Other Facts of Life

  ‘I’ve obviously got the wrong end of the stick here. Your mum thinks you’ve got some hoard of magazines tucked away …’

  He gave Ben a shrug. Saying they both knew what mothers were like. This is it, thought Ben, all or nothing. He got up, went to his cupboard and pulled out a pile of magazines. Ron’s face dropped. Apart from his backside, which felt like it had been injected with Fanta, his body tensed.

  And relaxed again when he saw that the magazines were all copies of Time and other news publications. He took them from Ben and flicked through the pile.

  Every cover story was on war, famine, pollution or nuclear catastrophe. The Hidden War. Our Dying Planet. A Nation Mourns. Eve of Destruction.

  Quite a collection, thought Ron. Whatever happened to stamps?

  Once again he ruffled Ben’s hair.

  ‘Mate,’ he said gently, ‘these are American magazines. The whole nuclear thing’s between America and Russia.’

  Ben looked at him steadily. Come on, Dad, he thought, I’m not ten.

  Ron straightened his back and spoke in the voice he’d planned to use if he ever found himself Prime Minister.

  ‘Now look, you haven’t really caught my drift here and it’s probably my fault so I’m going to be blunt. Man to man. Is there anything you want to ask, as intimate or personal as you like, about yourself, or your sister, or … or me … or even your mother?’

  Ben looked him straight in the eyes.

  ‘Yes, Dad,’ he said, ‘there is.’

  Ron took a deep breath, swallowed and licked his lips.

  Ben pointed to the pile of magazines.

  ‘How can we carry on living happily with all this going on?’

  The air trickled out of Ron. His safari business suit seemed to be two sizes bigger.

  ‘A … e … i …’

  Ron tried to form an answer but the words wouldn’t come. He looked at his watch and took on the appearance of a man with a serious sausage problem to solve.

  ‘Look … er … perhaps you’d better ask your mum.’

  Ben watched his father hurry out of the room.

  Typical, he thought. I ask him a serious question and all he wants to talk about is sex.

  Ben stood in front of the bathroom mirror stripped to the waist. He flexed his biceps and tried to wiggle his pectorals. The muscles sat snugly in their warm flesh coat.

  Ben looked down at the magazine lying on the sink. Staring up at him from a page was a boy his own age. A refugee boy stripped to the waist like him.

  Under his skin the refugee boy’s skeleton appeared to be held together by rubber bands.

  Ben looked back at his own pink flesh. He wished the whole thing wasn’t happening. As well as everything else it was ruining his social life.

  Okay, he’d been pretty stupid to bring it up at a Satan’s Spaceriders Club meeting. He remembered the blank looks when he asked the others if they ever worried about people starving overseas. Then the sneering laughter that rang through the stormwater drain.

  Then Angus Skinner had said he only worried about himself starving in Double Chemistry and the others laughed themselves sick. If Skinner wasn’t only eleven Ben would have nutted him. Instead he tried to explain.

  But they’d all blasted their bike horns at him which was the ultimate Spacerider insult.

  Then they chucked him out of the club for being soft.

  Ben looked at the boy in the magazine, at the sores on his face, at the folds of skin under his ribs, at the misshapen joints on his hands and hoped from his own tousled blond hair to the tips of his pink toes that Mum had some answers.

  3

  Ben’s Beef

  Claire Guthrie keeled over and crashed to the kitchen floor. She lay motionless, eyes closed, arms splayed.

  Instead of sprinting to the phone, ringing an ambulance, sprinting back, giving Claire mouth-to-mouth, weeping, panicking and making silly deals with God, her mother merely sighed and plonked down a steak the size of Tasmania onto the kitchen table in front of Ben.

  ‘Claire,’ said Di, long-sufferingly.

  Ben wasn’t too worried by his sister’s collapse either. He thought she’d held the horrified stare at her plate a couple of seconds too long and one roll of the eyes before going down would have done but at that moment he was more interested in beef than ham. He stared thoughtfully at the two huge steaks steaming on the table.

  Claire’s eyes snapped open and she dragged herself theatrically onto her chair.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘it was just too much for me, the sight of three months’ meals all on the one plate.’

