For Everyone Concerned (3 page)

‘We’re drunk,’ I said.

The Director loved clear answers. ‘Good,’ she said. She looked up at where the lift had been, then turned to us again. ‘Belinda!’ It was an accusation. She was searching for something to flesh it out. From time to time she would go for the young in the kind of automatic antipathy I recognised at once. ‘What are you doing?’

‘She’s drunk,’ I said, putting my arm around the girl.

‘Good,’ said the Director. Then she walked back to Bert, who held a small hammer and the Director’s shoe.

‘Fixed it,’ said Bert.

We watched as Bert bent down, carefully lifted the Director’s leg, propping it tidily against his knee, and fitted her shoe. She stood, looking off blankly, while this was done, implacable as a horse, or a painting of a horse.

We wanted the knife, both of us. Every Sunday we’d sit with our grandfather and he’d ask us all these questions, how was school? how was cricket? and all the time we were answering in our heads: fine, now give us the knife. Eventually he’d say, would you like to see the knife? He’d bring it out from his bedroom and give it to my older brother to hold first.

The knife was ancient but it was polished and oiled and its blades and tools swung easily into steely life. It was our grandfather’s army knife. He lived by himself in a council flat and he couldn’t climb onto a bus any more, but he said that the knife had saved his life more than once. He’d killed people, we believed. In Egypt. Egyptians? Anyway, that was the horror of war: kill or be killed. There was always a burnt smell in his flat because after doing the dishes, he used to hang the
rubber gloves on his heater. Also he had a budgie, that pongy bird, we called it.

We coveted the knife. We longed to have it and to take it home. We wanted it. We weighed it in our palms: the horror of war, we said to each other. At home we fought hand-to-hand, taking turns to hold the imaginary knife.

One Sunday our grandfather said that when he died we could each have one thing of his; we could choose now. My brother was to have first choice. The knife! he said. I’d like the knife!

I burst into tears and ran from the room but there was nowhere to go. Run out of a council flat and you’re on the road. I ended up sitting in the kitchen where I pinged my finger against the budgie cage. I’d coax the budgie towards my finger, then startle it by flicking my finger hard against the cage. There’s a moron in all of us.

A few weeks later I had to drive with my mother to deliver something to our grandfather. Soon, said my mother, we won’t be making this trip. How soon? I said. Don’t, she said. Don’t what? But she couldn’t speak. She just waved her hand for me to stop, or look out the window of the car.

The back door was always open. My mother called out and we went in. He’d already had his lunch. There was the end of a piece of celery, and there was his
soft-boiled egg in the egg cup. He always put the top of the egg back on the egg once he’d finished. Crown the king, he said.

We entered his room and found him bent over his feet; he was cutting his nails and scraping away at the dead skin in the corners of his toes. The cuttings were being collected on a piece of newspaper. He was working with the prize knife, the war knife, the knife of death.

My mother started fussing about it all. It was really repellent. She hated the male foot. Someone’s feet stink, she always said. Go and wash your feet whoever it is. Still it was her father and she had to help.

I turned quickly to face the shelf where our grandfather kept his golf trophies. Pretty much we despised golf, my brother and I, didn’t understand it one bit. Our grandfather had been playing for years and he wasn’t great at it but he was good enough apparently. He had his own fold-out seat for resting between holes. The largest of the trophies was a silver man saluting the air with his raised club. I touched the silver man’s head. It was a Hole-in-One trophy.

You like that? said my grandfather.

Yes, I said.

When I’m gone, he said, will you polish it?

I will, I said.

Liar, he said.

I will, I promise.

How often will you do it?

Every day? I said.

Ha!

I will.

Every day! He turned to my mother, grinning. He’ll think of me every day he says. He looked at me again. Then it’s yours.

My mother was wrapping up the newspaper.

I’m surrounded by kindness, he said.

And rubbish, said my mother.

Later, in the car, she said to me, Remember, you have made a promise.

And by what I have written in this document you will
see, won’t you, that I have obeyed her?

I was in the public library café the other week. At a nearby table was a group of mothers and fathers with their babies and their toddlers. One of these toddlers— a girl of about two—was making it her habit to hop down from her chair and escape. She’d set off in the direction of the lift doors. The café is very open and leads across a mezzanine to lifts, which carry you down to the library or to the underground car park.

