S
abiha arrived home from burying her father on a Tuesday. The café was silent and empty. The chairs upended on the tables in the dining room. The curtains closed across the window—for the first time ever. A few minutes after midday Sabiha was in the kitchen preparing lunch for herself and John when a shadow fell across the wall in front of her. She turned around. A young man of eighteen or twenty was standing in the doorway to the lane. He was so like Bruno it was uncanny. He was holding a box of tomatoes in his arms.
‘Good morning, Madame Patterner,’ he said. ‘I am Bruno Fiorentino, my father’s son. I will carry on his business as he would have wished me to.’ He was very nervous and delivered his speech as if he had rehearsed it. ‘My father greatly respected you
and Monsieur Patterner. My family does not blame you or Monsieur Patterner for this tragedy which has befallen us. I understand that you have just buried your own father. For this I would like to extend to you my family’s condolences. Such a loss is terrible.’ He took a step into the kitchen. ‘Please accept this box of tomatoes as a gift from my family. I shall be carrying on the business as my father would have wished me to.’ He leaned down and set the box of tomatoes on the floor by the door and straightened.
Sabiha could not take her eyes from him. She had one hand to her throat, her chest tight with emotion. She was not sure she could speak to the young man without crying.
‘I can’t accept your gift,’ she said. ‘There’s no point in you coming here ever again. We have no customers left. They have fled from the police and are either in hiding or have gone back to Tunisia.’
‘New customers will come,’ he said. He smiled. ‘Your cooking is famous.’
When he smiled Bruno lived in his eyes. ‘Chez Dom is closed,’ she said and had to turn away to hide her tears. ‘We’re going to Australia. Please go,’ she urged him gently. ‘Please go.’ Tears were running down her cheeks. She did not wipe them away. ‘I am so sorry.
There is nothing I can do.’ She turned around to face him and said gently, ‘Go away, Bruno, please!’
He looked down at the box of tomatoes and murmured helplessly, ‘They are a gift from my family,
madame
.’ He picked up the box and held it, his eyes on her.
She saw his humiliation and went to him and put her hand on his arm, touching him as a mother might wish to touch her son, farewelling him on a long journey. She was weeping and was unable to speak.
W
hen I came home yesterday evening after a session with John at the Paradiso, I was looking forward to having a quiet drink on my own. I needed to spend a bit of time on my own digesting what John had told me. He had surprised me. He had shocked me, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to deal with it.
When I came into the kitchen, Clare and her new man, were having a drink together. One of his horrible CDs was on loud. Clare was leaning against the stove with a glass of wine in her hand. She looked a bit rumpled and red in the face, as if she’d already had a few. It wasn’t a good look. Her man, Robin the Cap, was sitting at the table as usual, his chair pushed back and his head down on the table, chin on his left arm—cap on, of course. He was squinting along his
outstretched right arm at a can of Foster’s Lager in his fist. Stubby was lying under the table, his head on his paws too, his usual position. Was the Cap mimicking the dog? Was that something a stand-up would practise? When I was young, stand up meant your girlfriend had ditched you.
Like Clare, I didn’t sit down. How could I? The Cap was spread all over the table. I said hello and Clare said, ‘Hi, Dad,’ as if she was trying to sound younger than her years. We don’t usually say hi to each other. I didn’t actually hear the Cap offer me a greeting. But then my hearing is not as good as it once was and the music was very loud, so I may have missed it. I don’t want to be unfair to him. Prejudice is a nasty thing. Haven’t I spent half my life writing about it? In fact I have given the matter a great deal of thought in my books one way and another over a period of several decades. I poured myself a glass of wine and stood drinking it, looking down at the Cap. He was looking back at me, his head on the table. He was smiling.
I raised my glass to him and shouted, ‘Cheers!’
Clare yelled, ‘Cheers, Dad!’
When I looked at her she gave me a pleading smile.
The Cap was looking up at me from under his frayed peak. He yelled, ‘So what did you used to do for a living, Ken?’ Yelling seemed no effort to him.
I suppose it was necessary to yell in the house where he lived with his friends all playing loud rap, or whatever it is. I don’t
know
what it is. I know Shostakovich’s string quartets. Particularly the Sixth. That’s what I know.
I looked at Clare. So she hadn’t told him proudly that her dad was a famous novelist? I felt sad to know this. But why should she have? She saw my pain and leaned and turned the music down. Didn’t any of this matter anymore? ‘I
used
to be a writer,’ I said. ‘Until I retired.’
‘Books? Or what?’
He was still squinting up at me, evidently intrigued by the unusual angle from which he was viewing my features.
‘Novels,’ I said shortly.
‘Fiction novels?’
‘That’s the kind.’
‘I might read one,’ he said. He examined the can in his hand with interest, as if he had never seen a can of Foster’s Lager before.
