Figurehead (23 page)

Ted knew immediately, and with relief, that this encounter would not resemble the time Mary had brought Michael to India. He couldn’t remember now what he was doing in Bombay or why he had imagined it was a suitable place for a family reunion; he supposed it was something about last chances. Four years old, Michael had leaned against his mother, folded his arms and stared at Ted as if he had stolen his lunch. When the train had pulled away, leaving a large and attentive audience on the platform, he screamed, ‘You told me that my daddy was handsome.’

The last time I’d seen Michael was in London in ’69. It must have been July
because we watched the moon landing together. I thought that would be a
bonding experience, father and son seeing history unfold before us. How
wrong I was.

What was Michael: twenty, twenty-one? Maybe older, but he seemed like
a boy still, all earnest and awkward and shy. He was on one of those yearlong
sojourns to England that Aussie youngsters – at least the ones with
cashed-up parents (that’s his mother I’m talking about!) – are obliged to
undertake. They still do it to this day. What’s the point? None that I can
see, other than to keep faking some ludicrous link with the ‘old country’ (old
and senile, I say) and to help Australians pretend that the Yanks don’t own
us.

Michael was studying at some university: one of the posh ones. Or was
he working at a law firm by then? Anyway, I made a huge effort to go and
see him in his tiny little room. Postponed a trip to Moscow, even. I bought a
television for him (it cost a bloody fortune) and lugged it down a flight of
stairs all by myself. And we sat there, me drinking beer and him nursing a
glass of white wine, watching the Americans claim the moon as their own.
But just as Neil Armstrong was delivering to the world his ‘one step for
mankind’ line, his foot hovering over the surface, something went terribly
wrong and he floated, like a balloon, up into the air and out of sight.
‘What’s he doing? What’s happening?’ the television commentator cried
out. ‘Armstrong is flying through the air like a bird. Is that right? Is that
how it’s supposed to be? What the ... He’s gone, he’s gone, Armstrong’s gone.’
He was, too: never to be seen again, although if you believe the conspiracy
theorists he defected to the Soviet Union.

Poor Buzz Aldrin didn’t know whether to launch himself off in pursuit
of Armstrong or to take advantage of the accident. And, of course, he didn’t
have a line of his own ready to deliver. So Buzz stood clutching the ladder,
and by the time he finally took that famous step – having finally thought to
shout out ‘This step’s for you, Neil, and for all who came before you’ – all
hell had broken loose on Earth and nobody really noticed. So he stuck his
flag in the sand and he hopped back on board and he helped carry the
empty coffin at Armstrong’s funeral.

In Michael’s tiny basement, watching all this unfold, I fell off the couch
I was laughing so hard. ‘America the brave,’ I cried out. ‘America the bold.
America the innovative. God bless America the bloody useless.’

But Michael was staring at the television screen, his eyes moist, his lips
quivering.

‘Come on, mate: you reap what you sow in this world,’ I said.

‘Grow up, Dad,’ he replied. He grabbed his coat and swept out the door
and up the stairs, leaving me, like Buzz, staring about and terribly confused
as to what had just happened.

That time in Bombay was the last time Ted ever saw Mary. She decided that nine months of cohabitation spread across seven years of marriage wasn’t worth the fuss. And she decided that Ted thought so too, except he was too lazy to call it off. Decades later, Michael rang Ted to tell him that Mary had died. She had gone to the doctor to get her cholesterol checked; three months later she was dead of liver cancer. Ted was on holiday in Russia and Michael had a dreadful time locating him. Ted clumsily expressed his sympathy but the truth was – why deny it? he asked himself – that he had to pause and think before his throat tightened and sadness took hold.

Grateful that Michael was not going to lecture him on the responsibilities of fatherhood, Ted dropped his bag on Michael’s toes and, surprising himself, lowered his head onto his shoulder. Michael wrapped an arm around him and said, ‘Hello, Dad.’

Ted sniffed his response.

‘This is Anne, my wife.’

‘Welcome to Adelaide,’ Anne said. ‘Welcome home.’

Ted nodded. Anne was taller than the photograph suggested. Her hair had shortened and turned auburn. Ted felt lucky that he didn’t have to pick her out of a line-up.

‘And our daughter, Leonara.’

