And Did Those Feet ... (2 page)

BY the time I came along, Mum and Dad had already moved out of that little house in the photograph and into a bigger one. After I was a few years old they moved again, this time into the mansion near where her parents lived. This house was the business … electric gates, swimming pool, huge rooms with nothing much in them. Mum reckoned Dad was trying to prove something – maybe she was right. His
business
had really grown and he was spending half the time in Japan now, buying cars at the auctions to sell on in his chain of car yards. His friend Rufus O’Malley was now managing his New Zealand operation.

I guess we were rich. I never saw it in that way. I went to a prep school, wore a little blazer. I suppose if I had thought about that sort of stuff at all (which I didn’t) I would have thought everyone was like me. Didn’t know any better. Sometimes we would go to Fiji or Bali for the holidays. But usually my dad would fly on to somewhere else and it would end up being just a week or so of me and Mum hanging out at the hotel pool.

Mum was a smoker and she used to get these really bad colds during the winter. Her asthma would make everything that much worse. It was during a wet, grey winter that it happened.

Dad was in Osaka, and it seemed that we were trapped in the big house while the weather did nothing but rain for weeks. I still remember how we had been out for a walk on Sunday afternoon. Mum claimed I had been watching TV all weekend and I needed to get some air in my lungs before school on Monday. It had been bright and grey, high cloud, no rain for hours so we walked all the way down to a coffee bar where Mum wanted to buy us some muffins. I guess we were sort of dawdling on the way back because halfway home the first big drops of rain began to fall. Within five minutes we were both drenched to the bone, completely caught out, no raincoat or umbrella. By the time we got home we were both really cold so I had a shower and Mum disappeared into her ensuite bathroom for an hour or so to try to get a bit of warmth back into her bones. The following day I was okay but Mum had this cough that wouldn’t stop. It started as a soft little cat noise but soon sounded like stones being shovelled.

A couple of days later Mum was too sick to drive me to school so I had to go in by taxi. In the afternoon she still wasn’t there to pick me up so I rang home and there was no answer. I thought she must have been on her way so I waited out by the school gates in the rain. Everyone slowly fed out to the waiting cars and after a while I was there all by myself. I remember thinking surely she must be here soon.

After about an hour, Ashraf, the taxi driver we always called, drove by. I spotted his pale blue turban and black beard. I guess you could say I knew him quite well. He pulled over, did a U-turn and came back to where I stood shivering under the lee of the wall. He wound the window down and leaned over, “What’s the story, man? Your mother forgotten you?”

I nodded and he said, “Hop in. I’ll take you home, your mum can pay me later.”

When I got in there was a strange stillness as soon as I closed the front door. Sort of spooky. It was like the house had been deserted for five years. I can’t explain it any other way.

I hung my coat up, dropped my bag in the kitchen and went through the house calling “Mum!” She wasn’t to be found.

I turned on the TV and sat down to wait it out. She must have gone out to pick me up and passed us on the way. After a long time there was still no sign of her. I went to the garage. The car was still there so I went back in. I returned to the bedroom for another look. That’s where I found her, sort of tangled up in the bedding on the floor next to the bed.

She didn’t look good, pale and cold, her lips a bit blue. I rang 111 and waited on the bed next to her. There was a silk scarf on the bedside table that she always carried around. I lowered it over her mouth. There was no movement. There wouldn’t be. Somehow I knew that already.

The rest of it is just details. The ambulance. The hospital. My father coming home. The funeral. It all runs in together. I don’t think about this stuff much. What I do remember though were the months after that.

FOR a while Dad cut out the overseas trips and tried to be “more of a father to me”. I don’t know what that was about. He had always been a father, just a busy one, that’s all. I guess he had an attack of the guilts. What he didn’t have was a clue about running the house. Looking back I have to confess I made no effort to make it easy for him.

The mornings usually followed this pattern.

“Sandy … are you awake?”

Dad stood at the end of the bed with a newspaper in his hand, reading and pulling at the duvet at the same time. “Hey, you better scramble, man, school’s in half an hour … you’ve got to keep a watch on that time.”