I don’t think he’s ever going to read a book. Him reading one of my books is not something I can imagine. There’s a limit to what you can make up. He lives in a post-novel world—fiction novels or not. Not that Clare herself has ever been much of a reader. I think she read one of my books when she was in high
school. And that was about it. And maybe she didn’t quite finish that one either. I remember her carrying it around in her school bag for a very long time. Every now and then she’d hold it up and show me and give me an encouraging smile.
Clare said, ‘Hawthorn won, Dad.’
The Cap sat up and raised his can in the air. ‘We thrashed Collingwood! And
I
was
there
to see it, Ken!’ He drank from the can and put it down on the table in front of him. ‘We’re third on the ladder.’
I realised he was waiting for a response from me. I said, ‘Terrific, Robin. Good old Hawthorn! Here’s to the Hawks!’ I leaned and touched my glass to his beer can.
‘Up
the Hawks!’
These two make me feel dumb and inarticulate. My grasp of language closes down on me when I’m with them and I stumble forward helplessly while they look on, unsurprised by my awkwardness, my fragility, the failure of my remarks to make any sense, my complete lack of a cool understanding of what’s going on. They don’t expect anything better. That’s the trouble. When I’m with John I feel youthful and optimistic. I feel like my old self. My viable self. The man in charge. With these two I am an old man and they are telling me I am an old man in every way it is possible for one person to tell another person something without actually putting
the matter into so many words. Literalism, the enemy of art, is not needed. They do it without thinking.
They are all coming to dinner on Wednesday evening. I know, I didn’t need to do this to myself. But I’m doing it to satisfy my entirely selfish desire to see Sabiha sitting at our old dining table being a tragic beautiful exotic princess, one of our antique crystal goblets in her hand, the red wine gleaming like the blood of a bull in the candlelight. I want to set her up for this, as if I’m a portrait painter, Max Ernst setting up his model for his
Attirement of the Bride.
What a picture that is! The most unsullied eroticism. I’d like to know what Sabiha would think of it. It’s in Venice. A good reason for going there. We’ve not had a dinner party in the dining room since years before Marie died. We stopped doing that kind of thing. How dumb is it to want to see Sabiha in this way, though? How
old man
is it of me? It’s something I’m never going to confess to my daughter. There are some things we don’t tell anyone.
Wednesday seems to be the only evening Sabiha can spare. I’m feeling anxious about it. But then I’m anxious about a lot of things these days. There is no flow to my life, that’s the trouble. What
don’t
I feel anxious
about is more the question. I can’t decide whether to be completely informal with them on Wednesday and just sit around the kitchen with some finger food and a dozen cans of beer, or whether to put on a grand show for them in the dining room and demonstrate my respect. I can only have my dream image in the dining room. Clare hasn’t offered to cook. And I haven’t asked her. The Cap will be there, with his head on the table I suppose. I asked Clare, ‘Why can’t he sit up at the table like everyone else?’ She said, ‘Dad!’ So I left it at that. His legs fill the space under the kitchen table and his arms angle about all over the top. He doesn’t seem to notice that there are things on the table that he might knock off. How do they sleep together? Clare must be crouched in a corner of the bed. I can’t sit down when he’s here without being afraid I’m going to touch him.
And he’s always here. I think he’s moved in. I’m not sure. I asked Clare but her answer left me no wiser. I don’t understand them. We are not of the same world anymore. Venice beckons. It’s not funny anymore. It never was. They can have the house. After all, what do I need a house for at my age?
It’s not just Robin the Cap, however. It’s not just him. And it’s no good blaming him. After all, he’s not intentionally rude. He’s not aggressive. And he seems
to genuinely care for my daughter. More than once I’ve noticed his expression soften when he looks at her. Is that love, or not? From memory, that’s love. I should be grateful. I’ve never seen him drink more than two cans of beer and he doesn’t seem to be on drugs. Though how would I know? Anyway, Clare has to live her own life, in my house or somewhere else. And she has a right to choose who she sleeps with. I don’t want to think about that side of it. No, it’s not him. This goes a lot deeper for me than my daughter’s boyfriend.
I’d just about decided to make a start on John and Sabiha’s story when we had our last meeting at the Paradiso. Yes, that’s right, I’d decided to come out of my retirement for one last throw. This is not a surprise to anyone, I realise that. My retirement was genuine, but John and Sabiha’s story seemed to be just too much of a gift from the gods for me to pass it up—Sabiha’s old gods, undoubtedly. The playful ones. So why
was
I passing it up? I hadn’t been able to find an answer to this question that carried any conviction. In fact I knew I was going to regret it for the rest of my days if I let their story slip past without having a go at it. So a couple of evenings ago I spent several hours at my desk reading through my notes, from beginning to end, to see what I had. It was all there. The whole thing.