‘I’m so pleased to finally meet you, Grandpa. Dad’s told me all sorts of things about you,’ said a young woman. She kissed his cheek and Ted saw that she had Mary’s wonderful clear eyes. ‘I can’t wait to find out if any of them are true.’

Ted finally spoke. ‘Grandpa: bloody hell.’

‘One thing: my name’s Lea. If you ever –
ever
– call me Leonara I’ll send the heavies around to rough you up.’

‘The heavies?’ Ted asked.

‘The heavies!’ Lea said ominously, then winked.

Ted felt stripped bare. All the props of his life, all the elements of the persona he’d cultivated so lovingly for decades, were useless now. Although he knew this moment had been coming for months, probably for years, it seemed like in an instant he’d lost the moniker ‘Ted Whittlemore: radical reporter’ and become ‘Ted Whittle-more: grandpa.’ He was too tired, and his limbs ached too much, for him to do anything other than submit to this new reality. He’d told Michael that he just needed a few weeks’ rest and then he’d be on his way. But he knew it wasn’t true.

They drove through wide manicured streets – there’s so many straight lines, Ted thought despondently, it’s so flat, so neat – to a suburb called Kensington and to a house with a four-sided veranda. Ted’s home was the granny flat, out the back beyond the swimming pool. ‘What, no granny?’ he complained when Michael and Anne showed him through, but it was freshly painted and the bathtub doubled as a jet spa. Ted felt like Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi: with victory came retirement, a simple house by a lake, daytime strolls if his wonky legs permitted, weeding the garden, afternoon retreats to the bomb shelter (Ted, like Ho, found he often needed a post-lunch nap) and, Ted hoped, a steady trickle of devout visitors.

Ted adjusted as best he could to the relentless quiet, the remoteness of this city he’d fled as a nineteen-year-old. He soaked up the love and attention that Michael and Anne offered. They brought him food and clothes and brochures about healthy living for seniors. They introduced him to their friends and neighbours. Sometimes he ate meals with them in the house, sometimes he stayed in the flat and kept company with the newspaper and the radio.

But tired as Ted was, his new sedentary life was agony. Adelaide was about as far away from the action as he could imagine. He soon found himself faking cheerfulness for Michael and Anne’s sake. He pretended not to mind that he could barely walk around the block unaided or that they meted out wine to him one standard drink at a time. He knew he was still breathing but he wasn’t certain he was still alive. Some days he wanted to run at the walls of the granny flat and break every bone in his body so at least he could excuse himself this awful new do-nothing, be-nothing existence.

Ted found himself pining constantly for Lea, who two or three times a week blew through bearing library books and international newspapers and the oddest ideas about life. Each time, she brought a longneck of Coopers Sparkling Ale for them to share out of glasses Ted kept frosted in the top of his tiny refrigerator.

One sunny morning, a few months after he’d arrived in Adelaide, Ted and Lea sat on fold-up chairs in the shade of an oak tree watching Anne pull weeds from the herb garden.

‘Did I ever tell you about the time Simone de Beauvoir mistook me for Bob Menzies?’ Ted said.

‘Come on, Grandpa.’

‘What do you mean, come on?’

‘I just don’t believe you. I doubt that de Beauvoir would even have known who Menzies was.’

‘All right, all right, it was Anäis Nin. We were friends. The best of friends, if you take my meaning, and ... and ... and ... ’

‘Grandpa? What’s wrong? GRANDPA?’

Suddenly Ted could barely breath. His head felt so heavy that it flopped forward. His chin bounced off his chest. He clawed at his face and opened up a cut on his cheek. Then everything went black.

When Ted regained consciousness he was lying in the dirt (the grass grew sparsely under the oak tree) with an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. An ambulance officer hovered over him. Ted wanted to tell her that she was pretty even if she was dressed like a man. He wanted to tell her that the smell of her latex gloves aroused him. But Anne, who was holding his hand, said, ‘Don’t try to talk now. Relax, everything’s going to be fine.’

Anne had painted a look of reassurance on her face: trust me, her crinkly eyes said, I know what I’m saying. But she was the worst liar Ted had ever come across. He knew he was in trouble. He felt as if his illness was sweating out of every pore in his body, covering him in a sticky layer of agony. The heat in his head was excruciating.