  ‘Eat your lunch,’ said Di sharply.

  Claire sat up and cleared her throat.

  ‘Here is the news. A sixteen-year-old girl stuffed three months’ meals into herself today and couldn’t walk until a Japanese whaling ship cut the blubber off with bulldozers …’

  Di thumped a bowl of potato salad down onto the table and struggled to control her anger.

  ‘Claire …’

  Claire’s shoulders drooped and her eyes filled with tears. She stood up and looked down at her slim figure.

  ‘You don’t care that I’m fat,’ she mumbled.

  With a whoosh Di’s steak burst into flames under the grill. Di grabbed a tea-towel and began swatting at it, calling to Claire over her shoulder.

  ‘Lots of people in the world would give anything for that steak.’

  A couple more swats and Di lifted her own smoking acreage of meat from her self-cleaning, self-fan-forcing but unfortunately not self-extinguishing cooker.

  She turned to see Claire storming out of the kitchen and closed her eyes, wishing she’d handled things differently.

  Ben looked up from his thoughtful scrutiny of the steaks. This was going to be lousy timing but he had to do it.

  ‘Why do we have so much meat?’ he asked.

  Di became the second thing to flare up in the kitchen that morning.

  ‘Because,’ she yelled, slamming her steak onto its plate, ‘we own four butcher’s shops and if a constant supply of the best steak isn’t good enough for you then I’m terribly sorry, we’ll try and make the next one caviar.’

  Ben frowned helplessly, pushing his glasses up his nose.

  ‘No, I mean why do we have so much meat when half the world’s starving?’

  Before Di could answer, Claire stormed back into the kitchen. She slapped a padded post bag onto the table, scrawled ‘The Poor People’ on the front of it with a marker pen, snatched the steak from her plate, dropped it into the bag, stapled the bag closed, dropped the bag onto the table and stormed out.

  Di sank wearily into a chair.

  ‘Ben, I can’t think about the rest of the world, I’ve got enough to worry about here. A daughter who thinks she’s a whale, a husband determined to work himself into a early grave, you stuck in your room with R-rated magazines, one of the airconditioners has blown up, two of the bikes are out of rego, the rotisserie in the microwave won’t go round …’

  Ben cut in animatedly.

  ‘But you just said to Claire that lots of people in the world would give anything for her steak. That’s thinking about the rest of the world.’

  ‘It’s a figure of speech,’ said Di softly. ‘It’s what mothers say instead of “eat that steak you ungrateful little shit or I’ll stuff it down your throat with a curling wand”.’

  Ben went over to the work surface and picked up the National Geographic. He opened it at an article on drought in Ethiopia and held the pages in front of his mother.

  ‘Mum, how can we ignore this?’ he asked. There, the Big One. But Mum could handle it. God, death, pimples. She’d never shied away from a big question in the past.

  Di looked at the emaciated children staring uncomprehendingly out from the pages.

  ‘Is this what you got this for?’ she said in amazement. She turned back to the bare-breasted tribeswoman on the cover. ‘Not this?’

  ‘No,’ said Ben, puzzled. ‘That
’s a different article. Water conservation in West Africa.’

  He took back the magazine and turned back to the Ethiopia pages.

  ‘The drought’s in Ethiopia. East Africa.’ God, she could be thick for someone who did a year of uni. Well, nine months.

  Di took back the magazine and turned back to the cover.

  ‘You don’t find this more interesting?’ she said, with growing concern.

  ‘No,’ said Ben. What was this fixation with water conservation? A hint about him leaving the shower running?

  Di held the cover slightly closer to him.

  ‘There’s nothing special that strikes you about this woman … physically?’

  The tribeswoman’s teak brown breasts heaved with his mother’s anxiety.

  Double homework, he thought, her as well. Give a bloke a break – my voice hasn’t even broken yet. So that’s what all the fuss with sex was about. He’d known it was for more than just having babies. Now all had been revealed. The reason adults were obsessed with sex was that it stopped them having to think about the suffering, misery and impending disaster that screamed at them from every side.

  Ben realised his mother was waiting for him to respond to the tribeswoman’s physical bits.