The little girl, with a smile on her face, because she knew exactly what she was doing—she knew she was cute and young and blameless—she would run through the café towards the lifts. Her father, on whose love she could depend, would let her get a certain distance and then he’d put down his coffee and stand up and walk fairly quickly to retrieve his daughter. He’d scoop her up and she’d cry out in pleasure and
they’d return; the girl would be put on her chair again and the father would pick up his coffee again and try to have a life again. This happened a few times, and the pair had a good audience—mostly older couples having lunch. We were enjoying the spectacle. Each time, the father would let the girl run a little further. He’d ignore her for a little longer. He was trying to finish his coffee or the conversation he was having. He was with adults; it was a rare treat and he didn’t want to miss out. But eventually, of course he’d go and get her again. Short of tying her down in some way, what else could he do?

It was all developmental.

He put her in the playpen with the slide and she climbed the little wall and ran off. He gave her some of his cake, which she ate while leaving. He removed someone else’s child from the top of the slide and put her in his place. She slid down and escaped. He spoke with his nose pressed against hers, forehead to forehead almost, like soccer players sometimes do. She heard him out and hopped down when he wasn’t looking. He said, I will give you everything, a TV above the cot, everything. Please stay there. By this stage most of the audience were a little bored. When the girl ran past the tables now hardly anyone was looking and if they did it was with a bit of annoyance—won’t someone deal with that child?

So this last time, the father really ignores her and
the girl get as far as the lifts—she’s made it—and she stands in front of them. She doesn’t know what to do now. The father gets up again and maybe he’s a little concerned, though he doesn’t want to frighten his daughter, so he sort of begins half-jogging towards the girl, and he may even be making a few noises of discouragement.

The doors of the lift open and the girl steps inside and then the doors close and she’s gone.

The father arrives at the lift and pushes the button but the lift has obviously started on its journey.

Now the father doesn’t know what his next move is. He looks over the railing of the mezzanine wondering if his daughter will get out there. But what if she carries on down to the car park? What if she steps out there? That’s probably where they parked the car. Would she run to the car? She can recognise their car. She’s a very clever girl. Then he presses the lift button again. The other lift has arrived—but should he step in? Maybe he’ll miss her, if he’s in one lift and she’s in the other. He sort of hops around. He puts his arm inside the lift door to prevent it closing. I know what he’s thinking because I’ve been more or less in the same boat. He’s thinking, She’ll be fine. But he’s also thinking, I’ll never see her again. And it’s all my fault. He’s thinking because he wanted to finish his coffee, he loses his daughter. For one tiny moment of selfishness, this is my punishment? The hundreds of
hours, the two-plus years, all that care, the mornings, the early mornings, and the nights, you’ve got to be joking, the nights. So all that counts for nothing? Oh God, what have I done! How did I deserve this? Never to see her grow up. Oh please, dear God. Mercy! I beg you! Please bring my daughter back safely to me.

Then the lift doors open and the girl steps out.

She steps into his arms.

I remember it all. How they were held there. It was the day our friend went into the hospice.

Several months after I had returned from a short holiday in Melbourne where I was visiting and staying in the house of my older brother, I received a phone call which I had, on the fifth day of my holiday, imagined receiving upon my return.

It takes a little over three hours by plane to reach Melbourne from Wellington, where I was then living. I was aware when I wrote just now of travelling by air, that the writer who is the subject of this story has referred to air travel as
insulting the earth
. The writer made this comment partly in explanation of the fact that he himself has never travelled by air and that he has travelled out of his own native city only on the rarest occasions, making perhaps three or four or five trips in a lifetime of more than fifty years and all of these by road. I heard the writer speak on this and
other topics in a documentary film which my brother and I saw together in Melbourne. I am also aware that pinned now to the wall in the room in which I am writing this story is a small poster advertising the film. The writer who is the subject of the film and of this story is pictured in the poster bending down on his haunches in a leafy backyard and staring into a racetrack made of sticks, as if there is something buried there. Having seen the film, I understand that this is a photograph of the writer as a man revisiting the site of his boyhood, and although the scene over which he presides is, of course, only a reconstruction of the original one, it occurs to me that perhaps the boyhood racetrack has been reconstructed thus in the actual backyard of the house in which the writer now lives as a man.

I am remembering a boy-actor who played the writer as a boy moving stick horses around the racetrack, looked over not only by the film camera, the film lights and the film people, but also, perhaps by the writer, standing in his own backyard, as if the boy-actor was the writer’s own son playing, quite naturally, in the backyard of the house in which he is growing up. Sometimes I have thought of myself as that boy.