Lea didn’t believe Anne either. As Ted’s vision returned fully, he saw her crouched behind Anne, her face as pale as f lour. He reached up and pulled the mask off long enough to say, ‘Get yourself a drink of water, love, and have a bit of a sit down.’

Ted stayed in hospital for a week, educating the hospital staff in the evils of napalm, even convincing one intern to read up on it to see if it might be the cause of Ted’s myriad afflictions. Then he packed a small suitcase of clothes, a box of books, his Ho manuscript, a 34-centimetre television set, a ream of clean paper and an electric typewriter. Michael delivered Ted via the wheelchair access doors to Room 17 of the Concertina Rest Home. Ted considered kicking and screaming in protest but he didn’t have the fight for it. And he knew he wouldn’t have fooled anybody, least of all himself.

1992

A few weeks after the crowd nearly killed Nhem Kiry, he returned again to Phnom Penh. This time he stepped from the chartered plane onto a set of aluminium stairs. Below him, standing at the end of five feet of red carpet, stood Roberto Gallasi, an Italian career diplomat. Gallasi’s right shoe covered up a small perfect circle which allowed the carpet, when it wasn’t serving as a welcome mat, to double as a practice putting green.

Kiry had met Gallasi before. He thought that he was adept at standing on the fringes of cocktail parties, shuffling his feet and looking lost but all the while listening intently and taking mental notes. He was, Kiry thought, a great deal better than most of the UN fools he had to deal with.

The two men shook hands and agreed what a fine thing it was to meet again. Gallasi’s palm was sweaty, his face a mass of tiny red dots. His white shirt was creased and sodden. Its top two buttons were askew, revealing a hairy black and grey chest, pink skin and a silver crucifix. The ornament looked so heavy that Kiry wondered how the poor man kept his head upright. The power of prayer, he supposed. Gallasi’s wedding ring bit deep into a swollen finger. Grey trousers – polyester? Surely not, Kiry thought – clung to his thighs. An abandoned necktie spilled from his trouser pocket.

In honour of Italy, Kiry considered dropping to his knees and kissing the ground. While watching the television news he’d seen the Pope do it on his arrival in Africa, although Akor Sok claimed that he was demonstrating some new Catholic birth-control technique. But, Kiry thought, what if his lips stuck to the tacky tarmac? What if he was forced to crouch there, enduring the roar of the planes ferrying all those foreign soldiers in to keep the peace? What if he was still there when the same soldiers departed with the undignified haste that invariably accompanies Westerners being shot at?

‘Welcome to Phnom Penh,’ Gallasi told Kiry in Calabrian-accented French.

‘
I
welcome
you
to
my
city,’ Kiry said. ‘But I had hoped that the peacekeepers would have been fully deployed by now. I want to emphasise how displeased I am. What justification can there be for the delay?’

‘Yes, you are no doubt correct. The wheels of world government do indeed turn slowly.’

‘I have known them to turn backwards,’ Kiry said. He gave the Italian’s elbow a quick massage, implying that he trusted him like a brother. ‘But if they don’t begin to turn faster then there may well be no peace left to keep.’

‘I venture to say that these things are complicated. But might I respectfully suggest that you speak to my superiors with regards to the amended timetable for troop arrival.’

‘Yes, yes. It is an issue for tomorrow,’ Kiry said, allowing Gallasi to lead him to a waiting car.

‘But please understand that the whole Comprehensive Settlement is predicated on the Supreme National Council being able to meet in Phnom Penh. You will be safe here ... this time.’

‘For that to be true you must deploy the peacekeepers without delay. And not just in Phnom Penh. The people still need protection from the Vietnamese aggressors or they will not be free to vote as they choose.’

The motorcade – a car for Kiry and Gallasi, minivans for Kiry’s entourage and luggage – moved through Phnom Penh without incident. As the two men chatted about where to get the best pizza in town – ‘Everywhere, the crusts are too thick,’ Gallasi complained – Kiry felt safe. The situation simply did not allow for any more lynch mobs.

‘If I may say so, I feel that you and I are of one mind on many issues,’ Kiry said. ‘I sense that we are kindred spirits.’

Gallasi looked slightly alarmed. ‘Well, no doubt we share a desire for peace.’

‘I sense that you have seen a great deal of how the world really works and that you understand the root causes of suffering and hardship for the oppressed peoples of the world.’