Later, when I smelled toast burning I’d wander down to the kitchen where I’d see Dad on the phone, reading
something
out from the newspaper. Behind him a thin column of blue smoke rose from the toaster. He’d point to his watch and keep talking.

By the time I levered the charred toast out of the toaster with a fork he’d finally finish talking.

One morning he asked, “What’s that mud on your shorts?”

“Yeah, we played bullrush yesterday. I got decked by a senior.”

“Well, wear your other ones, you can’t go in looking like that.”

“These are my other ones, my good pants are in the
washing
.”

“Well, they won’t wash themselves, man, why didn’t you wash them?”

I was getting a bit red-faced by this stage. “Why didn’t you?”

“Hey, grow up, boy, I’m not your …” he almost said it and we both stood staring at each other and I saw his bottom lip kind of stretch sideways. He walked over and got a wet sponge from the bench.

“Here, stand over by the window so I can see what I’m doing.”

“Eee the water’s going right through to my bum.”

“Well that’s the best I can do.”

I was tempted to say something about his best but
everything
was bad enough already. Instead I went over and dug out the cornflakes from the back of the cupboard. I held them up and pointed with my finger. “Boy food.”

I would like to say that the evening meals were better, but they weren’t. Ashraf would be waiting for me at 3.30 each day and we would head back home. Since Mum died he wasn’t so chatty any more so we usually made the trip in silence. As soon as I got home I would forage around for something to eat. Peanut butter, muesli bars, biscuits,
whatever there was in the cupboard. Dad would take me to the supermarket once a week and I would make sure we were well stocked with after-school snacks. It might seem a minor point to you but for me it was a matter of survival. I would have starved to death otherwise. Dad wouldn’t have noticed until he tripped over my whitening bones in the TV room.

Usually Dad got in some time just before six. Being the boss he could knock off whenever he liked but he used to stop off for a few drinks on the way home. There was this bar called Oscar’s in the town centre. After down-loading a few glasses of rocket fuel he’d hit the supermarket and buy whatever caught his eye. Sometimes it was frozen pies, other times TV dinners and when he was really in the mood to walk on the wild side, he would buy most of the components for pasta or maybe a steak and some frozen veges. When he finally checked in just before the news, he was always
hauling
a couple of bags from the supermarket and leaving a vapour trail of whiskey fumes in his wake.

Now I don’t have any big issues with adults drinking. It lowers their IQ by a few points but the payoff was that it made Dad happy and optimistic, just the opposite from what he was like in the mornings. It did have one bad effect though. Dad, who was Mr Can-Do at most things, was a
really
crap cook. If you think the act of arson (which he called “making the toast”) was a one off, you’re lucky you didn’t come around for dinner during that time.

The big pie would go into the oven for an hour or two while Dad chilled out or snored off on the couch. When I kicked him back into action to complete the mission there
was always something wrong. The pie had somehow missed the
golden brown
stage pictured on the box top and headed off into territory known as
lump of charcoal
. Sometimes though, an hour later it would still be at the white, dusty stage Dad started with. He had thought putting the oven on 210 was the end of the job. No need to set it to bake. Other times it would come out a combination of the two, black on top and raw on the bottom. Only someone with Dad’s special talents could have pulled that one off.

Pasta and steak? How did he manage to mess those up? He found a way. With the pasta the noodles always got stuck together in a big mass. They looked a bit like that tangle of old seaweed you find on the beach after storms. Dad would fish it all out in one piece and then chop it up with a knife or scissors.

With steak there was a different problem. I don’t want to sound like a moaner. Maybe it was Dad’s cooking, maybe it was just that my teeth weren’t sharp enough to bite through them, but one thing was for sure: they were incredibly tough. I remember suggesting that he could use them to repair blow-outs in truck tyres. Soon after this he stopped cooking altogether and pizza began to figure big in our lives.