Shortly after I arrived in Melbourne my brother and I were sitting in the backyard of his house, drinking from gold-coloured cans of Castlemaine beer. The
woman with whom my brother was living at the time was also sitting and drinking in the backyard, though not quite with us, but rather
a little way away
from us. Since one may suppose it natural for two brothers normally separated from each other by a stretch of water of some fifteen hundred miles—the Tasman Sea—to have personal things to discuss, it might then be supposed that the woman’s distance is a mark of her understanding of fraternal relations. However, the real reason the woman was sitting a little way away, a reason known by myself and the woman, if not by my brother, whose deafness and blindness in this regard have been remarked upon by other members of my family, was our mutual antipathy towards each other.

I have visited Melbourne four times. Once as a very young child with my family when we were returning to Wellington from London. A second time as a university student in the summer holidays of 1984 to 1985, when I attempted to sell imitation leather credit card-holders door-to-door in the suburb of Carlton, where I was staying for two months in the flat occupied by my brother and several other people, including the woman who on my fourth visit sat a little way away from us drinking her own gold-coloured Castlemaine. The third time was a stay of three days in the same flat as my second visit when I was travelling by air to London in early March 1987.

My fourth and most recent visit to Melbourne was the first one on which I had been aware of the writer who is the subject of this story and of the gold-coloured books which carry his name.

When I was aged eleven years I auditioned for the part of a boy who was to be the chief character in a film to be shown on television. At that time my dream was to become the chief character in many such films. I dreamed of the boys and girls of my school telling their friends in the years to come of attending the same school as the boy who was now the chief character in a number of films they had seen. In my mind I heard the boys and girls of my school talking in their men’s and women’s voices about the boy who was now playing the major roles of his generation in films which, it was being said, had become
instant classics.
I imagined a time in the future when I would be unable to remember any of the names of the boys and girls of my school, though if I ever met them, I would pretend to remember.

I can recall no details of the first audition, though I imagine it taking place in a hall large enough to hold all the boys of my school, except those few who were either ill on that day, or who had no desire to be the subject of the future adult-talk of all the boys and girls of their school.

The uniform of the school, which I imagine all the
boys at the first audition being required to wear even though it is a Saturday morning, is predominantly navy blue. Navy blue jersey, navy blue shirt, navy blue shorts, navy blue socks. The socks, however, are topped with two thin bands of different colours; cornflower blue and lilac.

The second audition was held in Wellington in a small room more than ten floors above street level. On this occasion I was the only boy present in a room full of adults, one of whom was my mother. I was not wearing my school uniform though it was a Wednesday morning. I was given three pages of script and taken into a second, smaller room. My mother, having wished me luck, remained in the first room where she had been offered a cup of tea but had said no thank you. The second room was the sound-room of a recording studio and it was bare except for a microphone on a stand in the middle of the floor. The floor was crossed in places by cables. The room then became dark for a moment until a single light was turned on over the microphone stand. I remember thinking in the moment that because of the darkness I would never be able to read the three pages of script I had been handed. In that moment I was convinced that the adults had expected me to have read and memorised all the words contained in the three pages of script in the time it had taken to walk from the first small room into the sound-room and that now
I would never be the chief character in this or any other film. Standing in the darkness I then knew that I would never be an actor in the films which would be seen by all the boys and girls of my school, but that I might one day be the subject of a film which some boy or some girl from my school might see without being quite able to remember whether the man who is the subject of the film is the same man in whose outline flickers the shape of a boy in navy blue, cornflower blue and lilac.

I can recall none of the words of the script which I read into the microphone under the single light in the sound-room. I remember that while I read I was facing a large rectangular window which was perfectly black. Later, I learned that the man who had written the words I was reading was standing behind this window, watching and listening to his words forming in the mouth of a boy who might have become the boy in the film the man had scarcely imagined when he dreamed of the boy who is the chief character of the book he had written some twenty years before.

I now believe that the man who stood behind the black window of the sound-room watching and listening to all the boys who came with their mothers to the rooms more than ten floors above the streets of Wellington, had as a young would-be writer imagined himself as the boy who is the chief character of the book which some twenty years later would be a film
for television. I also believe that some man or woman who had been a boy or girl from the school of the man who had stood behind the black window, when they saw the film of the man’s book, might catch in the outline of the boy-actor who is the chief character of the film, a flicker of the boy whom they cannot quite remember but whom they believe went on to write a book some twenty years ago.

Although I had the address of the writer written on a piece of paper inside my wallet and although I looked at my brother’s map of Melbourne in his house in the suburb of Brunswick and found Falcon Street, in the suburb of McLeod, I had no real intention of visiting the writer. Before I had even left Wellington, several weeks before, or perhaps even several months before, dating back to the time when two friends had returned from their honeymoon in Australia and given me the writer’s address, I knew I would never find myself walking down Falcon Street, McLeod.

