The Best Australian Stories 2010 (38 page)

*

From the toilet to the elevator he'd kept repeating a phrase in his head. Sometimes this could go on for days. The same word, or a sentence, going through his skull again and again. He wished he could stop it. From the toilet to the elevator he had been repeating the two words – Studiously Aloof. It just didn't sound right. Was studiously even a word? Even though he knew it was, the final f in aloof made him think it should be Studio-fly. Which was wrong. Aloof also sounded false. What kind of word was that? So it kept going through his mind as he caught the elevator that would ascend only up above floor seventeen. Studiously Aloof. Over and again.

And then it got worse. Looking at the numbers scroll through one to seventeen, without the possibility of stopping, he got a feeling of déjà vu. It seemed pleasant to most people but to Devon it came with the fear that it wouldn't stop. The déjà vu could start repeating as well until everything he was looking at and everything he was thinking came with the feeling of déjà vu. The stain in the carpet in the corner of the lift.
Noticing
the stain in the carpet. The déjà vu itself. This trembling feeling he had going through his whole body. The vibration of the lift as it rose and finally broke the seventeenth floor and kept rising now towards the twentieth. The slight pause as though the lift wanted to stop at the twentieth but kept going. All of it, something that had happened before. Even the thought of his father at home in the kitchen, pulling open his business shirt and popping out those two buttons. Déjà vu in those two buttons.

Devon tried to push his thoughts away to something else. He thought about the birds his mother had bought him for his tenth birthday. The déjà vu followed him there but he couldn't help it. Now he was thinking about how his mother wanted to buy the cage full of brightly coloured Dutch frilled canaries because he'd begged for so long, even against Roland's wishes. A big, wonderful cage that was meant to go in his room but when he got them home he found that they were noisy and he couldn't sleep with them in his bedroom. So they went downstairs. They were too noisy for Roland as well and they were moved to the back porch. Roland told Devon they were Devon's birds, so it was Devon's duty to feed them. But he forgot and Rose began feeding them.

His mother's medication affected her memory, though, and all the birds starved to death a few weeks later. No one removed them from the ornate bamboo cage because Roland said they were still Devon's responsibility and they just made Rose cry when she saw them. Then one day, Devon came home and climbed the stairs to his bedroom and found that Roland had taken the long jar that the Becketts normally used for spaghetti and filled it with the ten brightly coloured canaries. It was sitting on Devon's school desk like it was a present for him. No one threw it away and Devon watched them begin to decay. Maybe he was supposed to throw them out but he just couldn't touch the glass and they started to seem pretty in that long, airtight glass jar. Eventually they disappeared as Roland had to finally deal with the birds he'd insisted were a bad idea from the start.

The lift got to the top of the elevator shaft and released Devon. He turned Tindersticks off because they weren't helping him with his déjà vu or the memory. He put on Mogwai's album
Come
on Die Young
. Skipped it to the song ‘May Nothing But Happiness Come Through Your Door.'

*

The office had a breathtaking view of Melbourne but Mr Cornell wouldn't have been able to tell Devon if it was raining without turning around to check.

On one of the walls was a portrait of Hyman Minsky. An economist Mr Cornell particularly liked to quote. Roland had told Devon the repetitions over the last six months, of the same mantra, were maddening. ‘Extended periods of healthy growth convince people to take ever larger risks, and eventually, when enough people have enough risky bets on the table, the smallest trouble can have catastrophic results.' In short, it was all about cycles, but at the moment Mr Cornell wasn't thinking about his mantra or Minsky. He was talking on the phone, giving someone harried directions regarding a meeting. As soon as he hung up the phone he was speaking to Devon.

‘Get those white things out of your ears.'

‘Oh, sorry.' Devon turned his iPod off and took out the headphones. Mr Cornell was in his late fifties but he looked older. It took energy to talk as aggressively as he wanted to, but he took a deep breath. ‘Where's Roland?'

‘He's not here?'

‘Don't be an idiot, son.'

‘I thought he was here. He's not here?'

‘Don't be a fucking idiot, Devon! What's happening?'

‘I left for work. I always leave like twenty minutes before him.'

‘What? What do you mean before him?'

‘What?'

‘Basic question, son. Basic! The answer is …'

‘Well … I've got to get to the train on time. And he drives. So he leaves later.'

‘But you work in the same building. How do you not come in together?'

‘He says it teaches me discipline. To use timetables and trains. If he drives me, then it's luxury I haven't earned. He …'

‘Son, I'm asking you where your father is.'

‘Mr Cornell, I'm trying to explain. I thought he was here.'

Mr Cornell stood up. He opened his arms and looked under his armpit. ‘Well, he's not here, Devon. You understand. And it's not a day he can miss. I mean it's impossible that he wouldn't be here today, yet I'm looking around, and it seems like the impossible is my reality. Those clients in the meeting room just waiting for Santa Claus six months before Christmas. I mean … this is impossible. This is, in fact, inconceivable. And no phone call. Not even a phone call. I can't go down there. What am I going to say to them? This was your father's whole deal. The tough explanations. The visionary spiel. What am I supposed to do?' His voice had become a roar but the statements had become childlike and the question didn't seem rhetorical.

Mr Cornell closed his eyes. He leaned heavily on the desk with his arms before him instead of slumping back into his office chair like he wanted to. He murmured sotto voce like he had forgotten his partner's son was in the room. ‘And he knows I've got cancer.' He swallowed but held himself up at his desk. ‘That I'm going. That there's nothing I can do to stop it.' He opened his eyes and looked at Devon.

Mr Cornell said, ‘I'm sorry. I know it must be hard for you to even think about cancer.' Cancer meant almost as little to Devon as Sagittarius. He didn't say anything, though.

