‘Lovely,’ Chanteleer sighed, then raised the book to breathe on his signature. To dry the thick ink, I presumed.
Or to leave something more.
A holy exhalation, perhaps?
That night, as we finished the dishes, Lootie said, ‘You know, Charlie, I couldn’t have forgotten that Sebastian [first name basis, so soon?] was speaking to our Children’s Literature class tomorrow. I must have missed the announcement.’
I slammed the cutlery drawer.
‘But now that I know, I’m really looking forward to it,’ she said.
‘Too bad I won’t be there,’ I muttered.
‘You don’t like him, do you?’ she said.
I was heading for the living room, the sofa there, to watch TV. ‘He’s not my cup of tea,’ I called over my shoulder.
‘I don’t think he was too impressed with you either,’ she fired back. ‘Not after you made a fool of yourself when you dropped that money.’
‘It’s not like I farted,’ I said, looking under the cushions for the program.
‘Just as well.’
‘Bite me,’ I grunted, which was childish, I admit, and led her to chuck a saucepan into the sink then stomp off, slamming the bedroom door.
Left alone, I found a bottle of red and went to sit on the bench beneath the elm. There were times when the combination of solitude, stars, and a couple of reds solved the world’s problems.
I
am an ordinary man. Nothing reminds me of my ordinariness more than Mondays. Nor did the following morning offer anything to disprove this thesis.
Lootie got up without a word, dressed in her usual (sexy) jeans and skivvy, then left for uni without a word.
I dragged myself off the sofa, took a leak and made coffee. Mondays and Fridays I worked for XPress Couriers. I pulled on my uniform: red Spandex bike pants and a red T-shirt, a yellow X stretching across my gut. Big as I was, I rode a pushbike all day (the fat clung), delivering documents to suits in highrise offices.
If I let the apparent superiority of others get to me, I sometimes reminded myself that there were worse jobs. I could, for example, be my own long-suffering bike seat, wedged up my own (fat) arse.
When I finally free-wheeled into the front yard at four that afternoon Lootie wasn’t home. I took a shower, found a clean tracksuit (having worn ball-crushing
Spandex all day), grabbed a beer and sat on the garden bench beneath the ever sympathetic elm.
The sun was setting. Grey clouds hung heavy across the sky. A black shadow crawled in off the street, crept over our garden wall, and inched towards my feet. I let it devour my socks, my knees, my thighs. I watched it sneak upwards, towards my nuts, which I found a little threatening, when Lootie arrived.
‘Hey,’ I said, smartening up.
‘You home?’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘Takeaway?’ she asked, pressing her books against her breasts like an American college girl.
‘We need to talk,’ I said. ‘Have a beer with me?’ I wanted to push back that shadow creeping over my wall. I wanted to put the bad words behind us, to apologise, to confess that I was a loser (compared to Chanteleer, at least), lacking any vestige of social graces.
‘Nah, not tonight,’ she said, going inside. ‘I’ve got an assignment to write. I’m having a shower. Nick out for Chinese, okay?’
I sat, downing another can. The last thing I felt like was getting back on a pushbike. So I sat, drinking. Two kids walked by, a boy and a girl, the boy in front, kicking a rock, the girl trailing behind.
‘Hey,’ I said.
The boy ignored me, the girl looked back and smiled.
It was nearly dark, and still I sat, until the house door opened and Lootie called, the light from the bulb in the hall gilding her hair, ‘Are you still there? I’m hungry.’
‘I’m going,’ I said. I went in, picked up my wallet from the kitchen table, stuck it in my back pocket, threw a wobbly leg over my bike, and left.
Ho’s Chinese was a block away. One of those dingy suburban joints with a fly baffle of multicoloured plastic strips hanging across the door. Inside was narrow and dark, heavy with the steamy fug of takeaways. To the left was a tubular chrome table, its red laminex top graced with a soy sauce bottle, a menu and a stack of newspapers. The two kids who had walked past our place were sitting there. To the right was a counter made of some grey marbled stuff.
I went there to order.
Old man Ho took the stub of a pencil from behind his ear and wrote something. Hopefully, Chinese for Mongolian lamb, steamed rice on the side.
‘Ten minute,’ he said, disappearing into the gloom at the rear.
I caught a glimpse of a squat, black-haired female in a grubby smock, no doubt Ho’s youngest. He shouted something at her and I heard the hiss of steam.
I looked around.
Since the kids occupied the table, I went outside to look down the street. It was dark now, and raining. Tyres hissed on the wet bitumen.
