This is the Life

I said we should get a plumber around but Louis was against it.

‘It’s screwed,’ he said. ‘It’s no use. We’re screwed. The whole thing’s screwed.’

I’d been trying to encourage him with tales I’d read on the internet of long-term survivors, people who’d had the surgery and the radio and the chemo and had lived on for five, six, seven years and were still going. He appeared to make an effort to believe me, and I thought I saw a flash of optimism in the milky eyes, but then he got upset about the drugs he had to take and whether he’d taken some out of sequence.

‘We’re screwed,’ he said. ‘It’s no good. We’re screwed.’

I tried to convince Louis that we weren’t screwed.

‘They’ve got us by the balls and curlies,’ he said.

‘We’re not screwed, Louis,’ I said. ‘They don’t have us by the balls and curlies. We’re not without resources, are we? We’ve come this far and look what we’ve survived. We’ve got through all that and we’re still going.’

‘Maybe,’ Louis said. ‘But now we’re screwed.’

‘We’re not, Louis,’ I said. ‘We’re not screwed at all. We could have years yet. All right, I’m not saying it’s not serious, but there’s people who’ve got through it and survived. There can be good times ahead. And we can get a plumber round.’

‘No point. It’s screwed,’ Louis said.

‘Louis, there’s a blockage in a pipe somewhere, that’s all it is. A plumber can fix it. It’s a half-hour job. I’ll ask Don, your neighbour, if he can recommend a plumber and get him round.’

‘No use,’ Louis said. ‘We’re screwed.’

I went round to see Don anyway and got a number for Barry the plumber and I called him up.

‘Sure, I’ll be round Thursday, mate. No worries.’

No worries, I thought. That’ll be the day.

But it didn’t cheer Louis up much. He still said we were screwed, and by then I was starting to agree with him, though I never said as much.

He was right, of course. We are screwed. Every single one of us. People go on so much about winning and being winners and coming in first and all the rest of it. But we all have to lose in the end and the best we can hope for is to go gracefully. Everyone dies. Death comes for us all. We’re all screwed. We’ll all stop functioning properly sooner or later. So Louis was right.

On the other side of the coin, though, when I suggested getting a fan heater to warm the chilly Australian winter evenings – not exactly cold by northern European standards, but cool enough – Louis was against that too. He said, ‘We don’t need any heaters, we’re tough.’

‘You’re tough, Louis,’ I told him. ‘I’m getting a heater.’

And he’d asked the Malaysian girl to put the burner on at the café, hadn’t he?

I went to a shop the next morning and bought two heaters – a convector and a blower. I brought them back and plugged them in. Louis sat in his Salvation Army armchair and toasted himself. They got to be inseparable, Louis and that heater. Towards the end of his life, that was one of his firmer friends. He wouldn’t have it in the bedroom though. He drew the line at that level of comfort and self-indulgence.

‘I’ll be all right when I’m under the blankets,’ he said. ‘You don’t have heaters in the bedroom.’

I guess you didn’t when you were tough.

I recognised the blankets. I’d seen them before. They’d belonged to our mother. They had to be thirty years old and they were disintegrating. When I tried to wash them, the fibres came apart and blocked the washing machine. I went out and bought some doonas – Australian for duvets. While stripping the bed I got a look at the mattress and went on to the internet to order a new one. It was falling apart. Underneath the mattress was a thick crop of dust growing out of what was left of the carpet.

‘Have you got a vacuum cleaner, Louis?’ I asked.

‘Of course I have,’ he said indignantly. ‘Of course I have a vacuum cleaner.’

‘Where is it?’

‘I don’t remember,’ he said.

We had a look and found it in a cupboard. It was out of a museum.

‘Who was the last to use it?’ I asked.

‘Kirstin,’ he said.

‘And when did you and she split up?’

‘I don’t know. Ten years ago?’

‘Have you got an iron, Louis?’

‘Of course I have an iron!’

‘So where is it?’

‘I’m going to bed.’

I found the iron in a drawer. I don’t know who had been the last to use it. Or if anyone ever had.

