For Everyone Concerned (8 page)

On the way home Father Liddell sat quietly in the back of the car. He hated me even more now. His coat, his trousers, his hair, the side of his face—all
bore the imprint of the slick, treacherous footpath. He wouldn’t let me do anything to help him, clean him. He waved his hand in front of him. Drive on, drive on.

The rain was threatening to flood the road. Traffic moved along slowly through the dark water. Blocked drains spilled little rivers down the road. We cruised through a deep wash and I pulled over.

Suddenly Father Liddell spoke: What are you doing?

I’m pumping the brakes, Father, I said.

I can hear you, he said. Why? Why are we stopped here?

I pumped some more. I put the car in Drive and let it go forward a little, then I stepped hard on the brakes.

What are you doing now? said Father Liddell.

I repeated the manoeuvre.

You’re not Archie, he said.

No, Father, I said.

I put on the indicator.

What are you doing with me? he said. Father Liddell sounded frightened. All of us, I thought, are locked in our worlds. What are you going to do with me? he said.

I turned on the demister to clear the back window of Father Liddell’s rapid breath and I no longer considered the possibility of an accident. The general
state of emergency around us, the caution and courtesy, seemed to be making us safe.

Bless me, Father, I began, for I have sinned.

Stop that, said Father Liddell.

It has been three months since my last—

Stop this car. Do you hear me! I want to get out now. Pull over. Let me out. I don’t feel well. Stop the car.

I pulled over.

Okay, Father, we’re stopped. I’m sorry.

We sat in silence for several moments. Father Liddell was staring straight ahead, past me and out through the windshield. Who knows what he was seeing? Was the glaucoma a little like trying to look through this windshield, through these waves of water.

Finally he said, Why aren’t we moving? Why aren’t we going somewhere? Don’t be naughty, Archie. Don’t be wicked, bubba.

I have no idea where Rosemary, the Wolseley, is, or where Claire, Bridget, Ian or Michael are now. We do not know if the boyfriend is a boyfriend still or who the father now calls for advice. The last thing I heard from the writing workshop was Charlie Vincent had been unfairly removed from his teaching position, but that for breaking the conditions of his tenure, the university had to pay him off handsomely. Amen.

Up high in the University Staff Club. At the window, Billy Hart was shaking his head over the unacademic city; Dr Halvorsen wished he would sit down again. Hart had a voice. Even the card players, the Works and Services men in their shirtsleeves, little top pocket bulges where their ties were stashed, had looked up from the game, their gins.

‘Have you ever seen out on the harbour when the tugs are bringing a big ship into port, Doc?’ said Billy. ‘Isn’t that a scene that stays. The two little red tugs guiding some huge ocean-going thing into its park.’

Dr Halvorsen hushed back. ‘It’s a great view.’ He nodded at the VC who was passing with his tray and who failed to place him. Halvorsen was not a Clubber. He was treating Billy. He was treating himself.

‘No,’ said Billy, ‘particularly that moment I mean,
Doc. Particularly then. Not just a great view.’

‘I see,’ said Dr Halvorsen. One Works and Services man, Dr Halvorsen noticed, had let his hand fold over slightly as he turned his head to Hart—the others quickly had his cards.

‘We are those two tugs, Doc. You and me. We’re the ones guiding this heavy, helpless, powerful thing into place, aren’t we.’

‘Oh, I do see.’

Billy tapped at the window. ‘Doc, I find that scene quite quite moving.’

Billy had sold Doc pharmaceutical equipment for several years. Now they were partners in the sunscreen business. Any nut could get into the Staff Club. Emeritus professors fell asleep on the sofas. Great minds, great minds. Card cheats. A table of powerful departmental secretaries gathered in the centre of the room.

‘Come and eat, Billy,’ said Dr Halvorsen. ‘It’s getting cold.’

Billy walked back to their table from the window. ‘It’s getting cold,’ he said. ‘Hey, Doc, this is a salad.’ He laughed, put his hand on Doc’s arm. ‘It’s getting cold.’ He got some sprouts on his fork. ‘You see my analogy, though? With the tugs.’

‘Are they there now?’

‘No, they’re not there now.’ Hart’s mouth was full of greens. Dr Halvorsen remembered why he was not
a Clubber—people want ed to make conversation all the time you were eating. ‘I was just thinking of an analogy.’

‘Yes, yes, because we’re piloting this project, that’s what you mean,’ said Dr Halvorsen. He’d been sharp. Hart stopped chewing.

‘Because we are those two tugs, Doc. Because we know the water round here. We know the dangers. We know the route. Hold on to our hand, we say, and we’ll take you there. We know, Doc.’

‘I get you.’

‘We know—you and me.’

‘I do hope so, Billy.’

‘Oh, Doc. Please, Doc. We
are
those tugs.’

‘Well,’ said Dr Halvorsen.

‘We are.’

‘These are just the tugs in the harbour here, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay. I can accept that. Yes.’