Hissing inside, hissing outside.
The view didn’t improve my mood so I pushed through the plastic to see if Ho had finished my order. The two kids were still there so I turned my back to the counter, folded my arms across my chest, and waited.
The boy was kicking the girl under the table. He kicked her casually, swinging his right leg so that his shoe hit the shin of her left leg. He was doing this slowly, like a pendulum swinging. Methodically. Since he was wearing sneakers, he wasn’t intending to hurt, just annoy. His eyes were on the girl’s face, waiting. He was the sort with freckles and prickly ginger hair. He wore shorts and a dirty white T-shirt with a football on the front. Across this ball were the words K
ICK
A
RSE
. I guess he was about nine or ten.
The girl might have been his sister. She was younger, maybe seven, with yellow hair (much like Lootie’s, only oily), parted down the middle in what is unkindly referred to as a ‘bum part’, held back with bobby pins. There was no style to this hair; it hung long and lank until it stopped unevenly at her shoulders. ‘Ratty’ is a word that comes to mind. She was wearing a grubby red-and-white checked dress, way too big for her. Gingham, the material is called, if my mother taught me right. The girl had the top off the soy sauce bottle and was using it to make black circles on a newspaper. When the sauce wore off the stopper, she put it back on the bottle, gave the bottle a shake, then started again. She was making a chain of black rings.
‘Nice,’ I said, because I was bored.
The girl looked up and smiled. Only one grown-up front tooth was through.
The boy stopped kicking and turned his head to me. ‘I seen you in the yard back there.’
‘Having a beer,’ I said. ‘I’ve been working all day.’
The girl paid me no heed, but the boy looked at me harder. ‘You get pissed every night after work?’ he said,
turning the lidless soy sauce bottle absently between his hands.
‘I was having a beer,’ I said. ‘That’s not getting pissed.’
The boy gave me a sly smile. ‘That’s what me dad said, every day, like, until me mum chucked him out.’
‘Did not,’ the girl said, snatching back the bottle. ‘He left hisself. Because he wanted.’ And she returned to stamping the freshly sauced lid on the paper.
I was saved from responding by the appearance of Ho’s youngest. ‘Chick chow mein,’ she said in three Oriental squeaks. And in two more, ‘Bag—noodle.’
The boy got up. ‘How much?’ he said.
‘That be nine dollar sev’ty.’
(About seven squeaks.)
The boy dug in his pocket, then checked the note and coin in the flat of his hand. ‘I only got nine forty,’ he said, slapping the money on the counter.
‘No take noodle,’ Ho’s youngest said, pulling back a white paper bag.
‘Me mum can pay later,’ the boy said. ‘Thursday’s pension day.’
Ho’s youngest turned to the back of the shop, about to call for help. I said, ‘I’ll make up the difference, okay?’
‘Thirty cent now,’ Ho’s youngest squeaked. ‘Then noodle.’ She stuck her hand out at me.
I paid. She pushed the noodle bag towards the boy. ‘He pay,’ she said. ‘You take.’
‘Thanks mate,’ the boy said, battling with the plastic fly strips clogging the doorway.
Only then did the girl stand, picking up the newspaper she had marked. ‘You could have taken this instead of the money,’ she said, holding the paper out to Ho’s youngest. ‘It’s a dress-up chain. See? If you watch it, it will turn to gold.’ Ho’s youngest stared wide-eyed. ‘But since he paid the extra, you’re not getting it,’ and turning to follow her brother, she screwed the paper up and chucked it in a corner.
Lootie was on the sofa in the living room when I got home. She was working on her assignment. I put the lamb out on plates, tipped the rice into a bowl, and called.
‘In a minute,’ she said.
‘It’ll get cold,’ I yelled, so she came.
‘This is lamb,’ she said, non-committal.
‘You never told me what you wanted,’ I said.
She ate in silence, so I said, ‘Well?’
‘Well what?’ she said, her cheeks full.
‘Did Chanteleer come to your lecture?’
‘Is that what you wanted to talk about?’ she said, taking more rice.
‘Not really,’ I admitted. ‘I wanted to apologise for yesterday. I wasn’t in the best mood.’
‘Yeah, so?’
‘So I’m sorry. I was intimidated by him. I guess.’
‘He’s famous,’ she said. ‘He deserves to be. He can write.’ She kept her eyes on her food.
‘I want to be like that,’ I said, ‘I want to write too. But I can’t think of anything to say.’ I was talking to the top of her head.
‘So he can write and you can’t,’ she said, still not looking up. ‘And I’m not Miss World. Get over yourself. Okay?’