Barry the plumber came round on the Thursday and fixed the plumbing. He said the pipe-work was so old that it was blocked up with internal corrosion. He turned off the water, cut out the bad pipe, and replaced it.

Louis said he could easily have done that himself at half the cost. I wanted to ask him why he hadn’t done it then. But I never did ask him things like that, as I knew he’d just get angry.

I paid Barry cash which I got out of the wall with Louis’ card. We met up outside the pharmacy where we were going to get Louis’ drugs. It was dusk and the sun was dipping and the street and vehicle lights were coming on. I handed Barry a wad of folded dollars.

‘It’s like doing a drug deal or something, Barry,’ I said.

‘No worries,’ he said.

‘Thanks for fixing things.’

‘No dramas, mate,’ he said. ‘See you, Louis.’

‘See you, Barry,’ Louis said.

And Barry drove off in his own ute. Every self-respecting tradesman had one.

‘That’s good then, Louis,’ I said. ‘We can have showers and brush our teeth now and do the washing-up in the sink.’

But he just shook his head and peered out at me from under the perpetual beanie hat that always seemed about to slide down over his eyes and blot him out. The world wouldn’t see him then and he wouldn’t see it.

‘Shall we go in and get your prescription?’ I said. ‘Have you got it there in the bag?’

He turned and pushed the door open. The Asian woman who was the pharmacist there recognised him and said hello. She had infinite patience with Louis, even when the words wouldn’t come to him or he was having trouble sorting out all the drugs he had to take. It seemed to me that the place was full of people who were infinitely kind, and most of them not white.

We got back out to the street with the drugs ordered and on the way – to be delivered tomorrow by three o’clock. In those few brief minutes the sun had set completely and the world was in southern-hemisphere winter darkness now, which came suddenly and early.

I saw a curry house with its sign lit up.

‘Shall we go and get a curry for dinner, Louis?’ I said. ‘Is that place any good?’

‘It’s okay,’ he said.

‘Shall we go there?’

He didn’t answer me, which was a habit of his since childhood. He’d often simply stare at you and not answer your question. Not as if he hadn’t heard it, but as though the question could not be answered, or deserved no answer. I could never tell. Maybe he hadn’t heard me after all.

‘Louis,’ I said. ‘Shall we have a curry?’

‘We’re screwed,’ he said. ‘Completely screwed.’

He turned his back on me and walked towards the neon goddess. I followed and we went into the restaurant. Once again, when we ordered our food, the waitress taking our order said, ‘No worries.’

There you have it, I thought. Some say no worries and some say we’re screwed. I guessed there had to be a middle ground somewhere. But I didn’t know what you’d call it. Or maybe it was just a swinging pendulum, which veered between the two conditions until it finally ran down and came to a halt and you couldn’t wind it up again. And when it stopped moving, that was when they buried you, and you were neither one thing nor the other then, just finished, but free from pain.

4

TERRI TWO

At the funeral Terri got up and said some well-meant and well-intended words. I liked her. She seemed like a nice, genuine person, who had felt real affection for Louis and had liked him for himself. We got talking and she said I should come around for a meal before I went home. I said I would take her up on that, and besides Louis had borrowed some bedding from her that I needed to return. So she gave me her number and she told me to call, which I did after a week or so, and I arranged to go round.

I thought we’d maybe go to a restaurant, but she said there was a communal lounge and dining area on site, where the bungalow dwellers could get together once a week if they so desired and eat dinner at trestle tables – all provided at minimal cost.

It was a barn of a place, full of noisy conversations. There were married and elderly couples there, along with divorcees, singles, and allegedly amorous widows on the lookout for spare men. I found Terri at a table with her friends. She’d saved a space for me, so I sat down and she introduced me, and we all exchanged small talk about the UK and what have you. After the first course, a woman Terri knew wandered over to say hello. Terri introduced us, and as they chatted, the woman remained standing next to where I sat. Next thing I knew she had her hand on my shoulder, then her fingers were in my hair, then she was playing with the lobe of my ear, which sent tingles along my arm. Then she asked me where I lived and when I said the UK, she gave up on me and walked off.

