Authors: Fiona McGregor
Seeing Clark so discombobulated, Leon was seized with a juvenile desire to snigger. He bit his lip. ‘She seems alright, all things considered.’
‘I think it’s good you’ve come back to Sydney.’
‘I don’t know if I’ve come back permanently.’
‘But you’ve got a job working for Susan Jones.’
‘To tie me over. There’s nothing much to do in her garden, you know.’
‘Digging holes and filling ’em in again, hey?’
‘Story of my life. I think Susan wants me there partly to keep the line open. Her and Mum’ve been fighting.’
‘Really?’ Clark’s face brightened.
He looked good when he smiled, thought Leon. In a boyish, slightly nerdy way. His hair, still thick, was greying on the sides. When Clark moved back to the fridge, Leon caught a glint in his
eyes that he couldn’t quite read. He said, ‘I’m still trying to figure out why Mum is so important to Susan.’
‘They go way back.’
‘I always thought Susan was a bit of a bitch to her.’
‘That went both ways, you know, that little dalliance.’
‘I know.’ Leon was trying to think of the other friend, the dark-haired one that he had always preferred, but he couldn’t remember her name.
Clark said ruefully, ‘Mum’s still seeing that bloody tattoo artist.’
‘I’ve been reading about cancer on the net. There are changes you can make to your diet. There are people who’ve gone into remission indefinitely. Meditation seems to play a
big part. Mum told me she meditated when she got tattooed.’
‘Of course, I can see now what it was all about,’ Clark said sententiously. ‘It was a cry for help.’
‘I thought she seemed really well at Christmas.’ Leon had sworn off default positions but the family dynamic was bigger than him. He felt like a canoe on rapids: his older brother in
the absence of their father would take on the role of patriarch, even patronising their mother in the process, and he would step in to defend her. How could it be otherwise?
‘So did I. Until Blanche told me she’d been on ulcer pills.’
‘Really?’
Nell switched on the television and called out, ‘I want more juice, Daddy!’
They spoke more easily with the blare of cartoons behind them. ‘I think her generation’s very good at covering up,’ said Clark. ‘God, I shouldn’t give Nell so much
juice.’
‘Well, give her water then.’
‘Juice, Daddy! Daddy, juice! JUICE!’
‘You want to deal with the tantrum?’ Clark ferried the next glass out, muttering, ‘I’m killing my child with sugar and television.’ Leon heard him say to Nell,
‘What do you say?’ To which Nell replied with a big raspberry.
Again Leon wanted to snigger. ‘Anyway,’ he said placatingly when Clark came back into the kitchen, ‘we survived alright.’
‘You reckon?’ Clark picked up the paperweight from the message pad and held it in his hands. ‘It’s weird, isn’t it, being in the house now. It’s not ours
anymore.’
‘But it so still is. That’s what’s weird.’
‘It’s like the anchor’s been pulled and we’re just floating. I’m cooking dinner here tonight. Will you be around?’
‘I don’t know. I’m waiting to hear from George. Has anyone contacted Dad?’
‘Blanche was in touch with him about the sale of the house. He tried to get your contacts from me a while back, you know.’
Leon narrowed his eyes, the glass at his mouth. ‘You didn’t, did you?’
‘Nooo. I wish you wouldn’t be so paranoid, Leon. Maybe he’s changed his tune.’
‘He can’t have been that keen. Like I’m not in the phone book.’
‘You did fritter it all away, Leon.’
‘He doesn’t know what I did. And it isn’t his business anyway. I’m an adult.’
‘I suppose I should ring him. I haven’t spoken to him for months.’
‘D’you ever see him with Nell? Is he interested in her?’
‘Yeah, but he won’t put himself out. Besides which I’m not that inclined to waste my precious days with her dancing around Dad’s schedule, you know what I
mean?’
‘Sure. Does he call you or d’you call him?’
‘He sent me a cheque for my last birthday.’ Clark smiled cryptically. ‘I banked it.’
Leon wished briefly he’d traded a fraught or fake phone call for a cheque. Lacing himself into the pious triumph of the dieter didn’t stop him salivating.
As though reading his mind, Clark said, ‘You’ll be well off when Mum dies, you know. We all will. You can still buy a property.’
‘You’re completely writing off her going into remission?’
Clark did not write this off in conversation to Blanche. He said to Leon, ‘I’m just going by what she told me.’
‘It’s not how she put it to me.’
