Barracuda

Theo opened the door. He looked sullenly at Dan, then turned and shouted down the hall, ‘Mum! Dad! Danny’s here.’ Without another word he went into his bedroom and slammed the door. The brothers had not talked, not really talked, since the night over two years before when Dan had called from the Prahran copshop. It had been Theo who’d answered the phone. Dan did not blame Theo for despising him or being ashamed of him, but he couldn’t think about it, so instead he reflected on how the cracks in the hallway walls had widened since he’d lived there, how the house smelled more of damp and soil, and how the earthiness of that smell was softened by the aroma of cooking and lived-in spaces.

  His mother was rushing up the hall towards him. She wasn’t wearing make-up and he realised how rare a sight that was. She was wearing an old black t-shirt, the lurid gothic script reading The Beasts of Bourbon now faded, she was hugging him, kissing him, on his face, his cheeks, even his lips. She released him from her grasp and he breathed out, but she wouldn’t let go of his hand. He breathed in, she was dragging him past Theo’s bedroom, past his old room; he breathed out, he was being pulled into the lounge, the television was on mute, The Age was open over the coffee table. She led him into the kitchen where his father was standing in a brown polyester top and cream pyjama bottoms, standing rigid. Dan breathed in. His mother let go of his hand and the two men took a step towards one another, went into a hasty embrace, their bodies just touching, but long enough for him to hear his father whisper, ‘Good to see you, son.’

  Dan breathed out.

  His father’s hair was now completely grey. He still had his Elvis quiff, his rockabilly sideburns, but his hair was a grimy silver, there were deep furrows at the sides of his mouth, and his paunch was now definitely a belly. He was getting old, thought Dan.

  ‘Will you two sit down? Anyone looking at you would think you were strangers.’

  Dan’s mother was busy in the kitchen but her words brought a wry smile to his father’s face, and the men were put at ease. They sat opposite each other, while his mother scurried around them, putting cheese and olives on the table, slicing bread. There was a plate of freshly made meatballs on the stove. She drizzled oil into a pan.

  ‘I hope you’re hungry, Danny,’ she said brightly. ‘I’m making keftethes. Your favourite.’

  He almost blurted out, Are they? Are they still my favourite? But he swallowed the words, knowing they would only hurt her. As the meatballs started spitting in the pan and the aroma of the meat, parsley and onion filled the kitchen, he was reminded of how much he loved her food. He remembered how he would come home from training, ravenous, having flown through the pool, having dominated the water. She’d often have made two batches of keftethes, one for him and one for the rest of the family. He could eat all of his, a half kilo of meat, he could have even eaten double that. She’d have salad for him as well and some roasted vegetables and bread. And then, maybe, his hunger would be satisfied. But it seemed years since he had eaten her meatballs. It could not have been as long as that. But that would have been before prison, and in there, time had become elongated and space had changed him, hemmed him in, made him burrow deep inside himself. He was no longer of the sky, of water, he was now in the earth. He did not know whether her keftethes were his favourite anymore. It was as if he had to discover his taste and his desire anew.

  His mother noticed the backpack at his feet. ‘Is that all you’re bringing with you to Adelaide? You’re just like your dad.’

  Father and son exchanged a glance, then quickly dropped their eyes.

  His father’s nervousness around him was new. There had been awkwardness before, there had certainly been that when he was young. They’d given each other the shits, they would argue endlessly. Dan understood all of it now, or thought he was beginning to: that his father resented the family’s time and energy and expectations all being focused on the eldest child. Swimming and practice and competition and heats—they’d been all Dan ever thought about. And not just him; for many years it had been all Theo and his mother and Regan thought about too. Only his father had been cautious, only his father, Dan now knew, had thought ahead to what might happen if Dan couldn’t swim. Dan winced; his father had thought ahead to what it would mean if Dan failed. Only his father had seen ahead to failure.