I sat, watching her eat.
‘Was this from Ho’s?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you like it?’
‘Not much,’ she said, getting up. I could see that she was heading back to her papers in the living room. But she stopped, and turned. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘you’ll have a chance to make up.’
‘Excellent,’ I said, excited.
‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I don’t mean like that. Sebastian spotted me in the lecture today. I was in the front row. He came over when he’d finished. He said, “Aren’t you the girl I signed a book for yesterday?” When I told him that I was he said, “I’m having a bit of a garden party next Sunday afternoon. At my home in Kew. Would you like to come?”’
She went to the fridge.
I waited.
She chose a can of Coke and went to the sink to pop the top.
She was playing one of her annoying games, but for all of that I was hoping against hope she had said no.
She took a few sips from the can before turning to face me. ‘I accepted,’ she said. ‘For you too. For both of us.’
‘Both of us?’ I said.
‘I thought you’d like the free food,’ she laughed, going into the living room.
‘What?’
‘You like food, don’t you?’ she said.
‘Is it like a bar-b-que?’
‘Now you’re being stupid,’ she yelled from the other room. ‘It’s a garden party. Classy. Make sure that you’ve got something decent to wear. A coat. And a nice shirt.’
She closed the sliding doors between the kitchen and the living room, dividing us.
When I had eaten, I went into the garden and wrote down what happened at Ho’s that night. About the girl with the golden chain made of soy sauce. (Or so she imagined.)
L
ater that week I met my friend Rory Whittaker in the coffee shop at uni. (While Rory is not the most glamorous of characters in this sorry tale, he deserves better than to be left in the wings, as I chose to do with Chanteleer.) When we were kids, Rory lived down the road from me. He used to come over after school and muck around. Rory sometimes called me Monkey Boy on account of a clockwork monkey that I had. This monkey was pretty shabby (bought secondhand), fat and hairy, and dressed in red-and-white striped silk pants with a yellow smock. When he was wound up, he would clap a pair of cymbals together and dance. Rory reckoned that I looked like this monkey, and I might have, being big and hairy. (And goofy.) All the same, if Rory played too rough, Mum would give him a proper dressing down. My mum was over protective, some might say. I guess this was because I was all that she had. My dad never existed. For all Mum ever said about him, I might have been conceived by immaculate conception. (Which fuelled my imagination, I admit, but more on that later.) The truth of the matter
was, without me, Mum would have no one, which explains why she was careful. Strict, you might say. Domineering even.
Rory grew up to be what my mother would call a ‘no-hoper’. He made it to uni okay, but he had no idea what he wanted to be. I mean, in spite of what people said, I knew that I wanted to be a writer (which is why I was studying literature), but when it came to ambition, Rory was clueless. (Other than wanting to get laid.) He would enrol in some stupid subject, say French, then drop it the day before census recorded him as being formally enrolled, then he’d enrol in something else stupid, like Latin.
I wasn’t a brilliant student, but I enjoyed what I was doing and passed everything.
Rory was a big guy, a bit like me, which might explain why we got along. When I say ‘got along’, I mean we talked to each other when we met in the refectory which was about once a week, and only then because of circumstances (getting a coffee) rather than design. The fact is, Rory was a bit of a loner. I don’t mean he was a closet gay, or a nerdy virgin (he did have the occasional date), it was just that he had no one in his life, like I had Lootie. So I felt sorry for him.
But this particular day, just after Chanteleer entered my life, it was Rory who was feeling sorry for me.
Having run into him, and seeing as we had time between lectures (or Rory wasn’t going), we found a free table.
‘Hey Monkey Boy,’ he started in, ‘you’re not looking too good.’
I told him what had happened.
‘So,’ he said, ‘you slept on the lounge since Sunday night?’
‘Not last night,’ I said.
‘And?’
‘And nothing,’ I shrugged, making my goofy face.
Rory gave me a philosophical look. He was growing a beard and looked even slobbier than usual. ‘You don’t have much luck with the women, do you Charlie?’ he said, raising his cup to his hairy chops.
‘Sorry?’ I said.
Seeing as I had invited a comeback, he said, ‘Well, before Alice…’
‘I call her Lootie,’ I said.
‘Before Alice,’ he said, ‘there was…?’
‘Nobody,’ I admitted.
‘Nobody?’ He looked at me over the brim of his cup. ‘Nobody,
ever
?’
‘Before that I was in school.’
‘How about your mother?’ He sipped, then put the cup down, satisfied that he had upset me.