Clark assumed that his mother hadn’t told Leon the truth because she thought he couldn’t handle it. But he would have to find out somehow.
Leon watched Clark stacking his glass and again caught that strange glint in his eyes, like a window on the other side of the harbour winking in the sun. Something like the way he looked at his
daughter. A fondness. Clark seemed taller too. He held himself differently. There was ease in his gestures, his back was straight. ‘You look really well,’ Leon said.
‘I am well. I’m fit. I’ve got an income — a pittance — but at least I’m working. I’m happy in spite of everything with Mum.’
Suddenly it dawned on Leon. ‘You’ve met someone, haven’t you!’
‘Ye-up.’
‘Do tell.’
‘Oh, you know. Beautiful, smart, sexy as all hell.’
For all his gripes with his brother, Leon loved seeing him this soft. He was also delighted at his acuity about Clark’s emotions, and to have the opportunity to trade stories about
relationships. ‘So,’ he said and grinned, ‘when’s the wedding?’
‘Actually, ah, she’s already married.’
‘So what’s the state of play?’
‘One week we’re on, the next we’re off. I’m just here, waiting.’ Clark looked at the floor, more vulnerable than anything.
‘Be careful, mate. You might just be therapy for a marriage glitch. I’ve been through that one.’
Clark’s eyes widened. ‘You had an affair with a
married
man?’
‘George. We were together for years, on and off. Remember? While he was still with his long-term partner, on and off, who he went back to in the end. I brought him over here twice. You
don’t remember?’
‘Oh yeah.’ Clark looked nonplussed. ‘George.’
Jesus, it was useless. Leon stacked his glass in the dishwasher. He wouldn’t have minded sharing, empathising, but Clark just didn’t register. ‘I’m going back out to the
garden.’
He turned at the door and asked his brother something that had been on his mind since the first morning back home. ‘Hey, Clark, do you know much about our ancestry?’
‘We’re mostly Irish on Mum’s side. On Dad’s mostly English. But there are some missing links on Dad’s side and they might be Jewish. Or even Aboriginal. Like half
this country,’ he added with an opaque facetiousness.
‘Really?’ Leon was excited by the thought that his white blood might be tainted. It mollified the worry that his armband had been a mistake.
After finishing in the garden, Leon brought some flowers up to the house and placed them in a vase on the coffee table. He had left George a message two days ago but George still hadn’t got back to him. He wondered if the reception here was dodgy. He rang his mobile from the home phone to check: no, all clear. Besides which, he knew very well he had four bars on his phone. He was disgusted with himself, acting like a desperate girl, gardening with his mobile in his pocket, willing the man to call. He longed for somebody to vent to. Clark sure wasn’t interested. And how about that stupid remark about mummies and daddies? Fuck that for a joke. Leon peeled off his dirty clothes and walked into the shower. For a smart guy, Clark sure was a dumb cunt. Leon didn’t want to be here tonight. He didn’t want to be alone either.
Crossing the landing to his bedroom, looking down at the open plan empty of all life but the flowers he had cut that afternoon, Leon longed for company. Even with Clark banging away in the kitchen, the house at dusk seemed a cavernous lonely place. Leon had never thought of it as it had truly been these past eighteen months — a single-occupant residence, the occupant not much of an entertainer. In his mind, it remained in the past. His strongest memories were of the parties.
He loved the advertising parties. The music, the shouting and dancing. The tropical cocktails decorated so heavily it was a wonder they stood upright, the extravagant vases of vivid, sadistic flowers and the swirl of people in the open plan. For the first hour, the children were allowed to pass hors d’oeuvres. The women were so glamorous with their year-round tans, high shoes and flimsy dresses, their mouths filled with laughter and cigarette smoke. After being sent to bed, Leon would watch the parties with his siblings from the landing. There was a sense of unravelling in the late hours, of the illicit. It was better than television.
‘Which one do you like?’ Clark asked him one night. He meant the women.
‘Dunno,’ Leon replied nervously.
‘Who’s down there now?’ Blanche came and went from their vantage point like a referee. Three years younger than Clark, almost twelve, Blanche assumed authority over both her brothers. Clark resented this usurpation but at the same time was in thrall to her burgeoning femininity. Whenever he asserted himself, Blanche only laughed at him. Leon crouched beneath their tension.
‘Come on, Leon,’ Clark scoffed. ‘There must be one. I’ll take Susan.’