It was a lovely Melbourne autumn day. Autumn is the best time of the year in Melbourne. The oppressive heat of summer is gone and the sun gives just the right amount of warmth to the air to make life comfortable without a jacket or a cardigan, no wind and maybe just one or two innocent white clouds going by. You have to
be
here. People are happy on days like this. Strangers say hello. Even young women smile at me. And no one’s in a hurry. It’s the kind of day Chinese students get up and offer me their seat on the tram.
John and I were sitting outside the Paradiso after lunch at a table on the footpath. All the tables were taken. There was a lot of chatter and laughter going on around us in about three languages. John told me he didn’t know Australia when he got home, things had changed so much, but not in ways he’d expected. He laughed and said, ‘Sabiha was more at home in Carlton than I was.’ Every now and then a big dry leaf from the plane tree above us came twisting and spiralling down and one of the young women at the next table made a grab for it and laughed. Watching the girl grabbing for the leaf I remembered telling Clare when she was a little girl that if we catch a falling leaf our wish will come true. The two of us running across
the oak lawn at the Botanical Gardens chasing falling leaves, Marie sitting on the grass by our picnic watching us or drawing in the pad on her knees. Marie was always turning her world into drawings. She never joined in our games but she loved to see me and Clare running around having fun. It was a magical time for the three of us. Clare must have been about Houria’s age then. A little kid full of confidence. It used to break my heart to watch her running across the grass, her skinny little legs going like clockwork. I see kids doing that now and I stop and stare at them and my throat tightens. As a general thing I don’t have a problem with being old or even with getting older, but when I see the beauty of children I do regret that life must soon pass from me and be no more. It’s a dry kind of regret and I don’t weep, but it’s real enough.
I thought John had finished his story. He had left me with that affecting image of Sabiha and Bruno’s son in the kitchen of Chez Dom, the place sad and closed up and finished, its history done with. The young man doing his best to deal with what had happened in a manner that would dignify the memory of his murdered father. I wasn’t expecting a lot more after that. I had one or two questions, like did they ever catch up with Nejib’s brother, and stuff like that, but I had decided these things could wait for another time.
We were sitting there saying nothing. I was listening to the conversation in Spanish at the next table. Lorca’s language! It was a pleasure to listen in. I stopped thinking about myself. There was no expectation playing between me and John, and the silence between us was easy. I thought we’d done for the day, for the whole thing. Life was going on around us and I had a new story to write.
Then I realised John was looking at me steadily, a smile in his eyes. He said, ‘I want to thank you, Ken.’
‘Oh, there’s no need for thanks,’ I said. ‘It’s me who ought to be thanking you.’
‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what you’ve done for me. I came home from France after sixteen years with nothing of my own to show for it. Not a thing. I felt as if whatever gifts or ambitions I’d once possessed had been wasted. I felt guilty about this failure to make sense of my life. When we got back to Australia I made the mistake of taking Sabiha to Moruya. I felt sure there would be nothing for me in Melbourne. I couldn’t believe I’d get a job with the Victorian education department after being away so long, so I didn’t even try. I went home to Moruya to see Mum and Dad. Mum was pretty far gone with Alzheimer’s and never did work out who Sabiha was. But she seemed to like her, whoever she thought she
was. Sabiha was depressed for a long time, grieving for Bruno. For a year or so I didn’t think she was going to get over it. If it hadn’t been for Houria I wonder if she would have come through it. I don’t imagine she will ever forget him. But she’s found a way of living with it. We don’t talk about it. Whatever she feels now it’s her private sorrow. We had five pretty tough years up there. Then I heard about this teacher shortage in Melbourne. You know the rest.’
He sat there saying nothing again and I thought this was definitely it. I was on the point of asking him if Sabiha knew he had been telling me their story when he looked up at me and said, ‘When you started coming into the shop on Saturdays and then I saw you at the library I didn’t know who you were. Then I saw you on the daytime replay of
The Book Show
and realised you were a writer. I’d heard your name, but I’d never read any of your books. When I found myself standing next to you at the shallow end of the pool that Saturday I decided it was a sign. That’s when I asked you to join me for a coffee. Remember?’
‘A pool-water coffee,’ I said. ‘Yes, I do remember.’
‘I was planning on making use of you.’
‘How do you mean?’ I said. But I believed I knew what he meant, his need to move his story on and get it out of his system had been obvious.
‘I had no confidence that anyone would be interested in our story. But our story was all I had. It was all I’d brought home with me after sixteen years in Paris, and five years wasting our time in Moruya. I decided to try our story out on you. Like you said, you were my perfect listener. Your interest has given me the confidence to write it. When I get home after each of our sessions, I spend hours writing what I’ve been telling you.’ He waited for my reaction.
I said nothing.
‘I’ve been staying up till two and three in the morning writing it. Once you start, it’s all just lying there waiting for you, isn’t it? I’ve more or less got a draft of the whole thing.’