There was no coffee to be had so Terri invited me back to her bungalow. She had a small dog, but it was friendly and nice, and not much of a barker. We drank instant coffee and talked about Louis. We talked about his boiler, which had conked out a decade ago. It had taken him a full ten years to get round to fixing it, and he had lived without hot water all that time, taking invigorating cold showers, even in winter. His washing machine ran off cold water too.

‘And yet he was so good at fixing other people’s things,’ she said.

‘Isn’t there something about the shoemaker’s kids always being badly shod?’

‘I suppose,’ she said.

We talked some more about Louis and she said how good he had looked after the famous haircut, but that generally speaking he had allowed himself to turn into a wild man.

‘I’d look at those eyebrows,’ she said, ‘and think, Louis, if you’d just shave that beard off, you’d be quite a handsome man. He could scrub up really nice. But well, you know Louis …’

Louis was always covered in paint. If not him personally, then his clothes. Some people have good, going-out clothes and working clothes. All of Louis’ clothes were working clothes, because if a job needed doing, he’d do it, irrespective of what he had on. As a result almost everything he owned had paint or oil daubed on it, and he lived in shorts, even in winter, and his elbows poked out of his unravelled sweaters. He was a take-me-as-I-am kind of man. He was a love-me-or-leave-me guy.

Terri went on to say that he had asked her out to dinner once at Fried Fish, which was an upmarket kind of fish and chip place down near the harbour.

‘I thought he’d have got dressed up,’ she lamented. ‘And I went to a lot of trouble. But he turned up in his ute in his working clothes. I felt I was going out for a meal with the workman,’ she said. ‘I was so embarrassed.’ Then she sighed and said, ‘Though I did like your brother. And underneath that beard he could have been quite a handsome man.’

I sneaked a look at my watch and thought that maybe I ought to go. I didn’t want to outstay my welcome. They seemed to keep early hours in the bungalow city.

But then, as I was about to make excuses, Terri said, ‘You know, I maybe shouldn’t tell you this, but Louis came to see me once, oh, a year or two ago, and he was sitting right where you are now, in that very chair …’

We both looked at that very chair I was sitting in, as if it might speak, or somehow bear witness, or disclose its mysteries. But it stayed schtum.

‘Yes, he was sitting in that very chair – and I don’t know if I should tell you this, but quite out of the blue, I mean, I was so surprised – you know what Louis said to me?’

I did, but felt that I couldn’t admit to it.

‘He said, Terri, would you like to go to bed with me?’

‘Wow,’ I said, feeling I had to say something. ‘Well, that was Louis for you, always subtle.’

‘I was so surprised. So surprised.’

‘I bet.’

‘Because I’d never ever thought of Louis in that way. I’d always just thought of him as a friend of Frank’s. Not to say though that if he’d trimmed that beard and moustache off he wouldn’t have been quite a good-looking man.’

‘Well, Louis always had a beard,’ I said. ‘Since his twenties. He’d had that beard a long time.’

‘So anyway, I was that taken aback.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘I didn’t know where to look.’

‘A very difficult situation,’ I agreed. ‘To have come out with it like that. I mean, no preamble or anything.’

‘Not a word. No preliminaries. No what you’d call—’

‘Courtship rituals?’ I suggested.

‘No warning at all.’

‘Well, Louis always preferred the direct approach.’

But I was just stalling. I was just trying to keep things on a neutral footing so as not to put her off from telling me what had happened next.

‘Well, I did not know what to say,’ Terri said.

‘Quite an embarrassing situation,’ I nodded, ‘to be put on the spot like that.’

‘And he was looking at me with such sad eyes. He had such sad eyes sometimes, your brother.’

‘He had to put drops in them for his glaucoma,’ I said. ‘In fact I sometimes wondered if it wasn’t the roofing that caused it. You know Louis, he’d never wear sunglasses, and up there on those roofs in the Australian sunshine, and it reflecting off the surface. Surely that could damage your eyes.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘They were more like a labrador’s eyes. They’d look at you sort of sadly, but affectionately too. And Frank never got glaucoma, but then he drank a lot.’