‘God, Clark. She’s like a hundred years old or something.’ Blanche spoke into the comic book she had brought out of her bedroom in case the boys thought she was taking all of this seriously. ‘And Leon’s
nine
.’
‘Which Susan?’ Leon asked.
‘Mrs Jones, you idiot. On the couch next to Mum.’
Leon leant forward to inspect the tall blonde in a strapless dress and matching shoes, a clatter of bangles along her brown arms. He imagined grappling with her and her folding and breaking like a stick insect. He was always the last to retire from this game into his and Clark’s room, a constantly disputed territory of disappearing assets and broken ceasefires. The delay in the completion of Clark’s attic had made him even more aggressive than usual. Leon’s eyes followed the path of a brunette across the living room, her undulating breasts, black swallow brows and crimson mouth. He admired the darkness of her. Her difference. ‘I’ll take her.’ He pointed with confidence.
‘Gina Totti? She’s a bitch.’
Why?’ Leon protested. He had fallen into the trap again. He knew how important a man’s taste in women was, but the correct one still eluded him and Clark as usual was ahead. Even Blanche snorted loudly. Leon sat morosely in a fug of humiliation.
Clark looked down at the brunette with disapproval. ‘I hate wogs.’
‘Don’t be such a racist, Clark,’ Blanche admonished. ‘It’s so uncool.’
Leon watched Susan walk into the chink of passage below then disappear. She wasn’t nearly as spunky as his brunette, who was walking towards the kitchen behind her. A man emerged from the kitchen and Gina stopped. He was dressed in white linen, like so many others at the party. He and Gina stood very close, talking urgently. ‘Look.’ Leon sniggered as the brunette was pressed up against the wall by the man. His excitement increased knowing that nobody in the living room could see this couple. Then he recognised the white linen shoulders as his father’s and regretted drawing attention to them. His brother and sister regarded the scene below with prim mouths. One of their father’s fingers slid beneath the strap of Gina’s dress like a witchetty grub. Leon could smell his brother’s breath as he cursed over the banister. Their mother was now heading for the passage from the living room with a handful of dirty glasses. Susan exited the kitchen, saw Gina and their father, then walked down the passage, colliding with their mother at the other end. Something spilt on Marie’s dress and, with Susan steering her out of the passage, she abandoned the glasses and began to mount the stairs, head down, not noticing the children until she was level with them. ‘Go to bed
now
.’ She went into her bedroom and slammed the door.
Clark’s eyes were glittering. ‘Say, Blanche. You know we got rats in the cellar?’
But did Clark really say that? Leon wondered as he walked down the stairs to join him in the kitchen. Hadn’t he — Leon — followed his mother into the bedroom, to help her pick out another dress? He remembered picking his favourite Marimekko. In which case he wouldn’t have seen let alone heard Clark say anything to Blanche. But the dress memory could have been from another time. Still, the glittering eyes of Clark remained etched in his mind, and the cut of the remark. Then there was the liaison of his father and Gina Totti. Yes, Gina, that was her name. Gina had been Leon’s first attraction, the premier signal of his tastes, even if the gender had been wrong. He wondered what had become of her.
During those first weeks, Marie sometimes woke in the middle of the night and remembered she had cancer. She lay there thinking of all the possible reasons the disease had chosen to occupy her body. She examined her family first of all. One grandfather had died of Parkinson’s disease, one grandmother of a stroke. Her sister Judy in Tasmania had died in a car accident aged sixty-one. Could she have taken to her early grave the guilty gene? Or the other grandparents who had died before Marie was born, of what she didn’t know: was it from them? Or, most likely, her mother with those mysterious gynaecological problems that hadn’t actually killed her. But might have.
She thought about her diet. The white bread and chocolate biscuits; tinned corn, peas, beetroot and tomatoes; the takeaways and battery chickens year after year. All those chemicals and hormones; and had she fed cancer to her children as well?
She began to see cancer everywhere. Reports on new treatments, new research and funding proliferated. The spiralling figures, the death toll. Her pulse raced at every news item as though she were seeing excerpts from her diary on the front page.
Was it in the packaging? One program suggested that fire retardants, now worked into every household product from telephones to couches, were responsible. Was it pesticides? How many apples had she eaten without washing? Flea treatment, cockroach baits, toxic honey for ants in the kitchen. And how many clouds of insect repellent on how many summer nights had drifted back down, cool and deadly, onto her sleepy face.
Short of living in a tree
, said an environmental scientist with breast cancer on TV,
I don
’
t think we can avoid it.