Now I used to like pizza. What boy doesn’t? There was a time when I believed I could never have quite enough of the stuff. You know what it’s like using advanced geometry to get that slightly bigger slice than everyone else? Maths was useful for once. Those were the old days. These days I know there is a cure for this.

The cure for pizzamania is to have ten or more feeds of pizza in a fourteen day period. Yep, margherita,
pepperoni
, capricciosa and that other unpronounceable beast, the quattro stagione. I guess the good thing is I learnt a bit of the Italian language along the way. I’ll tell you the difference between mozzarella and gorgonzola. One leaves long wispy tendrils hanging from your lips, and the other is really sticky. Think of metre-long hairs hanging from the gob. Think bubble gum after you’ve chewed it for three days.

It was during the pizza days that I made contact with the once and future king of the vegetables: the artichoke. I thought that I could never have too much of those guys. But it all goes to show I guess that whoever invented the phrase “You can never have too much of a good thing” had never been pumped up to the ear holes with slices of pizza over a fortnight period. Maybe he could have shared my
nightmare
. The one where I am attacked by swarms of pizzas. Angry discs, spinning like flying saucers, straight from the fiery pizza oven, super-spicy and coming at ya.

AFTER my pizza rebellion Dad lifted his game. He went to some agency and got us this live-in nanny. Her name was Yoke-Lin and she was from Malaysia. She was twenty-three years old and not much taller than I was. She had about twenty pairs of shoes and laughed all the time. It was like her way of saying “What’s that?” or “I don’t understand,” or “It doesn’t matter”. It got really annoying after a while. It must have seemed like a great idea to Dad, hooking in Ms Joke-Grin, filling the house with laughter. But then I reckon most of Dad’s “great ideas” from that period of our lives were actually not that great.

I don’t know what it is about me but sometimes I find myself doing things that are not the best. A bit psycho
sometimes
. I reckon it must be my famous criminal grandparents (long dead) bubbling to the surface, just like those evil
spirits
in a horror movie.

It started like this. One weekend I had hoped that Dad was going to take me to Eden Park to watch the footy. He had mentioned it earlier in the week and I guess I was dumb
enough to think it was going to happen. On Saturday I got up early to watch the cartoons on Sky. It was my weekend routine in those days. I would wrap myself in the duvet and hobble through to the lounge and curl up on the couch. At about eleven o’clock the ’toons get stupid, all the baby ones come on, so I wandered through the house looking for Dad.

I knew he had been up for a while because I had heard him drive out in the morning. Everything was very quiet. I thought Yoke-Lin would be around at least, but there was no sign. As I headed up to Dad’s bedroom I got this sinking feeling and dropped back. I heard them talking. I couldn’t make out what they were saying because the door was closed, but it was the tone … Dad had a sort of buzz in his voice that I didn’t like. I knew that something had happened.

After this I shot back to my room and dug out my favourite Asterix book, anything to stop my brain from working. Maybe half an hour later Dad stuck his head in the door to my room and said, “What about this footy then?”

“Nah, don’t feel like it.”

“Okay,” he said, as if it were no big deal, and then added, “Yoke-Lin and I are going to the supermarket to do the big shop.”

And that was it.

That was when the real rot set in.

It was soon after this that I started to do bad things to this Yoke-Lin.

I think I was hoping to drive her mad.

Couldn’t help it.

At first it was just small stuff really, like hiding things that I knew she would need. Her keys, or her wallet or maybe the TV remote. I would sit somewhere near at hand so I could watch her getting flustered, sometimes I would even help her to look. Once I even shifted it a couple of times while the search was on. That was fun. It wasn’t long before she twigged to it because now it was Yoke-Lin who started to hide things.

Her own things mostly.

From me.

If she had hoped that this was the end of it then I guess she must have underestimated my determination. Like father, like son.

After a while hiding things wasn’t enough any more so I had to go further. I began to take money from her wallet, not that I needed it. I just wanted to take it from her. She liked money, I knew that. I did a few boy-like pranks too. Put slugs in her shoes. I would go into the garden to hunt out the biggest, hairiest spiders and free them in her
clothes-drawers
. If I got the chance I would throw her mail away.

