. The Man took his money and did not look over his shoulder.

  But in time, The Man found himself unable to resist the sight of the Dying Gentleman. From behind the coffee machine, he watched surreptitiously. Each morning, the Dying Gentleman came in looking a little more hollow, a shade whiter. The monkish spot the ascending sun made on the top of his head seemed more luminous every day.

  How is the stomach today? he began to ask the Dying Gentleman as he brought his glass of milk. The Dying Gentleman shook his head and drank. He looked as though he was starving, but as though a meal would murder him.

  II

  One evening, a man came running into the café with blood issuing from great wounds in his face. His jacket was torn and a swamp of blood rose from his armpit.

  Someone is after me! he screamed. The Man took him by the bloody collar and put him out on the street and pushed him away along the pavement. He watched him stagger down toward the roar of music and leave a trail of blood. The Man saw him collide with detectives who had arrived to shoo the electric guitarist off the street. When he turned to go back to his café, he saw a thin, dark man holding a cleaver. He had a drooping moustache and he stood near the door, the cleaver at his side. The Man took a breath, walked straight past him and went into the café without looking back.

  III

  As the days became longer, the morning sun lay heavy on the Dying Gentleman who sat by the window with his milk. The light made him ghostly and The Man did not like to look.

  The stomach? he would ask. The Dying Gentleman shook his head and put the hand to the belly. His flesh was translucent. Sad world, The Man said, despite himself. His customer shrugged and looked for a moment as though he might disagree. The Man left him with his milk.

  It was Sunday morning when the Dying Gentleman came in and ordered bacon and eggs and sausages and short black coffee. The hot sun cut the café in half.

  Feeling better? The Man asked.

  Yes, the Dying Gentleman said. He put his hat on the table and straightened the little blue feather in the band, and The Man felt a happy twitch in his chest as he called the order through.

  When he brought the breakfast, he saw the determination in the Dying Gentleman’s features. From behind the coffee machine, he saw him eat all of it – the bacon, the eggs, the sausages, and the short black coffee – before putting his knife and fork down to watch the traffic pass. Then he got up and went to the pay phone by the door. The Man poured coffees and watched him dial. He saw the Gentleman straighten and speak and then return the piece to its cradle. He saw him put his hand to the window. He saw the black hole his mouth made and he got out from behind the counter and caught the
Gentleman before he fell, and the wind escaping his throat was like the gentle sound of passing traffic. The Man felt heat and there was a terrible stench. The Dying Gentleman’s head was on his chest, his jacket was slipping up his arms.

  Junkies nodded in the corner. The sun did not reach them. He looked down into the Gentleman’s face and saw the black hole of his mouth. The darkness of it seemed to go forever down.

  The Man looked up and saw that people had stopped their talking and drinking, and as he held the body and felt it belong to him, he suddenly knew that Naples was on the other side of the world, that boyhood was further, and that death was a lifetime, a lunchtime, a breath away.

  Blood and Water

  Since it was the day of Preparation, in order to prevent the bodies from remaining on the cross on the sabbath (for that sabbath was a high day), the Jews asked Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away. So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first, and of the other who had been crucified with him; but when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water.

  John 19:31-34

  RACHEL LAUGHED AND there was water down her leg.

  ‘It’s coming,’ she said.

  Jerra leapt up and switched the TV off. For a moment they stood there and regarded the trails on her thighs. A car accelerated up the hill and passed with a hiss outside. Rain fell; the gutters were thick with it. They heard it chug in the downpipes.

  ‘This is gonna be the happiest night of my life,’ he said. He put on a record. Suddenly the house was full.

  The midwife came, felt Rachel’s abdomen, and commandeered their bed. Fires purred in the stove and the fireplace. The street was quiet. They played Haydn on the stereo and held hands during Rachel’s contractions. They heard the midwife’s snores. Her name was Annie. She was a tall, athletic woman who always wore her hair tied back in a scarf. She believed in God and healing and the goodness of people’s bodies. Rachel and Jerra thought she was a little weird, but they had come to love her these past months. She was gentle. She warmed her hands. Her smile was reassuring.