‘My
mother
?’
‘Well,’ he said, making out that he was watching some girl wander past. ‘She did have you over a barrel. She did control your life, if you know what I mean. Tough lady, that one.’
‘Didn’t stop you from eating her biscuits,’ I said. ‘And cake.’
‘Take it where you can get it, Monkey Boy,’ he said, giving me a wink. ‘So, what about this latest mess?’
‘I wouldn’t call it a mess. It’s just one of those things.’ ‘One of those things that puts you on the lounge. In your own house, like?’
This was true. But it was hard to admit. Harder still to live with. ‘It’s only temporary,’ I said. ‘I already told you I was back in the bedroom last night.’
He sighed, shaking his head. ‘So why are you looking so miserable?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Whereabouts in the bedroom, Charlie? Whereabouts in the
bed
?’
‘That’s a bit close to the bone,’ I warned him. ‘First my mum, and now Lootie. Hey?’
Rory finished his coffee in a gulp. ‘Hey yourself, Monkey Boy,’ he said, leaning across the table towards me, ‘you’re one of the reasons I live alone. Think about it.’
I was home before Lootie so I grabbed a beer and sat beneath my elm.
A low stone wall spanned the front of the property. The stone was basalt, and aged. Olive green moss, thick and rich, grew on the house side of this wall, where the sun never reached. The moss grew in tufts, and sometimes (if I sat very still), I saw ants, black as jet, come to feed there, or drink from the edge of it, tiny tongues sipping. Sleek silver lizards came too, silent and flat. If I was very quiet, and slipped from the bench to my knees (like praying), I might imagine a lizard’s eye to be a pool of gold, so deep, so real, that I could dive in, but dare not.
Our garden was very small, being no more than the width of the house, which was narrow. About seven metres wide, I guess, and four or five metres deep. Or, if measured by the shrubs, two azaleas and three hydrangeas wide, and one magnolia stellata deep, with the golden elm in the corner, to the right of the front door, reaching up to our bedroom window. The elm’s lime green shade was the best part of summer, its golden splendour the best of autumn. The garden bench beneath made this my favourite place in any season.
That afternoon, as the sun set, I stared over the wall into the gardens of the houses across the street. I guess the people who lived in these houses knew that I was staring—if they were at home, that is, and in their front gardens themselves—but no one ever had a go at me. I say I guess that they could see me, but maybe they couldn’t. If I was sitting down (which I most often was), the fact that the stone wall ran the width of our garden might have been barrier enough to prevent them knowing I was even there. Like the secret ants. Or the flat lizard, invisible. Whether the wall prevented their seeing me, or whether it didn’t, I will never know (I never went over to find out), but at least it provided a psychological barrier. As did their own walls. My point is, our wall made it easier for me to watch without being seen (or so I imagined) and I liked that.
What I liked most was watching the family that lived in the terrace directly over the road.
I never saw much activity in their front garden until late afternoon, dusk mostly, usually after five. A family of
four lived there: a father, a mother and two little boys. I didn’t see much during the day because I was mostly at uni, or riding for XPress, and even if I was home, and did happen to sit out the front, maybe the boys were at school. Or maybe they played in their back garden. They were only young, about five and seven. Little fair-haired boys. But at dusk, about five-thirty, their father would come home. He wore a white shirt and tie. I guess he worked in an office. Maybe a post office, I liked to imagine. He didn’t carry a briefcase, so he couldn’t have been that important.
The boys would wait for him, sitting on their front wall. When they saw him coming from the direction of Ho’s Chinese, they’d whoop and run to meet him, leaping into his arms, all hugs and kisses.
I hardly ever saw the wife, the mother. Once or twice I saw a woman go in the front gate, between the stone plinths, and I guessed by her age and clothes and the groceries she carried in plastic shopping bags that she was the mother, but this was only a guess. Only in my imagination.
What was real were the games the boys played with their father. After he went inside, I suppose for a cuppa (or a beer?), he’d reappear with a soccer ball and his sleeves rolled up. The boys and the father would kick this ball in the street (too involved to notice me), up and down and back again, laughing and yelling for a good hour or so then, still laughing, they’d go inside, because it was dark, and shut the door.
I would see nothing for a while (dinner time in the kitchen at the back? Bath time?), then a light would go on
in the front of the house, behind a lace curtain there, and I’d imagine the father reading stories to the boys.
This is all made up.
Probably completely untrue.
At best imagined (like that episode when I stabbed Chanteleer with the pen), but it would be good to be loved like that.