I must say she coped quite well, never cried, never got angry with me. I would climb out my bedroom window at night and make noises near her room. Try to frighten her a bit. Nothing seemed to work and I was about to give up when one day she was gone. No note, nothing.

She can’t have said anything but Dad was suspicious, I can tell you. He never spoke to me about it but for a few days he would stalk past me giving me the evils. Actually, it was after this that he got his revenge. This time he got a scary woman
from the agency. Actually I reckon it was a different agency. Instead of
asianhoneys.com
it was
Rent-a-witch.

Her name was Ada, but I used to call her adder because I reckon she must have had a poisonous bite. This Ada must have had a background as a prison guard or a dog catcher. Something like that. There was no way I was going to mess with her. She was big, she was wide and she wore men’s shoes which squeaked. She had no eyebrows, just pencil lines where they had been drawn on and she wore the sort of glasses that magnified her eyes. They were big and round, like a squid’s eyes. Who needed nightmares when Ada was loose in your house?

She had me sussed from the minute she arrived. She always knew what I was going to do before I did it and she never left personal stuff lying around. She was unbeatable. When she said, “Get up, Sandy,” I was out of bed like I had been launched by a giant spring. My clothes were laid out ready, breakfast was ready, school lunch was ready then Ashraf was ready, and I was gone. The homeward beat would be much the same. I’d always get this feeling of dread as Ashraf pulled up in the driveway. He’d turn around and look at me. “We’re here,” he’d say. I would sort of shrink into the seat and slowly slide out.

Then the morning routine happened in reverse: bag
emptied
, school uniform off for inspection and possible washing, homework out on desk with glass of milk and regulation two Krispies. After three days I knew exactly what the expression “stir crazy” meant.

The only good thing about the new arrangement was that
she was strictly eight ’til five. Out the door the moment the big hand reached twelve. She wouldn’t wait for anything. What a relief.

Dad, being Dad, couldn’t follow such a strict time
schedule
. For a few days he was there at the changing of the guard but then he came in at half past whatever. Adder had
usually
left some little witchy meal bubbling on the stove but we hardly ever ate it. Dad had snatched a pie or three from Oscar’s and I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole. Luckily I was getting pretty handy at fixing things from the freezer by this stage. There is an old saying where I come from and that’s “a microwave is a boy’s best friend”.

I wasn’t the only one who turned a bit feral at this stage. Dad developed a few habits that were a worry. He began to drink more and go out more. Sometimes he would drink at home, but other times he would be at clubs with Rufus O’Malley until the wee small hours, when suddenly on an impulse he would ring me up. It was like he suddenly
remembered
he had a son. He would get all sentimental, say the sort of things he would never say normally. Stopping every now and then to sip his drink before he rambled on.

“That you, Sandy?”

“Yes, Dad.” (Like who else would it be?)

“I’m going to be a bit late home.”

“I figured.”

“What?”

“It’s already after ten so I guessed it.”

“Is that the time? My God I thought it was about seven. You must be starving.”

“No I’m okay, I nuked a couple of burritos.”

“What about Ada’s dinner?”

“What about it?”

“Why didn’t you eat that?”

“Too risky.”

Then there would be a pause while he drank or lit up a smoke or spoke to someone he was with.

“So you’re okay?”

“Never better.”

“That’s great.”

It was a bit like being trapped in one of those cheesy Walt Disney movies. Smiling Mum and Dad, lovable Junior with his fluffy dog Scruffy. It wasn’t him and it wasn’t me, and I didn’t even have a dog.

“Hold up, Dad, there’s a call coming in on line two…”

“Whaa …”

Then I would drop the phone on the couch and carry on watching TV.

Just when you think that you are stuck in something and it’s never going to change, it does, in some unexpected way. Dad had the home base covered with Ada. He was well on the way to becoming his new self – “The Party Dude” – when the whole thing blew up in his face. I got suspended from school.