  The act of violence that had resulted in Dan going to prison had terrified and confused his father. The one time he had visited Dan in gaol, he had hardly been able to talk, had had not a clue what to say. He had sat there, straight-backed and silent, unable to speak a word. Throughout the visit, his father’s eyes had been watery, as if all his rigidity, all his discomfort had arisen from the effort of fighting back tears. When the visit had ended, all Dan felt was relief—and exhaustion, as if he had swum for hours.

  It’s my fault, thought Dan. It is my failure that has aged him.

  ‘I don’t need much, Mum. We’re only going for a few days, aren’t we?’

  His father blurted out, ‘I’m really glad you’re going with your mum, Dan. This means so much to her.’ Behind him, at the stove, his mother reached back and squeezed Dan’s shoulder.

  When the keftethes were ready, his mother asked Dan to get his brother. Dan walked down the hallway and knocked on Theo’s door. There was no answer, so he knocked again, then opened the door.

  The curtains were drawn and Theo was sprawled on the bed. Dan could smell the marijuana, the accumulated fetid stink of sweat and adolescent boy, strong, overpowering, straight down his lungs. Theo’s shirt had ridden up and Dan was shocked at the flush of tight wiry curls on his brother’s flat stomach.

  Theo scowled. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Lunch is ready.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  There were no swimming posters on his brother’s wall, no more Kieren Perkins or Susie O’Neill. There were no athletes, nothing to do with sport except a Magpies pendant: all of Dan’s old trophies and championship ribbons had gone. Instead there were two enormous band posters, ghoulish exaggerated faces, a man’s face painted white, blood-red lipstick, his mouth opened wide in an expressionist scream. There was a smaller poster of a supermodel in a bikini, there was an A4 black and white leaflet for a rally against the war in Iraq, a poster of a thick-necked, preposterously muscled black rapper wearing a baseball cap with a dollar sign on it, gold chains decorating his oversized glistening chest. Dan didn’t know any of them, what they were, what they sang, what they meant.

  Theo had closed his eyes.

  Dan tried again. ‘Come on, mate, do it for Mum.’

  The boy sat up abruptly. ‘As if you’ve ever given a shit about Mum!’ His reply dripped with disbelief and scorn, the outrage rising to a juvenile screech. He couldn’t steady the trembling in his voice. ‘As if you have ever given a stuff about anyone but yourself. When did you last call Regan? Do you have her address, do you even have her fucking number?’

  Dan couldn’t answer.

  ‘Thought so. And she still defends you, she still thinks you care about us.’ Theo lay back on the bed and turned to the wall. His next words were muffled. ‘Just get the fuck out of my room.’

  Dan heard him clearly. He stood there, clenching and unclenching his fist. I could fucking kill you, I could take you by the fucking neck and wring it till you choked. He told himself to breathe, to remember the lessons he’d learned in prison: to count down from ten, slowly, not to rush through the numbers, to mouth them, to visualise them, to breathe in and out between the numbers as he counted. It was a simple trick and he always felt a little foolish doing it, but it worked. By seven his hands had relaxed and by three there was no anger.

  ‘OK, mate, I’ll get Mum to save you some for later.’

  He shut the door, but not before he heard the mumbled words: ‘Fucking loser.’

  The keftethes tasted good, the keftethes tasted as he remembered them. But he didn’t know if they were still his favourites, he had yet to rediscover that.

  After lunch they hit the road. His mother had delayed
their departure searching for CDs to take along for the drive. She had finally got rid of her old Datsun—by the end the chassis was more rust than steel, Dan remembered—and had bought herself a five-year-old Hyundai.

  ‘It doesn’t have much grunt,’ his father explained, grinning, leaning against the lounge doorframe with his arms folded, watching his wife search frantically through cases of CDs, ‘but it has a shit-hot stereo and that’s all your mother cares about.’