Hart laughed again, touched him again. ‘Boy, you guys are so cautious, aren’t you. Have to be though, don’t you? The sort of things you’re dealing with. The Academy. The Faculty.’ Billy waved his hand around the room, stopping at each table, anointing them with his fork. ‘The Science. The Commerce. The Humanity. I feel humble in such company, Doc.’

‘Humble?’

‘The learning, Doc. What you people have
learnt.
I’m amazed.’

‘Oh, that.’

Dr Halvorsen’s appetite was gone. He watched the VC bend secretively into the secretarial table and tell the women something.

‘Doc, do you mind if I say something?’ Billy had finished his food. Things were in his teeth. ‘You need to sit at the window table more often. Get out of your laboratories. There’s never any natural light in there. You look hunched to me. You need to spread your wings. Don’t you feel that sometimes? Get out and see things.’

The VC had finished; the secretaries laughed. Oh, Lord, how they laughed. ‘I do, Billy.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘Yes. Sometimes I do feel that.’

‘Just to see things.’

‘Yes.’

‘I have the utmost admiration for your work, Doc.’

‘Thank you, Billy.’

‘I admire everyone here.’

‘Everyone?’

‘I don’t know how you all got here, Doc. In my book anyone who gets into a university staff club deserves everything. You deserve everything, Doc. You. I want you to have everything.’

‘That’s very kind, Billy.’

‘I mean it.’

‘Thank you.’

On a sofa in the far corner, Avril from Physics seemed to have moved closer to the girl he’d been sitting with. Dr Halvorsen was sure she was an Honours student.

‘Doc?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not making it too obvious or anything, I’d love it if you could have a quick look around the room and tell me if there are any philosophers present.’

‘Philosophers?’

‘Just if there were any members of that department popped in for a bite. Just in your own time if you could indicate them to me.’

‘From the philosophy department?’

‘If you could.’

Dr Halvorsen did a quick scan, careful not to catch anyone’s eye. ‘There are no philosophers here, Billy.’

‘Really?’

‘Not today.’

‘Really?’

‘No.’

‘What about him over there? The chap on the sofa.’

‘Him? Avril? Vincent Avril? He’s no philosopher, I can tell you. He’s not from Philosophy.’

‘That’s a shame.’ Billy Hart looked genuinely disappointed. Hurt almost.

‘You hardly ever see them,’ said Dr Halvorsen.

‘Is that right?’

‘Hardly at all.’

‘Is that right?’

‘They’re very rare.’

‘Rare,’ said Billy Hart, stretching the vowel. He smiled all around himself. ‘Still, today I have supped with kings.’

‘Kings,’ said Dr Halvorsen. Avril, like Halvorsen, was in his retirement year.

‘I have dined with princes.’

‘Princes,’ said Dr Halvorsen. ‘That’s us.’

‘O lucky man.’

‘Yes.’

‘I love this room,’ said Billy Hart.

‘Me too,’ said Dr Halvorsen.

Barbara Halvorsen told her husband to be careful with that Billy Hart. He’d started dropping in for business dinners. He was an insinuator, she said. What did he insinuate? Doc asked her. No, she said, he insinuates
himself.
He gets into things. He talks strangely. ‘“Barbara,” he said the other night, “we are fortunate to have your husband in our country.” In our country!’

‘That’s just patter,’ Doc told her. ‘He has to talk like that. For instance, “I’m a UV ambassador.”’

‘Oh dear,’ said Barbara.

Billy liked Barbara Halvorsen, the way she combined last night’s pudding with tonight’s, running it all together with a fresh custard which was as smooth as milk. She was married to a genius. Being that close he guessed it was like leaning against a blackboard, some came off on you. This was what he hoped for too: an imprint.

Repossession, Gregory’s boss told him, is nine-tenths of the law. ‘How much can you bench-press, son?’

‘Two-eighty,’ said Gregory.

‘Okay,’ the boss said, ‘but this job is not about bench-pressing, understand. That don’t impress me. It’s about waiting. It’s about the Household. Ingress and egress. Patience. Let me see how you wait.’

‘Sorry?’ said Gregory.

‘Go and stand over against that wall.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Stand over there a second. Now wait.’

‘What should I be doing?’

‘Wait,’ his boss said. ‘Wait, Greg. Wait around that wall.’

He stood there and the boss looked at him. Gregory put his hands in his pockets. Then he took them out and folded his arms. He moved his feet.

‘I don’t know about you,’ said the boss. He came forward and felt along Gregory’s shoulder, pinched at a bicep. ‘You look pumped to me. You look primed.’
He crossed to his desk and handed Gregory a piece of paper. ‘Here’s the inventory and the address of the Household. Now go to it. Go out there and bring me back everything on that list.’

Gregory took the paper. ‘What about, you know,’ he said, ‘job training?’

‘Listen,’ said his boss. ‘Don’t you get smart with me, you big lump.’

The first batch Dr Halvorsen tested on his family. His wife said it was too oily. It clung to her skin, it caught the dirt, the sand. It was unpleasant. His daughter went out in the sun with it on her face and suffered a severe stinging sensation. She also put it on her children. He interviewed the children about their responses.