It was as much of a surprise to me as it was to
everyone
else. I quite liked school, it kept me from thinking too much, you know, brooding on stuff. It was this brooding that used to ruin my weekends. They kept us busy at school and the work was easy. The teachers, what can you say?
They were just your standard issue teachers, boring but harmless.

Anyway, that particular day, I was sitting on a bench
outside
my form room with a couple of other boys at lunchtime, it was a day like any other, no lightning strikes or freaky visitations. We were just yakking on about stuff when this guy Liam came over and said something to me that made me explode. You know those bombs on the cartoons? The sort of ball-thing with a wick. That was me, but the wick was about one millimetre long. We were discussing the parents’ evening which we had all just been told about and Liam said something about my mother.

I’m not going to repeat it now, it probably wouldn’t sound like much anyway, but it was enough. I turned instantly into a “raging engine of death and destruction”. (I wrote that in a report for the counsellor, pretty good description I reckon, even though I say so myself.)

Anyway, to get back to Liam, all I can remember was this puzzled look on his face while I was punching it, again and again. A look that seemed to say, “What did I say? What did I do?”

After this there was a whole bunch of stuff that happened pretty much one thing after the other. I was hauled around by sets of hands, first big kids, then, when they weren’t strong enough, adults. I was talked to by one face after another. Mr Tyndall the DP, then, after he had run out of things to say, Mr Redbone the principal. I didn’t get involved this time, let them do all the talking. I thought it best to sit back and not say much. It was only going to make things worse.

After a while the counsellor and community police officer talked to me. They talked to me about causes and
consequences.
Mrs Larkin the counsellor sat next to me on the couch. She smiled sweetly at me and then said in this soft purry voice, “Why do we do silly things?” I said nothing so she began a long talk about my mum and dad, and love and tolerance, and how we were all part of a big family at school. I leaned back on the couch and closed my eyes, I could tell that sleep was near, but it was not to be. The door opened and it was the familiar shape of Constable Keith, our bulky Community Constable. He had spoken to us the previous year about shoplifting. I imagined him like a cartoon
character
who ran around whacking people on the head with a stick. His mission was to explain to me “the pathways” I would take if I ever repeated this behaviour
in the community.
I was lucky that this happened in a school because if it
happened
in the community
(he used that expression a lot) there were no prizes for guessing where that would lead to.

Yep, it was a pathway that led straight to the slammer.

I remembered thinking that I was getting some good practice for that anyway, with Ada looking after me.

Then Dad was called in. It seemed funny having him in the school, he looked out of place, like seeing a giraffe in your toilet. He’d never been there before. Hated schools he said. Looked really uncomfortable, kept trying to loosen his tie, like he was choking. But it was no good. All the talk came to nothing. Our final positions on the matter were these.

They
called it “unprovoked assault”.

I
called it “takin’ out the trash”.

Which version’s correct? Who cares? The month’s
suspension
brought Dad to his senses though. It took this to make him sit up and take notice.

He thought he would leave me at home with Ada. Just sort of wait the period out and then send me back, but I made it clear that I was not going to stay in the house with that woman, and that was that. If he tried that one I would be gone. You wouldn’t see me for dust. I guess I must have looked pretty determined because he didn’t do it.

For a day or two he took me into work with him. I would read my book or play on the computer while he did his deals. Then we would get into the car and visit some guy and it was more of the same. I didn’t mind this but it was starting to cramp Dad’s style. I could tell it wasn’t going to last.

Then one night after tea, there he was, on the phone,
desperate
now, begging his younger brother to take me on.

“I’ve tried everything … the kid’s in a bad way … I’m at my wit’s end … ever since … ever since it’s been just the two of us nothing has worked out for him … aggressive, violent, untrustworthy … there’s a gun at my head … space, time to reflect, fresh air, animals, family life … they’re scared of him, scared of what he might do… That would be great … that would be amazing … just a short spell … Yeah, I owe you big time … regards to Lorna … yeah … yeah … I know … okay … yeah … promise … a couple of days, see ya …”

That’s where Uncle Frank comes into the picture.