Max (4 page)

At the end of a rare paddle with his little brother Woody, Max had made the mistake of telling him about his dream. Woody said it reminded him of how he felt about rivers – like he was the water and the water was him. Which was one of Woody's many comments that could drive you crazy and suck you in at the same time.

M
AX SLID HIS KAYAK into the rubber slings nailed to the back wall of the house. He had a hot shower and then lay on his bed. He heard his father wake up and curse the cold weather. He heard the rustle of a newspaper, the tearing of toilet paper, wiping his bum, the flush, the cistern filling and then the shower running over skinny feet and down the plughole.

‘Havin' breakfast, Max?' Woody poked his head in the door.

Max gazed straight ahead. ‘I'll come in a minute.'

‘Come on. I'll give you some of the jam I made. It's good.'

‘I know your jam's good, mate. Just leave me alone. I'll be out soon.'

Woody's jam had been a weekend activity with one of their dad's girlfriends. Her name was Naomi and she had it bad for the father. She was also into Buddhism. Somehow, homemade jam and Buddhism seemed to go together like the Vatican and the Pope, or peaches and cream.

Naomi told Woody it was wrong to capture lizards and ants and butterflies. And it was even worse if you ripped their wings off or dropped hot candle wax on them, just to watch them squirm. She bought him a book on ants, with stories of their amazing strength and purpose, social organisation and will to protect and survive. They started an ant farm together. Woody wrote about it for a month in his school journal.

Max picked up a pillow and hugged it to his face. He heard his door open again, knew it was his father and said, ‘I'm alright.'

‘OK mate. Just checking.'

Woody and Dave were in the kitchen when Max walked in. His father was making lunches at the bench. Woody glanced at Max, pushing his mop of fair hair out of his eyes.

‘What'll it be today, Sir? Lightly munched snails, sprinkled with garlic sprouts on a bed of moutarde grainee?' asked Dave.

Woody grinned. ‘Not today, Dave. I feel like fried ants sprinkled with shredded butterfly wings.'

‘Don't let Naomi hear you saying that', Max said. ‘She'd probably reckon you're eating your relatives from a past life.'

‘Ah, the Max has come to life'. Dave looked gently at his oldest son.

‘Yep. Back in the land of the living...' and the rest of the sentence fell like a cold pancake onto the kitchen table.

The table, made of oregon, was one of the things Dave got when the divorce and settlement came through. He also ended up with the kids. Dave stayed in town with them and Meg moved up to a Victorian coastal town. Brown's Beach was isolated, beautiful and mysterious. Large and small rivers, heathland cliffs, mountains, the rolling and rushing surf, dunes covered with marran grass.

Meg had two jobs, one at the abalone co-op and another in the video shop. She was an easygoing person whose only wish was to avoid anger in her life. Not that she didn't have a backbone. She did. But she was afraid of anger and hate-filled words and the effect they had on people.

So Dave got the oregon table. It had been a wonderful place to sit around. Every now and then some of Dave's mates would come around on a Friday night, get a bit tanked up, maybe a little stoned (if they wanted to remember their youth) and play cards, listen to music and watch TV. Sometimes Max's mates would be there. Once a girl called Jodi turned up in Max's life but after a couple of love bites and a hundred phone calls, she disappeared from the kitchen table.

Dave's girlfriends came and went. There was always something exotic, eccentric or mad about them. Cathy, the one before Naomi, was into numerology. She was a nurse like Dave, so they always had plenty to rave about. She shuffled numbers like a pack of cards.

One Sunday afternoon Woody was playing in the loungeroom with his plastic soldiers. Max was trying to finish an assignment, thinking about the run he and Lou would do that night.

Cathy said: ‘You know Dave, if you add both our birth dates together and multiply that by the number you come up with when you subtract my age from your age, the result is a ruling number 7... which luckily, we both have. And if you do that with my ex's numbers, you arrive at a ruling number 3... and historically and astrologically 3s and 7s have never got on well. What's your ex-wife's birth date, Dave?'

‘Don't remember', said Dave, getting up to find himself a beer.

And that was the last time Cathy's face was seen at breakfast around their kitchen table.

Lou, of course, was often there. Max knew almost nothing about his family, except that he was the only son. His older sister had run off to another state looking for work and escaping her parents. Lou hadn't seen her for four years and his parents didn't talk about it, which meant Lou wasn't to raise the subject. His father worked in an office in the city somewhere and his mum was a primary school teacher. His parents would go to work, come home, eat tea, watch TV, go to bed, get up, go to work...

About the only thing that Lou ever mentioned was his father's television watching habits. ‘He comes in at night, takes off his tie and puts on a jumper. He switches on the telly, reads the paper, eats his tea, then reads a book, all the time the TV's blaring away. Oh yeah, and when I come in he nods at me and I nod back.'

Lou spent many nights sitting around the oregon table, his long hair falling over his face. A face that always appeared to be puzzled, in school or out. Apart from when he was with Max, Lou was quiet, often answering others' questions with a smile or a quizzical look.

