Tom Houghton (30 page)

‘The weird thing is I not only share most of the boy's name but we also share a birthday, which Hepburn decided to claim as her own.'

‘Yep, that's a story that needs to be told,' he said encouragingly. ‘Why are you the one who should tell it?'

‘Ah . . .' I released a little chuckle. ‘Might have to save that for another time. We should probably be heading to our rooms . . .'

‘Fuck you, Tom Houghton! Tell me.'

How could I say this without sounding certifiable? Eddie was, after all, practically a stranger. Despite this, if I found the courage to say it aloud, he would be the first person I'd ever had this conversation with. Not Lana, nor Mal, nor Hanna, nor scores of men who'd come through my revolving doors. What the hell?

‘I was bullied pretty severely as a kid. In those days we called it teasing, and it was a right of passage, frankly, not something that was regulated or attracted media attention. It was a good day for me if I came home after six hours at school and had not been on its receiving end. I mean, we're talking about a fat little poof obsessed with Hollywood! I was a sitting duck!'

‘Tom. Don't do that.'

‘I think I might need to as my way, you know?' My whole body started trembling. ‘I thought to myself that I needed a way to show my antagonists that I was better than them, that I was destined for greater things. And when I discovered that Thomas and I shared the same birthday, my mind took over. My overactive, out-of-touch mind. I thought I could reclaim his destiny, because I thought Katharine Hepburn had only made it big by emulating him. In his death she dressed like him, took on the theatrical role in the family, changed her birthday – I mean here was a woman who cut through because of her voice, wearing pants; Hollywood had never seen anything like that. And yet if it hadn't been for her brother, she would never have evolved. He was the one destined for greatness, I thought, and who better to make that stance for both of us? As fucked up as that may sound to you, and even to me now, I was convinced that becoming Thomas Houghton Hepburn would be my ticket to escape, and survival.'

‘So you thought you were the reincarnation of a famous actress's dead brother?'

‘No,' I said emphatically. ‘No, no, you can't label it. It wasn't reincarnation, nothing like that.'

‘You didn't want to be you, Tom Houghton, I get it. But you still wanted to be
a version
of Tom Houghton.'

‘Something like that.' I concentrated on a spot on the floral carpet, wondering what the stain had been caused by.

‘Look – you were a kid. We all think fucked-up things as kids. I wanted to tie up the labourer who lived next door to my dad and kiss him all over his hairy body but hey, I stopped short of trying. Imagine that – in prison at the age of twelve!'

‘At least you had the presence of mind not to try . . .'

‘Oh no . . . you didn't.'

‘And in the tradition of the best cliff-hangers I really am going to leave it there for tonight. I have to, I hope you understand?'

He nodded.

As the hour crept towards breakfast, we made our way to our separate rooms.

It was refreshing to make plans with someone without the requisite game playing. On our second date, essentially, we'd committed to spending the next four weeks seeing each other, if you could call it that. We did not call each other outside of our allocated weekend time. I insisted that paying for a room was a complete waste if he was not to sleep in it and convinced him to share my room for the following four Saturday nights.

If I thought he was charming that first night with Lexi, he'd clearly chosen to save his more effective arsenal for subsequent catch-ups. He was genuinely interested in my past and I found myself making jokes about the younger me, going into great detail about my movie card collection and my general film obsession, which, instead of finding repellent, he said he found endearing.

‘Poor you,' he said without mimicry, ‘you just wanted someone to befriend you and love you for who you were.'

When I found the courage to talk about my relationship with my mother, he wisely avoided expressing any opinion and asked more intently about how I felt. Hanna was the only other person I'd told about Lana's little lapses and talking to Eddie about them helped me see that neither she nor I was to blame for her not infrequent drops out of society. That's just what Eddie did, however, found a way to draw this information out of me without it sounding like a confessional, never coming remotely close to a psychologist's couch. In return he laid his own soul bare and it was this I began to develop feelings for, the physical side of our relationship never having quite got off the ground.

That was another first: for me to have spent so much intimate mental time with none of the physical. He shared my hotel room but never my bed. We never touched each other in public (he detested public displays, he said, something he found demeaning to all involved) and even when completely alone we did not kiss, or move towards one another. It's not that there was no physical attraction. On the contrary, we often spoke of how intensely we felt about each other, but we both understood that this would not, could not, become physical, due to our mutual fear of becoming impossibly entwined when our lives were not structured for its success. Time was running out for me and soon I would be forced to move on. Five glasses of wine was my limit with Eddie, because I knew more would only turn me into a lascivious lech.

‘Why torture ourselves with the physical,' he said, ‘and then miss having it for the rest of our lives?'

‘I'd prefer to regret having done it than never having done it at all,' I offered.

‘Must you always be so dramatic?' he asked and this turned me towards petulance. ‘It's not that I don't like you, you know that. But I don't want this, whatever this is, to be one of those heavy-petting sessions where we're both so pent-up every time we see each other that we never bother to just sit and talk. And then you'll just return to Australia and we'll both be heartbroken and make each other unattainable promises of moving to the other's country. We're in our forties – this isn't a naff holiday romance.'

I genuinely longed for his company and anticipated each of his returns. He told me many stories of his upbringing in Malaysia, about losing his virginity to his father's (female) business partner, the murder of his sister when he was nineteen and his parents' subsequent bitter divorce. I teased him about boy fondling in all those private school dorms and he sheepishly shrugged but never denied any of my suppositions. He knew more about the world and its affairs than I ever cared to, frankly, but his knowledge was never meant to intimidate, and he was quick to detect whenever information-sharing bordered on the mundane.