They cried. They said their grandfather was trying to hurt their skins. The youngest one said it tasted horrible. They had to be hosed down. Could they get their ice cream now? They shivered.

Outside the household. Gregory’s father’s double-breasted suit feels like armour in the afternoon heat. The wool sweats like steel. Under the suit he has an erection. Gregory is turned on not at the prospect of using his fists but at the thought of older women trying to seduce him. His boss left that out of the job description but he’s heard it from the other employees. Hard-up wives. The girlfriends of bankrupts and
losers. An indebted man, they said. You know the first person he’s going to be owing. Sometimes there was nothing you could do it seemed but comply. That was an oddly exciting word comply.

Billy Hart arrives home around six. He has been talking to another bank, handing out his stationery, flashing Dr Halvorsen’s letter of credentials, graphs and company literature. There’s a big kid in a suit slumped by the back door. Billy gets him inside and loosens his tie. He wonders where Megan is.

Gregory arrives back at the office. From William Hart, Esq, he has repossessed four glasses of water and two Disprin. Hart has the boy’s tie.

‘How can you kill them?’ said his granddaughter. ‘The little mice. The wee people.’

‘We don’t kill them, honey,’ said Dr Halvorsen.

‘You shine lights on them. You sun them to death.’

‘It’s for a higher cause,’ he said. ‘Besides, they don’t suffer.’

‘I’ve seen them on television, granddaddy. In their death throes.’

‘Their death throes?’

‘Oh, boy, we don’t know. We don’t know. But they put this tiny microphone right by their bodies so you could really hear the noises they make when they die. It was horrible. Please don’t ask me ever to try on your sunscreen again.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But I promise I’m gentle with them. I give them names, you know.’

‘Be serious.’

‘I am. I do.’

‘Like what? What names?’

‘Well. One’s got a pink nose. I call him Pinkie.’

‘Is Pinkie still alive?’

‘Of course!’

‘Could I have him?’

‘Have him?’

‘One day will come a time when you don’t need him. He will be exhausted. I want to nurse him back. I want Pinkie.’

‘All right.’

‘And what I would like before that is if you can give me a list of all the names of the mice. Even of the ones that you killed. I want to see what they were all called.’

Billy had a contact in Japan that he was working on. He liked to run his hand over the new, smooth surface of his desk while their faxes hooked up. He’d got the desk at auction and sanded it down. Someone had carved
I Hate
Mornings
into the wood. Billy sanded out the words, moving with vigour and some violence down through the layers of all the lives the desk had lived. The Japanese phone number flashed up on his little screen and the paper started feeding itself through
in its hesitant, winning way. This halting flow was, thought Billy, much like a conversation he was having with his Japanese counterpart; a formal introduction, bow … bow … harro … a tentative motion, an advance, the meat of their communication, then the swiftness … goodbye.

The second time the agency sent Ken. Wiry and smooth Ken, with a young daughter he brought to the office to have babysat by Raewyn. He got the television after some delay. He said he had to wrestle it off Billy Hart’s wife, Megan. She was watching something. Gregory immediately thought it must have been pornography that Mrs Hart was watching, with all the curtains pulled. Or something kinky that you wouldn’t think was sexual. He had once read an article in a magazine about what women find erotic. None of the women interviewed said the penis. Some mentioned the elbow. The hands came up quite a lot—strong-looking and not too hairy. One woman said the smell of fruit bats hanging in the botanical gardens in Melbourne. The fruit bathung upside down and urinated on itself. Something of this nature had detained Ken, Gregory was sure. Ken said Mrs Hart had told him the television was hers. She offered Ken some things of Billy’s in its place: an old electric guitar signed by that guy from The Shadows, or the golf trundler. Ken said he’d probably be back and would
look at those other items but for now it was important to secure the larger durables. Here, said Megan, take the microwave. I’m not cooking that bastard any more meals. That’s the last time I’m reheating for him.

‘So do you like The Shadows?’ said Ken.

‘Sure,’ said Megan.

‘That bit in “Apache”?’

‘I love “Apache”. It’s a special song for me.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘I’m not telling you.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘I was a singer.
Used
to be.’

‘Well now I play.’

‘I sang for a living once, can you believe it?’

‘Okay.’

‘Did you ever play for a living, Ken?’

‘Not a living,’ he said. ‘I played for love.’

‘Yeah.’

‘The vibrato arm is missing on this guitar, otherwise—’

‘That’s a shame.’

‘It sure is.’

Doc’s next idea is a suntan lotion for animals. They send out samples of the lotion to farmers. There is a questionnaire to fill in. Some farmers use the lotion on their cats with mixed results. A dog gains a healthy coat. Cattle respond brilliantly. One farmer puts it
on the inflamed udders of his milking stock. He is ecstatic. He wants a year’s supply. He wants it now. Where can he buy it? There is a section asking satisfied customers to supply a name for the product. A reward of one hundred dollars will be given to the successful entrant. After several crossings-out, the dairy farmer writes,
Wonderteat.