‘I’m not so much of a dog person,’ I said. ‘Though I had a cat once when my girlfriend left. She went off with my best friend but she left the cat behind. Interestingly, Louis introduced that friend to us and then he went off to Australia. He ruined half the furniture – scratched it to pieces. Cats and sofas are a lethal combination. I think the cat resented me and he’d rather have gone with my ex, only she didn’t want him.’

‘But what a thing to come out with, I thought,’ Terri said. ‘Terri, would you like to go to bed with me? Just like that.’

I felt there was nothing I could say now that would have been appropriate. So I just waited.

‘Well, once I was over the surprise, I said, Louis – Louis, for us to do a thing like that would spoil a beautiful friendship.’

‘So you—’

‘I just couldn’t. I mean, if he’d dressed a little smarter maybe, or had had a shave more often. But you can’t expect to live without hot water for ten years and still—’

‘No, of course.’

‘Maintain normal standards,’ Terri said.

‘So how did Louis take that?’ I asked. ‘He was okay, I guess. Because you obviously remained friends.’

‘Oh yes,’ Terri said. ‘I really liked Louis. And so did Frank – until he got the drinking problem.’

I looked at my watch.

‘I’d better go,’ I said. ‘It’s late and I’m not so sure of the route in the dark.’

Terri gave me detailed directions for a short cut, but they were so complicated I couldn’t follow them, and I went back the way I had come. I was driving Louis’ ute, which was a noisy rattle trap with a falling-down window and a heater/cooler fan permanently stuck on high. It also had a quarter of a million miles on the clock. And that was Louis too, always buying old and high maintenance. Even when he could afford better.

I said goodbye to Terri and thanked her for everything and we said we’d keep in touch, though I doubted that we would and I believe she doubted that too.

The last I saw of her was in the rear-view mirror, her and her little dog watching me drive away.

I hadn’t said a word to her about Louis’ version of events; I’d felt it would have been impolite to mention this contradictory story. But I did wonder which version was true. And I also wondered why she had even mentioned the incident. Did she know that I knew something and she wanted to put me right? Or had she really slept with Louis, but was embarrassed about it, because of his paint-splattered clothes and his torn shorts and his creased T-shirt and his untrimmed beard and his not having been under a hot shower in ten years?

And if her version was the true version, then why had Louis told me a different one? Had it been a tale of wish fulfilment? But he hadn’t needed to tell me a single thing about it. If she’d turned him down, he could have kept quiet about that. Only the two of them need ever have known.

So where does the truth lie, and does it really matter?

But I liked Terri. She seemed like a good person to me. Good and kind and generous – someone who’d had a hard life but had come through without cynicism and with her values intact. And she said some nice things at the funeral service, and she didn’t have to.

So what the hell. What you are supposed to do anyway, with all the fathomless stories that you’ll never get to the bottom of, and all the contradictions? People’s lives seem like entangled balls of string, with a thousand knots in them. You’ll never unpick them all. The best you can do is just carry on and forget about it. You could drive yourself nuts if you brooded over it. And what good would that do anyone? Least of all yourself.

5

BABIES

Back in my juvenile delinquent days I had been apprehended for tearing the leaves off a rhododendron bush, but had given a false name and address, so the cops had come looking for me and stopped the school bus on the way home into town. I guess I must have been the only person on board who looked guilty, so they said it was me, which it was, but I denied it, and they escorted me off the bus to the police station across the road.

I used to try to sit on the long back seat of the bus with the trouble-makers and no-hopers and those who had aspirations to play the electric guitar but who would probably end up working behind a counter.

Seeing me being taken away, Louis – who was a respectable pillar of society back then, with a prefect’s badge and high status as deputy head boy – got off the bus too and accompanied me to the station.

When news got to the school the next day, they said they would expel me for what I had done to the bush, as it was plain I was a bad lot and a corrupting influence and heading for the pan.

Louis went to the headmaster’s door and knocked on it and requested an interview, during the course of which he relayed the fact that if I got kicked out, he would leave too, and they didn’t want to lose him, so we both stayed.