‘I never ever want to bore you,' he said one night as we lay in side-by-side beds, another night when there would be no sleep. ‘I'm making that a personal mission in my life – never ever let me see Tom Houghton bored.'

I feigned a yawn. ‘Oh, you're doing so-so thus far.'

‘I doubt I will ever get used to Australian sarcasm,' he answered.

‘Sarcasm?'

‘I rest my case.'

I
called Spencer's house before school but there was no answer. It felt as though I'd imagined the entire visit, like my mind was playing tricks on me. I even checked the back lawn to see that it had been mowed. I mapped out the evening in my mind. We'd worked, had dinner, settled in to watch the video. When I woke Spencer it would have been about nine p.m.; would have fallen asleep myself shortly thereafter. Would Spencer really have walked home on his own that late at night? I was sure he had been fast asleep when I climbed onto the couch with him but if he'd woken before that, why didn't he say anything? And if Spencer had seen anything, had seen me touching myself like that, who else would he tell?

I left early for school and walked straight to Spencer's house. I knocked on the door and listened carefully for sounds coming from inside. There was nothing. I knocked again.

‘Fuck off!' I heard Mr Michaels yell. ‘Whoever it is, just get the fuck away!'

I ran back down the front steps as fast as I could, lost my footing and took a tumble. The palms of my hands grazed along the pebblecrete and immediately began to sting. I picked myself up and continued running. It wasn't until I felt it drip that I realised my left knee had opened up: blood was snaking its way down to my sock, a bruise blossomed out at its top. I felt anxious, my head dizzy and light. I walked quickly back to our house and let myself in.

Mum was lying in bed facing the hallway. Her eyes were open, staring at a spot on the wall.

‘I . . . I . . . I just fell over.' I held my palms out to show her, all spotted with blood and dirt.

If she heard me, she did not acknowledge my presence, merely rolled over to show me the back of her head.

I went to the bathroom to clean myself up. I was scared. A deep-seated, indefinable fear gripped me and I was helpless against it. My legs fell out from under me, my limbs began to shake. I wanted to cry but no tears would flow. All I wanted was for my mother to calm me with quiet and soothing tones, to rub my back.

I managed to find the strength to stand and pulled the medicine kit down from the top shelf and worked quickly to clean and dress my wounds. The antiseptic stung as it hit my grazes but the jolt of pain brought me back to the present. I moistened a cloth with warm water and rubbed it repeatedly over my forehead, tore two aspirin out of their foil packaging and made myself drink the salty-sour fizz.

Something awful was happening at Spencer's house. Spencer was in the midst of destroying me. I had no one to share my fears with. How could I possibly begin to tell my mother what I was feeling? How does a son tell his mother that he may have been caught masturbating in front of his friend? How does a boy admit that he has feelings for his mother's boyfriend? There was no way I could explain to her about Tom Houghton, about the costume and my desire to be free. It hit me then like dead weight, the realisation that I was utterly alone. My mother was a lost cause, rotting away inside her darkened room like a zombie. Soon, she'd push Mal away and we'd be alone again and she would never understand, could never comprehend, what was happening. Mum was too stupid to realise the truth if it came up and smacked her in the face. She was part of the reason I was stuck here in Seven Hills when rightfully I belonged somewhere else, some place better.

I started crying, got up from my seat on the edge of the bath and ran to my room. In that moment I thought the house would crumble down around my ears, swallow me whole. I was sure I would never be seen or heard from again.

I sat in the centre of my room, on the floor, unable to concentrate on anything. I could feel the dead-weight presence of my mother in the room next to me, vegetating. I wanted to scream at her, slap her into the here and now.

•  •  •

When I woke, I had never felt so exhausted. It weighed me down, made moving difficult. The palms of my hands ached and I remembered my fall, but not where it had happened. Dazed, I made my way to Mrs B's. I knocked on her door and apologised for visiting her during the day, unannounced.

‘No school today?' she asked suspiciously.

‘Special day,' I said, and forced a little smile.

‘I can help with something?' she asked, casting her eyes down to my bandaged knee.

‘I need the costume,' I said, ‘the outfit. I need to take it now. I need to show my mum . . .'

‘I finish it last night, but you need to try on first. I need proper measurements, pin it in place.'

‘I need to take it now,' I said again. ‘Thank you very much for all your hard work on it, I want to pay you for it, please.'

‘No money, Tom! I don't want any moneys.'

‘Can I . . . is it possible for me to take it now?'

‘I thought you not want for weeks and now you come to take it already? I don't understand you, Tom, but yes, you take. She's beautiful.'

She instructed me to wait at the front door and I did as I was told. She returned five minutes later carrying the costume in a faded old suit sheath.

‘Any alterations, you let me know. I want photos too, Tom!'

I promised to have photos taken and gave her a firm kiss on the cheek. She held her hand to her face and shook her head slowly from side to side.

I took my costume straight to the garage. I was ravenous but ignored the cries of my stomach. I turned on the television and found the scene where Hepburn emerges as the moth. So beautiful, such an icon. I stripped off all of my clothes and climbed into my new skin. It stretched over my limbs tightly, hugged around any movement I made. It felt clean and perfect, covering my nakedness. Gone was the pudgy docile caterpillar and in its place was a majestic winged beauty. The metallic material shimmered in the light, projecting tiny sparkles onto the floor and the garage walls. The skullcap clung to my head, pushing down and making me feel compact, a moth in its cocoon.