Coda (6 page)

‘Where will you look, dear?' Kathleen had asked mildly.

‘Oh Jesus, you do crap me off!'

I lived through that, Kathleen admitted, through all that sulky acrimony, that impudent flouncing, until Shamrock hitched her way to a commune outside Mackay, an outwardly decorously run family group that, according to a chastened and returned daughter, was organised to punishment point by a failed law student with stunning connections in the state judiciary. Daddy had funded the farmlet, a pre-postmodernist remittance gesture. There was much regimentation her unaccommodating daughter had resisted. The male/female balance was preserved by rostered swapping. A kind of tremor, Sham insisted, ran through the group every Monday when the new copulation schedule was pinned to the breakfast-room notice board. Culture, too, was regulated. You will learn oboe. You will play bassoon. You will mould pots, paint, weave, wood-carve. But above all you will sleep with James, with Trevor, with Russell. You will help build the hayshed and do the washing and cooking every third day. (Hey, don't the
men
get a go?) You will learn ballet, sleep with Shark, do the … Shamrock lasted only two months and revealed these things to her mother in later dribbles of
self-pitying confession. Her small face seemed permanently morose. There was a poignant squalor about her and about the disciples she described, whose earnings on regular week-day jobs and/or unemployment benefits vanished into an unaudited bank account for the failed law student, who did at least know dollars and which way to butter his bread.

In the seventh week she had announced rudely that she was utterly tired of beansprouts and would, she swore, remember to her last breath the crocodile-eyed law failure (I
mean
, mother, how can you fail at law?) making hip roofs of his tapering unworked fingers and saying, ‘I'm not sure, Shamrock, whether you fit in with the ideology of our little family, whether you have assimilated the philosophic concepts of the group. Some of your partners … that is, your sexual partners … have complained about a lack of enthusiasm, of an … how shall I put it? … inert compliance.'

She had said, ‘I will truly vomit if I don't get my jaws round a hunk of steak, medium rare.'

Shamrock had married before the necessity to work had claimed her, ironically enough, another lawyer who had given up his practice to enter parliament and whom Kathleen immediately dubbed the minister for transports.

‘This makes me wonder about the ultimate charity of fate,' Kathleen whispered to Brain as they stood with fixed smiles in Cathedral gloom waiting for Shamrock to be legally joined to her ambitious backbencher. Despite the many junctions before the religious ceremony, Shamrock flaunted herself in glaring white, tossed bouquets to prismatic bridesmaids, caught Brain's mocking eye and fast-bowled him with a posy. Blush. Giggle. At the city hotel reception, in a spate of clichéd well wishes and lewd telegrams, she kissed her mother sparingly on the cheek and then vanished on a Barrier Reef honeymoon without a word of thanks.

‘For what?' she might have asked if prodded. ‘For this pagan mockery?' Now Kathleen merely writhed uneasily, trapped in a clawing landscape.

She was paying off the loan for the wedding for the next three years. That girl, she told herself, can't even spell matrimony without an ‘e'.

‘Can't seem to get my act right, Mum,' Brain moaned. ‘What the hell goes wrong?'

‘Don't look at me!' his mother said.

After university he had been offered the management of a motel in the far north by a friend of a friend. The motel closed a year later. He became a working partner on a prawn boat and was deckhand, odd-jobber and maintenance johnny. He had to keep assuring himself he was expanding his abilities, stretching his limits. One burning, slashing day in the Gulf at the height of the season, the refrigeration plant failed. Nothing he did could save the catch, not even red-eyed panic. The stench around the body. The business lost over fifty
thousand dollars on that one disastrous trip.

He moved to Townsville where, brooding in the choking air of a Belgian Gardens flat during a strike by sanitary workers, he mentally perfected the notion of solidifying dunny contents in a kind of Araldite so that the entire pan appeared as some exotic dish set in aspic. He found no backers. Peughh! Urk! Nutter!

People were beginning to laugh at each new proposal. He had lost nearly all his small savings.

The minidepression.

The boom.

Nascent charm saved him.

Bosie was an accident, a fleshing of the fantasies of sweat-filled solitary nights, a come-by-chance at a luncheon in a very expensive seafood restaurant in Brisbane where he had returned to complain to Kathleen and lick his financial wounds. The restaurant was the latest trendy place to be seen. Diners were neither put off nor rendered vomitous by the window's street decoration of a monster two-foot carp floating listlessly in a tank six inches longer than its body and suppurating slowly in its own juices, despite the languid efforts of a pump and a few strings of watergrass.

From the table behind. Bosie managed to spray her future husband with a laughter-disgorged
mouthful of peppery riesling. Apologies, little wipings, flutterings. Vowels so rounded they almost, but only almost, came out flat. It was too tedious, Brain—for the name started not long after that, snapped up by mother with crude guffaws—decided in later years. And horribly inevitable.
My God!
he often murmured to himself.
Crook wine at midday! We both had it coming
.

She was the daughter of a speculator who had made a killing selling swamplands for housing estates near the Gold Coast and who had conveniently died, leaving everything to his doted-upon child. For a time his financial agonies were eased. But he had reckoned without his wife's spending abilities. Bosie (after two years he had forgotten her birth name) had private-school assumptions as well as desperate elocution. Within three years they had two pouting, aggressive, indulged boys who were later rendered semiliterate under the new tolerance curricula promoted by academic refugees from the classroom.

That was all it took. (Was that all it took?)