  She had chosen good music for their long drive across the border. There were the strong-lunged, honey-voiced singers that she adored, Etta James and Mavis Staples. There were the growlers, Cash and Jennings, Joplin and Cave. And then there were those she called the angels, the ones who healed as they sang: Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Presley. She sang along to all of them. Dan’s father was the singer in the family; Neal’s voice was strong, it had character and he could hold and tame a note. Dan’s mother’s voice was reedy, and both high and low registers defeated her. She could butcher a melody, could go badly off-key. But Dan didn’t mind. As the city ended and they sliced through the low plains of farm and scrub, he took pleasure in her joy at the music, in being on the open road, in the fact that the space between them was being filled with music rather than conversation. He was safe in the music, he felt at home in it.

  After they’d reached the end of a George Jones CD his mother said, ‘I’ve packed some Soundgarden, I’ve got Nevermind.’

  He knew she’d brought them along for him, but his heart was sinking as she pushed in the Nirvana CD. The chords thrashed and boomed through the car, lashing at his ears. He ejected it immediately. His mother said nothing as he chose another disc from the pile, an Everly Brothers compilation. She sang along to ‘Unchained Melody’, her voice cracked on the final chorus of ‘You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling’ but stayed true on ‘Cathy’s Clown’. All the words came back to him. He could take comfort in the familiarity of all these words and notes and melodies.

  In Ararat they stopped for a break. All the shops were open for the Easter Saturday trade. They went past a second-hand bookshop. ‘Do you mind if we go in?’ his mother asked and he agreed gladly. They spent twenty minutes looking through rows of dusty books. Dan picked up worn copies of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon.

  His mother chuckled as she stood beside him at the counter, and paid for the books. ‘That looks like pretty heavy reading there, mate,’ she said as they headed back to the car. She threw him a quizzical look. ‘I don’t remember you reading much at all when you were at school.’

  Dan hesitated. He wanted to say that he’d learned to read in gaol, to really read. He wanted to tell her that the library had been his favourite place inside, that when he read As I Lay Dying he’d found a voice that made sense of time and space as he was experiencing it in gaol, that it had spoken to him more clearly and more profoundly than any voice he’d ever encountered before: of how the past could not be separated from memory, of how it was not only time that changed people, it was memory as well. He wished he could tell her how he’d read Johnno in one sitting at the library table and that he’d started it again before lights out that night. He wished he could tell her about discovering words and how words could become song, something he had never understood at school. Not that he had ever scoffed at books; his parents would never have tolerated that—even his father’s suspicion of the learned had never extended to learning itself, he loved stories too much. But the young Danny had never worked out how to make time for books; he had believed that the dedication required would pull him away from routine and from his body, from his goal of success. In prison, however, where everything was ordered by time, but time itself was always elusive, out of reach, he realised that he had been wrong about books.

  Sitting at a desk in the library, reading in his cell, losing himself in a dog-eared copy of 1984, his whole being had been immersed in the ferocious lust for escape that drove Winston Smith. The novel had so shaken him that he’d had to gasp for air, as if he had swum an ocean. Desire and betrayal: George Orwell had chronicled Dan’s soul. Soon after, he had picked up a slim volume from a donated crate of books, a collection of Chekhov’s short stories, the spine broken, some of the pages falling loose. Dan had never read a short story before in his life. One particular story he had returned to again and again, reading it obsessively: ‘A Day in the Country’, the story of an innocent Russian peasant world that could not possibly be part of the same universe that had created the brutal shaming world of prison. Dan couldn’t understand how he had become the peasant boy Danilka, how he knew how the boy moved and breathed, how he could feel the soreness of Danilka’s wrist when the old cobbler had freed it from the hole in the tree, how as he read of the journey through the fields and back to the village he could smell the scent of bird cherry, meadowsweet, and lilies-of-the-valley after the storm. He had reread it immediately, and realised that he had been wrong; that as the old man had crept into the deserted barn to make the sign of the cross over the sleeping orphans, Chekhov had indeed captured some of the brutality as well as the tenderness of the world. Dan had furtively torn the pages of the story out of the book—no one would know that they had ever been there, the book was old and that torn, no one would ever know—and he had guarded that story through his last few months in prison, kept it folded inside a tear in his mattress. That story had returned him to childhood, had made him shudder with a joy so intense it seemed almost erotic. Had he ever known such joy?