  ‘She’s better fed. They probably get more rain in West Africa.’

  He looked at Di sadly.

  Di smiled weakly, suddenly concerned that Ben shouldn’t realise he was a late developer and get neurotic about it. She made a mental note to give him more meat.

  Claire shivered with anticipation as the warm Hollywood breeze caressed her skin. She allowed herself a slow, smouldering glance across the blinding strip of Sunset Boulevard to where the figures stood nonchalantly around the black sports car. Five tanned young men, each one the star of a major motion picture.

  ‘Oh poop bum!’

  Okay, it wasn’t actually Hollywood, but when you’re stuck in a Sydney bush suburb miles from the city you do what you can with five shops and a service station.

  Claire allowed herself another slow, smouldering glance across the blinding strip of Wattle Parade to the five tanned young men standing around Des Turkle’s mother’s black hatchback.

  ‘Poop poop poop.’

  Her friend Amanda hissed furiously as she slipped a long, lacquered nail under a small piece of pepperoni and lifted it gingerly off the front of the ensemble that had taken them nearly an hour to mix and match in Claire’s walk-in wardrobe.

  Claire checked her own untouched slice of pizza, gripped casually between her fingertips, well away from her own nails (forty-five minutes). With her free hand she brushed invisible crumbs off her own outfit (seventeen minutes, Feb. Cosmo, Page 63).

  She glanced at her reflection in Amanda’s sunglasses. Hair okay, face okay, still not sure about the lip gloss. It was the same colour as the cabanossi on the pizza.

  One of the hatchback guys glanced over. Claire and Amanda froze.

  Claire suddenly realised that during all these weeks she’d never thought what she’d do with the pizza if one of the blokes actually came over to them. No way she’d eat it. Holding it was bad enough. Still, you had to look as though you had a reason for leaning against the pizza shop wall every Saturday afternoon.

  She casually turned her head away from the boys so she was looking down past the video shop, the paper shop, the hairdresser and the other video shop.

  To a small figure coming towards them. Hair ablaze in the sunlight. Glasses glinting. Cheeks pink and perspiring. Little brother.

  ‘Oh puke,’ muttered Claire.

  Amanda looked round, saw Ben and glanced hopefully across at the hatchback worshippers.

  ‘Perhaps he knows these guys,’ she said without moving her lips.

  ‘Only on a babysitter/client basis.’

  Ben stopped in front of the girls. He stared at Claire’s slice of pizza. Claire glared back.

  ‘One word …’ she said threateningly.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ said Ben.

  ‘Only if it doesn’t involve money,’ said Claire, relieved that the little dobber didn’t seem to be taking advantage of his very strong blackmail position.

  Ben looked through his sister’s lush black fringe of lashes into her eyes.

  ‘I’ve asked Mum and Dad but they won’t give me a straight answer.’

  Claire and Amanda froze, all but their eyes, which darted across at the boys, then met anxiously above Ben’s head.

  Amanda muttered through clenched teeth.

  ‘Please, not here, don’t ask where babies come from here.’

  One of the boys looked over. The girls writhed with embarrassment.

  Claire dropped her slice of pizza, pulled two dollars from her bag, thrust it into Ben’s hand and pushed him away.

  ‘Go. Go. Rack off,’ she hissed.

  Ben thought of trying his question anyway. Then he looked at the girls, who were studying the sky and the ground and trying to look as though they wouldn’t notice if someone dropped a hundred megaton warhead on the blokes across the road. He decided not to.

  He walked away slowly, stepping over Claire’s slice of pizza. Questions burned inside him fiercer than any pepperoni.

  He knew they’d cause just as much pain when they came out.

  4

  Spare Ribs

  Ron sat in the small, dingy office at the back of one of his shops and looked at all the paper.

  The mountain of invoices on his desk, the sheaves of delivery dockets pinned to the board, the rows of ledgers on the shelves, the numerous abattoir calendars around the walls with their naked women segmented by dotted lines into Forequarters, Topside and Rump.

  He was meant to be in meat, not paper.