Marriage was the dangled worm that hooked women. Women were the dangled worms that hooked men. Both ways it was a bad deal, a lousy deal. Who was trapped the most? He found awe-inspiring those decades of
small miscalculations, the trifles on which monstrous disasters depended: the struggle for home ownership—but the right sort of home!—the home that would bring Bosie's ultimately suburban approval; the children—those beaking birds querulous with demand; the school fees; the debts; the overdraft. That never-ending overdraft. The pretence, at gatherings of friends who were also engaged in pretending, that everything was jake, hunky-dory, keen, cool, a total gas. Cheap laughter around the unpaid-for pools with the cheap wine flowing and in the back of every mind, thrust back but there, the tick of the plastic card meter, tocking over.

Hey, what a party!

Great bash, man!

Jesus, Brain, do I have a hangover!

Smashing, Bosie darling. Absolutely smashing. We had a ball! Just loved those thingummies en croûte. You must tell me how you did them
.

Make it our place next time
.

And ours
.

And ours
.

And ours and ours and ours and …

In the red. In the mood and in the red. A frieze of unpally bank managers. In the red but still in the mood. Failed projects one after another. Even failed despair. In the syncopated pauses Brain pondered suicide, thoughts flippant
enough of cutting out without a trace; of leaps from buildings, train hurlings, boat plungings. He couldn't crack even those and Bosie's
Oh Brain, must you! Bims and Chaps are at boarding school. Think of them
. changed to
Thank God Bims and Chaps are at boarding school. Thank God they're spared seeing their father
… (But seeing his father, that grotesque scene in the specialist's rooms on the Terrace as a horrible entr'acte before he too moved on to the next scheme, to collapse in a torpor of weather when the induced lassitude of Brisbane's streets threatened to choke.)

He was not really serious
, Bosie assured telephoning friends who had heard of his latest financial misadventure, a disco called Heart of Darkness with shares largely owned by the minister for transports and closed down after three months by the police, who wanted more protection money.
If he were truly serious
, she babbled,
then he would achieve oblivion. Listen, why don't we meet for coffee?

Huh?

Bosie punished him.

‘I've booked it up,' she would say challengingly to his outraged face (there were no cheapskate kisses these days!) as he glared at a new dishwasher, freezer, airconditioner, inflatable swimming-pool table, entire new summer wardrobe.

‘You've bloody what?'

Shit! Head between hands. Oh shit!

It felt, Brain decided in his saner moments, like the Hundred Years War. And the protagonists never changed.
The woods decay
, he quoted softly and sullenly to himself, pouring fibre bran into his breakfast bowl,
the woods decay and fall, the vapours weep
(pouring the milk)
their burthen to the ground … Me only cruel immortality consumes
. ‘ “I wither,” ' he suddenly shouted at the heavenly morning glittering on the impeccable surface of the pool, ‘ “slowly in thine arms, here at the quiet limit of the
worlds
!” '

‘Brain, the neighbours!' Bosie cried, coming out to the kitchen.

Yet, ‘“And thee returning on thy silver heels,” ' he mischanted impertinently to her after one particularly trying evening with a failed avocado grower from the Tablelands.

‘What?' Bosie snapped. ‘What? I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about.'

‘No matter. No matter at all.'

He knew and Alfred Lord T. knew exactly what he meant.

He would observe Bimbo and Chaps home for what Bosie called the hols or later, the vac, wincing from her stagey pretentiousness that drove them inevitably into displays of boorish retroaction. Yet I am a natural lout, he would admit after sottish evenings. The boys have my
genes. Or half of them. You didn't will their gawky insolence or sullen response to the best-will-in-the-world inquiries. You simply watched the bad manners prickle out like acne.

Against which his wife waged increasingly refined battle, chiding them in vowels so ovate the boys paused physically within a smidgin of being flattened another way.

Cor!

1992.

His marriage had endured two decades.

They had moved north on the promise of nirvana. More hotel management in booming Reeftown, the man with the fake sincere glance had persuaded. Needs people like you. People of your calibre with get up and go. You can't miss. Not these days. Not in this economic climate. Simply can't miss.

Could he not?

PR for Reef Tours. That lasted longer. Bosie had chosen their house after cutting a swathe through soon-disaffected real estate agents—another year, another mortgage—at one of Reeftown's northern beaches, a low-slung, rambling affair turned in on itself (
Like us
, Brain had hissed) and away from the street, the living room a spacious, roofed, unwalled affair surrounding a pool of extravagant blue. Bosie was ecstatic. There were parties parties parties, back-grounded
by hi-fi joy from carbuncular speakers depending like enormous ripe plums from the pergola roof. ‘Or haemorrhoids,' coarse Brain suggested, inspecting the completed work. ‘Brain!' his wife had cried. ‘For God's sake! Must you reduce …'

The only thing Bosie failed at was words.

More plans sprouted and withered. There were months of riches on paper followed by financial drought. Backers for improbable business projects came and went. They went bad-tempered. There were more parties and more dinners, more luncheons by the pool and in it. God! What a rage! There was political involvement followed by political accusation followed by withdrawal of funds.

Twenty years' endurance.

Fair enough, was his summation. Fair enough. The boys were more or less self-sufficient except for those lean times when they reappeared with dollar signs in their eyes.

‘You're not the only one who wants freedom,' Bosie had said bitterly. ‘Why do men think they are the only ones trapped? And the only ones entitled not to miss the great world out there, eh?'

‘We're both trapped, love.' He was conscious of vast sadness for them both. ‘Both. I know exactly how you feel because it's how I
feel. It's simply a question, isn't it, of who's going to be the first to make a break for the wall.'

Bosie glanced up with suddenly fearful eyes. She was unequipped for any sort of career now, her pert good looks vanishing along with those outdated office skills she had once sported. She was fit only for counter-jumping. She mentioned these facts, ground them out reluctantly, acidly, the data of those decades.