Mr Cornell asked, ‘Was it long? Her suffering? Sorry to ask …' ‘What do you mean? Who?'

‘Rose. Dying of cancer. Leukaemia …'

‘My mother didn't die of cancer.' Devon shook his head. Couldn't really imagine that Roland had maintained a lie like that for almost ten years.

Devon said, ‘A bathtub full of blood. That's what it looked like. Blood on the bathroom floor. Blood down the hall. Down the stairs. Blood on all the handles. Because he carried her out to the street crying like a woman.' Devon fumbled with his iPod. Managed to get the earphones into his head. Sometimes he thought of them as plugs. And sometimes he wished he never had to pull them out at all. ‘I don't know what leukaemia is,' he told Mr Cornell.

*

Devon didn't want to go home. He sat on a bench outside the tower and thought about places he could go. He listened to the whole album
Ma Fleur
by The Cinematic Orchestra. Eventually some young guns from the firm spotted him and recognised him as Roland Beckett's son. Pulled him along with them, down the road to a bar for a drink. Devon said yes but he followed them with his earphones on. He walked into the bar listening to ‘Suds & Soda' by Deus.

Of course they yanked out his earphones but they let him put them back in after a few minutes and motioned sign language at him occasionally. Making fun of him but unable to make him respond. They left him to drift into his numb paralysis.

He watched them mock and torment a young waitress by dropping things for her to pick up, like cigarettes and beer bottles. When they got even more drunk they let a glass break and made her clean it up. She was too pretty and removed. She wasn't impressed by them. Maybe that's what it was, but Devon didn't feel sorry for her. He didn't hate the hot shots. He listened to another song by Deus called ‘Jigsaw You.'

If he was honest with himself he wasn't numb at all really. He wasn't quiet and still because he had nothing to say or nothing he felt like doing. He kept imagining what they would do, these young men in their lovely attire, if they saw him start screaming and flailing his arms around. He skipped to the next song. Mouthed,
Not yet. Not yet. Just a few more moments
. And knew it would pass. That it could pass like a song. That it had passed. If he gave it another few seconds.

*

The young men from his father's firm began to leave and he left with them but they each went to cars or piled into taxis and he still couldn't go home. He walked a few steps as though he would go somewhere but then turned down the first alley and found a place beside a dumpster full of wine bottles, beer bottles and bottles for spirits. Other dumpsters were full of other kinds of rubbish. He listened to an album by a band called Lamb.

The waitress came out of a side door crying. She lit a cigarette even though her face was getting warped by the crying. She took a puff and didn't move. She tried to get the hurt out but new waves kept breaking over her. She took a few more breaths and then noticed Devon beside the dumpster.

It would have been natural for her to flick her cigarette at him or shout something and leave, but she walked over to him and motioned with just her palm opening and closing to stand up. He got to his feet and took a step towards her wondering whether she wanted to kick him for what the men he was with did to her.

She stepped closer to him and took one of his earphones and put it in her ear. ‘Gorecki' was playing. She listened for a few moments.

‘I got fired,' she said.

‘That sucks.'

‘Didn't want the job really.'

‘Maybe you should be happy.'

‘I should have quit though.'

‘Maybe you did. Just reversed the way it happened.'

‘I like this song,' she said and Devon nodded at her. ‘I was wondering what you were listening to all night.'

‘Just music,' he said.

‘It didn't make sense – you with those arseholes.'

‘I'm an arsehole as well. I'm worse.'

She smiled like she didn't believe him and leaned in to kiss. She was still wearing her name badge. It said Nadia. It took a while for Devon to feel her lips. He had a lot of thoughts about what it might be like. It felt like nothing until he closed his eyes. There was tobacco on her breath and there was the taste of tears because her face was still wet. Nadia was the first person Devon had kissed. They listened to Lamb play a song called ‘Gabriel.'

When the déjà vu started this time it brought with it the phrase Studiously Aloof and the words Perils of Paradise he'd seen on the toilet door. Déjà vu about kissing Nadia and the feeling of suffocation, like both of them were stuffed in a long airtight glass tube. Déjà vu about being in this alleyway surrounded by the bottles. Déjà vu in the taste of tears and tobacco. Devon thought about
pain in paradise being a pleasure in hell
, and didn't know where Nadia's kiss came from.

*

He walked to Flinders Street Station. Let two trains go before he caught one. He listened to Primal Scream. He got to Brighton station on the last train. Got off and walked home slowly. Turned up the volume on his iPod until he could barely think. Unlocked the front door. The air in the house seemed vast and dead. Like it had been a tomb for a decade instead of a day. Everything perfectly placed and immaculately clean. As always. As though Roland and Devon Beckett had been living in a museum instead of a home.

He walked to the phone and plugged it into the wall. He turned his iPod off and pulled out the white plugs. He dialled the number for the police. He hung up. Took a breath and tried again. He told them he'd found the body of his father on the kitchen floor. That Roland Beckett was dead. He said it a few times before they accepted the information and asked him for his name and address and then told him they were sending a car over. They would have continued talking to him but Devon hung up and pulled the phone out of the wall again. He picked up his iPod. Put it down again. The light was still on in the kitchen from the morning.

Devon walked towards the kitchen and its body. When he got there he sucked in a hiss of air. The two perfect white buttons from his father's shirt were still on the pristine off-white tiles. One with thread in it and the other without thread. But the body wasn't where it had fallen. The body wasn't there.

Devon couldn't think. He looked around like it might materialise suddenly. He listened to the house and couldn't hear a thing. He wasn't sure if it was silent. His ears were roaring with sound. He wasn't sure his eyes were working properly either. He kept blinking, trying to see the body of his father. But it wasn't there and now he thought he could hear the sound of footsteps climbing down the stairs.