  These days it was other blokes who got to nick the baby fat off sweet-smelling legs of lamb and slice through heavy, marbled rumps with knives so sharp you could lop a finger off and not notice till you tried to give a rude sign to a bus driver on the way home.

  But not for much longer.

  Once the wholesale side was up and running he’d be able to afford an accountant on staff who’d rip through all this paper like a leaf mulcher.

  Then he’d really be able to get cracking on expanding the business. Until one day the supermarkets wouldn’t be able to touch him.

  Wearily he grabbed the next invoice and started checking the figures. He decided the accountant would be a woman so she’d get rid of those bloody awful calendars.

  The office door crashed open and Wal, the manager of the shop, a big, cheery man in a bloodstained apron, came in carrying the morning’s takings in a calico bag.

  ‘Missed the plane to Rio again,’ grinned Wal and dumped the bag on the desk.

  Ron smiled. Wal made him smile.

  Wal frowned.

  ‘Jeez mate, you look pooped,’ he said, his big happy face sagging with concern.

  Ron rubbed the grey bags under his eyes.

  ‘Got a lot on my mind,’ he said. ‘Getting the bulkstore open by next month mostly.’

  ‘At least you won’t have to bone and trim nights in Woolies to pay for this one,’ said Wal fondly. ‘Remember the second shop?’

  Wal sat on the corner of the desk. The desk groaned.

  ‘Ever thought, mate,’ said Wal, ‘if you sold the business now, this arvo, you could go to the beach with nearly a million cans of beer. And still have enough left over for an Esky.’

  Ron smiled again.

  ‘Million tinnies doesn’t go far these days,’ he said. ‘Not when you’ve got a family.’ He rubbed his hands wearily over his face.

  ‘Wal,’ he said, ‘do your kids ever ask you questions you can’t answer?’

  Wal grinned. ‘All the time. What’s the capital of Spain? Forty-seven minus ninety-three? It’s just a phase they go through.’

  Ron looked at Wal.

  ‘Know what Ben asked me this morning? Why are so many people in the world starving?’

  Wal thought for a moment.

 
‘Curly one,’ he said. ‘Still, could have been worse. Guess what my Daryl asked me once? Where does the picture go when you turn the TV off?’

  Both men laughed. Then they stopped. Wal frowned.

  ‘Where does it go?’

  Ron dragged himself out of the car and plodded wearily up the driveway. In front of him the big house sat solid and immovable under the starry sky.

  He wished he felt solid and immovable.

  He fumbled with his keys, closed the front door behind him, dumped his briefcase on the hall table, felt his way to the foot of the stairs and switched the light on.

  And nearly jumped out of his skin.

  ‘Ben!’

  Ben sat on the third stair looking at him, the pile of magazines on his pyjama’d knees.

  ‘Can I talk to you now, Dad?’ he said.

  Ron’s shoulders sagged.

  ‘Not tonight, mate,’ he mumbled wearily. ‘It’s nearly midnight. Some other time, eh?’

  He ruffled Ben’s hair, stepped past him and plodded up the stairs, hoping with his last glimmer of energy he wasn’t being a bad parent.

  Suddenly he felt a jab of anger. Why should he be expected to worry about the world? Nobody in India gave a stuff that an Australian butcher had just spent Saturday afternoon and evening stuck in an office sweating over figures.

  He stopped, turned and looked down at Ben.

  ‘Anyway, you should be in bed.’ He went upstairs to dream of paper.

  Ben sat on his stair with the world’s problems on his knees and a heavy heart.

  Why won’t Dad talk to me! he wondered. Sure he’s busy but you can always find a moment. That’s why I sat up half the night risking acne from lack of sleep.

  He remembered other times he’d desperately needed to talk to Dad. Sitting up on the stairs had always worked then. Like the time Shane Moore had kicked the pedal off his bike on purpose and he’d desperately needed to discuss his plan to superglue him to the council garbage truck.

  That night he and Dad had talked almost till dawn.

  So why won’t he talk now? wondered Ben. Perhaps it’s me. He checked his breath. Perhaps I’m adopted and he’s scared he’ll blurt it out. Perhaps I’ve got cancer and he can only control his grief by not talking to me.