Shortly after my return to Wellington but before I received the phone call mentioned in the first sentence of this story, I learned from a letter the writer had written to my newly married friends that the writer’s house number had been changed by the local council; that what had been the last house number on Falcon Street was now the first and the first last and so on, so that every house had the number which had previously
belonged to another house in the street. Setting aside the no-small-matter of the residents’ anguish at this change, it occurred to me that if I had chosen to simply go and look at No. 22 Falcon Street and not approached the writer’s door but merely made a pass of the house and studied it casually from the pavement so that anyone who happened to be walking down Falcon Street or even looking from the window of a nearby house would not have guessed that this was my objective, I would have been looking at the place where only some distant neighbour of the writer kept house. I would have been furtively looking at the house numbered 22 which had, until very recently, been numbered 48, or 56, or 74. I would not have seen the actual backyard in which I believe some of the boyhood scenes of the writer’s life were recreated for film.

While considering my plan of walking down Falcon Street I became aware, firstly, of a feeling of dread which is the familiar accompaniment to my thinking about any interview, appointment, or public engagement, a feeling which communicates itself to my bowels. Secondly, I was aware that of all the houses of writers I have visited, I have never failed to enter those of writers who are dead, that is, I have never simply walked past the house of a dead writer, but that I have on several occasions
walked past
the house of a living writer without going in. I have often looked in
the phone book for the addresses of living writers and planned and carried out exactly the sort of walk-past I was planning on my fourth visit to Melbourne, while studying on my brother’s map the streets of the suburb of McLeod.

I then remembered reading an interview with an American writer who was asked whether he had ever met an older, more famous writer who had since died. The American writer replied that he had perhaps seen the other, more famous writer from a distance but that it was his everlasting regret that as a young man who wanted to be a writer, when he had had the opportunity to visit the famous writer in his house, he had not been able to go through with it. He said he had chickened out. He said he had sat in his friend’s car outside the famous writer’s house, while his friend, a young man with no intention of ever becoming a writer but who was merely studying the books of the famous writer to earn his degree, spent almost an hour inside the house, drinking the famous writer’s whisky, the whisky which was finally to kill the man outside whose house the only young man who ever truly loved his books was waiting with everlasting regret in the car of his friend.

Yet I remember thinking that if I was to be stirred by this lesson in everlasting regret and not merely walk past but enter the house of the writer on Falcon Street, I would somehow be suggesting to myself that
the writer whose house I had entered was now dead and not living.

I saw myself again as the boy-actor in the film about the writer, bending over the racetrack I have made from twigs and leaves and dirt in the backyard of the house in which I am growing up. The sticks I am moving around the track have brown-coloured flanks and the finishing post, which I have painted gold, is the rounded piece of wood from an old ice block. I am being looked over by the writer, my father, who is instructing me in the meanings of silks.

My father is telling me that his personal silks would be a combination of two colours, lilac for the sleeves and brown for the body; lilac for a special country blue sky, and brown for the soil. His breath smells of the beer and whisky which he drinks for three hours every night before going to bed. Drinking, he says, which will lift him from his own pages, deep into the lilac sky.

I remember thinking, while studying the map of Melbourne in my brother’s house in Brunswick, that by acting on this lesson of everlasting regret I, the only young would-be writer who truly loved the books of the writer whom I sometimes imagined as my father looking over my shoulder as I moved the words of my sentences by applying pressure to the brown coloured flanks of letters, would be killing him, or at least wishing him dead. And I also imagined, then,
that I would receive the news when I had returned to Wellington that no more books would ever appear which carried the writer’s name and that the news would come by telephone.

On my second visit to Melbourne, in the summer months of December 1984 and January 1985, when I was a university student, I spent some of my time reading the books which I was to study in my next university term but most of my time reading books which I would never study, the latter always giving me more pleasure than the former, so that I always felt I was truly studying only those books I would never study at university. I would sit in the lounge of my older brother’s flat in the suburb of Carlton or in his bedroom or outside in the sun on the patch of concrete which was the backyard, while he and the woman with whom he was living and the other flatmates were out working. While reading, I would drink from the blue-coloured cans of Fosters beer which my brother had left in the fridge. When my brother came home from work in the early evening, I would stop reading and we would turn on the television and watch the news programmes on four or five different channels. My brother and I would exchange a few words with each other about what we had done during the day and sometimes I would pretend that I had been out for several hours in the city looking for work, or seeing places of interest, or doing a variety of
things which the woman with whom my brother lived had often urged me to do instead of sitting inside their house reading books, drinking their beer and wasting my holiday. The woman would often remind me of the debt of several hundred Australian dollars which I owed my brother.