I should have been grateful, I suppose, but I wasn’t particularly, as I hated the place and left anyway after a couple of months. But I appreciated his loyalty, as we hadn’t been getting on back then and fought constantly. Once he tried to break a beer glass over my head and told me I treated home like a hotel. I told him it was a pretty poor hotel and not what I was used to – which was a lie, as I’d known nothing else. After that I tried to hit him over his head with a cricket bat, but he was too quick for me. But apart from small skirmishes like that, we got on fairly well.

At one time though, Louis had a religious period and our mother started panicking when he let it be known that he felt he maybe had a vocation and would one day become a priest. Our mother went straight to church and prayed that such a thing should never happen, and God, being bountiful, let that particular cup of woe pass to someone else.

All the same, Louis took possession of the high moral ground and defended it staunchly for several months. When he came across the James Bond paperback I was reading he tore it up and binned it and said reading it was a sin.

I had to tell him that it wasn’t even my book, I’d been loaned it, and it was none of his damned business what I read as I would read whatever I liked and he could go and screw himself and he’d better get me another copy soon as I was due to return the book to the boy I’d borrowed it from.

Give him his due, he bought a replacement, but he said I wasn’t to look inside it, I was to hand it back and no peeking.

When he was out of the way I read the rest and finished the novel. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, unless it was the heavy smoking.

But that was Louis for you back in those days, always ready with the judgements and the moral tone, but then he mellowed a little in later life and said the school was a nest of hypocrites after it came to light that half of the Reverend Fathers were now standing accused in their retirement of fiddling with little boys.

All the same we had a big row once that set the tone for the remainder of our relationship when Louis told me that as soon as he got the chance he was going to move abroad and head for another country so as to get away from me. And that was just what he did – though whether I was the prime mover in this or just another incidental annoyance he wanted to get away from I’m unsure. I suspect the latter and bear no hard feelings because if he was pleased to go, I was also relieved he was gone, as it meant I could read my books in peace without the censor looking over my shoulder.

The first place Louis went to was Canada. He got his chemistry degree and then went to Alberta to study for an MSc and teach undergraduates. He met a girl there called Chancelle who had a brain the size of his or maybe even bigger and they both studied chemistry and had a lot of sex, according to Louis, and no doubt some intellectual conversations afterwards. They soon moved in together.

Chancelle was French Canadian and her family supported a free and separate Quebec. They wouldn’t speak English to you and made out that they didn’t know any, though they did and spoke it like natives when people weren’t looking. Louis had to learn some French or they’d have left him out of all the conversations. He got quite fluent as far as I know, though he spoke it with a Canadian accent.

But things went to pot after a few years. Louis got his degree and went to work for a mining company out in the sticks. Chancelle got more deeply involved in French Canadian politics and she and Louis only saw each other at weekends. She began an affair with another French Canadian who was also active on the political front (and, no doubt, the sexual one) and spoke better French than Louis did.

Louis got disillusioned and disgusted and came back home. Like most academically-inclined people who don’t know what to do with themselves, he decided to return to university. So he studied for an engineering diploma this time, and when he got it, he moved up north and worked in a straight and proper job for a while, but he got disillusioned and disgusted, as they didn’t know how to run a business and there was too much politics and the senior management were wankers.

So he took his savings and bought a narrow boat and sailed it down the canal and moored it in the harbour half a mile from the flat I lived in with a woman I had fallen in love with, on account – amongst other things – of her Scottish accent. The trouble was she was an artist, and her friends were artists, and Louis lived on a boat now, and he got into craft and furniture making and rented a small workshop by the docks. So everyone was a bohemian apart from me, and I had to get up on Monday mornings and go to work, as I was the one paying the rent.

This narrow boat was the first of Louis’ wrecks. It needed so much work done to it, it would have been easier to start from scratch and build a new one. It had once been a fire boat on the Birmingham canal. Its engine was situated in the middle of the boat, instead of one of the ends, which is more usual, and it had two drive shafts, so that the boat could go in either direction without the need to turn it around – which can be difficult in a narrow canal when you’re in a hurry to put out a fire.