That face hovered in Max's brain, while Woody and Dave continued to chat.

‘Want some jam, Max?' asked Woody. ‘Want some, Dave?' he asked his dad.

Woody's habit of calling their father ‘Dave' rankled Max. He wasn't sure why. Maybe because it showed what good friends his father and Woody were. They joked around. They both liked football – watched games, footy panel shows, videos of their favourite grand finals. Dave put up with and even encouraged Woody's constant stream of whacky reflections and questions about life, the cosmos, ants and sex.

‘Max?'

‘Yes, Woody?'

‘Maybe Lou's still around.'

Dave, with his back to his two sons, kept slicing the bread.

‘He's probably gone into another world, just like ours – maybe exactly like ours.'

‘Yeah?' said Max lifting his eyes from the wooden tabletop to look straight into Woody's bright eyes. ‘Where's this parallel universe? Next door?'

Dave placed the bread knife on the bench and looked out the kitchen window.

‘Maybe... maybe we go in and out of different worlds and just don't remember it.' Woody fidgetted with the jar of jam. ‘Lou might be a spirit in a next door world – starting all over again.'

‘Yeah. And he got there by walking through the back of his bedroom cupboard.' Max almost regretted his snipe but not enough to stop him. ‘He's probably riding on Aslan's back right now.' He caught his dad looking at him but he was on a rapid he didn't want to get off. ‘Yeah, Woody. Lou's hanging onto the bloody lion's mane. Instead of lying in a bloody box, stiff and hard and cold...'

‘...and dead', his father said. Max stared into Dave's face, his eyes lost at sea, his face shadowed by the rushing storm clouds.

‘...yes, and dead', Max said. He let his head rest on the table, nose squashed against the wood, puddles of tears running into pools, while his father put his arms around Max's shoulders and buried his face into the nape of his son's neck. There in the warm toast-filled air of the kitchen.

‘If there was something that could fix it for you, I'd do it or buy it or say it... but I don't know what it is or where it is.' Dave looked across at Woody, smiled and said, ‘Unless of course, it's Woody's jam.'

In the days and nights that followed, the memory of Fatman and the night on the bridge faded. And Dave slowly stopped asking him if he was alright. But Lou never went away.

M
AX'S FATHER HAD BEEN A NURSE for about ten years. Every third week Dave had night shift at the hospital and Max was expected to stay home and look after Woody.

One night he and Woody were alone in the house eating take-away in front of the telly. It had been nearly a week since Lou died. Dave had given Max some time off from school which he'd spent alone, watching television, playing Nintendo, sleeping in and moping around the house.

Max never talked much to Woody; there was something about Woody's mind that reminded him of a minefield. So he stuck to questions and commands.

‘What do you want for tea Woody?'

‘Have you had your shower yet?'

‘What time did Dad say you had to be in bed?'

‘Don't switch the channel, mate. I'm in charge of the remote.'

Or, on this particular night: ‘Don't let those bloody ants out of your farm Woody. They're not like bloody dogs, y'know. You can't take them for a walk.'

Woody ignored most of his brother's remarks but this one made him think of large black ants with small dog collars around their necks, their owners commanding them to ‘heel'.

‘They're really interesting, Max. They've all got a job to do and they just get on with whatever they have to do.'

Max stared at the television.

‘And they help each other. Whenever danger's around they grab their eggs...'

Max tossed the remote onto the coffee table with a sigh. ‘And whenever one of their mates breaks a leg, they cart ‘em back and eat them. Great friends to have, I must say, Woody.'

His little brother was not to be put off. ‘Yeah well. That helps to keep them going. They don't seem to worry about dying. Just accept it. It happens to all of them. It happens to us. Dave says that's the only thing you can rely on – that and birth. He says everything that lives has to die.'

Max got up from the couch. He felt heavy and his heart was leaden. ‘Geez, Woody...'

The TV droned on. Some crook was caught, his pregnant girlfriend fell in love with the copper, the cop couldn't handle the idea of bringing up another man's child (especially the child of a crim), they both parted sadly wishing it had happened in another time, another space.

Woody watched his brother from the corner of his eye. He slid his fingers along the top of his ant farm.

‘Max. You know, coming back as an ant wouldn't be all that bad. What do you want to come back as, Max?'

‘A younger brother,' replied Max. ‘Then I could get my own back. You better go to bed. And don't forget to switch off the telly.'

W
ALKING ALONG WELLINGTON ST was the best part of the school day. There was every kind of shop imaginable but the ones that grabbed Max's attention were the Vietnamese groceries with their boxes filled to the brim. Moist vegetables, yellow marrows, lime green bok choy, Chinese broccoli with pale yellow starlit flowers, thousands of baby red chillies. Nodules of ginger, garlic tinged with purple, styrofoam boxes of dark brown nuts, chunks of Chinese cabbage, dark green zucchinis and lemon grass lying in shallow wicker baskets. The smell of the spices and packets of dried mushrooms blended with the salty tang of dried fish.