  Dan had discovered that he had been mistaken, that books did not exist outside of the body and only in mind, but that words were breath, that they were experienced and understood through the inseparability of mind and body, that words were the water and reading was swimming. Just as he had in water, he could lose himself in reading: mind and body became one. He had taken the Chekhov story with him on release, and the pages remained folded in a tight square in the one gift Carlo had ever given him, an old vinyl pouch in which the older man had kept his tobacco and his drugs. The pouch now sat on a makeshift shelf Dan had constructed next to the mattress in his bedroom. That story was a song: in reading it he believed he was opening his lungs and singing.

  He didn’t know how to explain all of this to his mother, but at that moment, with the books tucked under his arm, he decided that when they were back in Melbourne he would show her his home, in which there was no television or radio, no stereo or computer, just books. And he would tell her that prison had taught him that books were all he needed, books were enough. They were music and light and sound to him—they were the world.

  ‘I like reading,’ he answered simply, and held out his hand for the keys. ‘My turn to drive.’

  They hadn’t driven far, listening to a live recording of Aretha Franklin backed by a gospel choir, when his mother lowered the volume. ‘It was Regan who was always the reader,’ she announced, suddenly. Her tone shifted. ‘Have you heard from her?’ There was pleading in her voice.

  ‘No,’ he said, and remembered with mortification his brother’s scoffing words. ‘Have you?’

  His mother didn’t answer straight away. She had her eyes closed, was swaying to the music. ‘She speaks to your father. He’s visited her when he’s been up north. We want her to go back to school, finish her VCE, but she won’t hear of it.’

  The call and response of singer and congregation tumbled and rolled under his mother’s words.

  Her voice trembled on the edge of tears. ‘I feel like I failed her, Danny. I did what my mother did to me. I took my daughter for granted. I don’t know why I did that.’

  His gaze didn’t waver from the open road, the parched wheat-coloured farmland. His mother turned up the volume. Franklin’s ecstasy filled the car and Dan found that he could breathe out. It was safe again.

  It was pitch-black night as they descended from the hills into Adelaide, only the weaving headlights breaking through the obstinate darkness. The descent had come abruptly, the drop sheer an
d frightening, the city’s canopy of sparkling lights suddenly glimmering below. Dan was tired and had to snap to attention, fearful with every turn that he could lose control and send the car flying out into the night. Part of him wanted that flight, that release.

  His mother had turned off the stereo; they were descending into silence.

  ‘I’m scared, Danny,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry, I’ll slow down.’

  ‘No, not of your driving. I’m scared of going home.’

  Home. It surprised him that she would still use that word for this city. ‘Maybe Dad should have come with you instead?’

  She shook her head vehemently. Dan was concentrating on the precarious twists and turns of the road but he sneaked a look across at her. No make-up, streaks of ash now in her once coal-black hair, which was tied back in a severe roll. She was wearing a corn-yellow cardigan over a white top, loose dark linen pants. No intricately embroidered stockings, no heels on her shoes. This was not the mother he knew, the woman who delighted in artifice, in elaborate dress, in exhilarating aromas. She had stripped herself down to a woman on the other side of middle age.

  ‘Your dad came last time,’ she finally explained. ‘It was a disaster. Your papou was dying, he was so sick but he still found it in himself to rise from his deathbed and order your father and me out of the house.’ Again, she was shaking her head ferociously, as if by doing so she could shake her memories loose, untether them and toss them away. ‘He called me the most terrible names—it was awful. I thought your father was going to punch him.’

  She touched her son’s wrist, the lightest touch, then put her hand back in her lap. ‘I really appreciate this, Danny. I need you here but I’m sorry to put you through this.’

  His neck hurt, he felt bone-weary from the driving and her words. A dull pain was thumping at the back of his head. He couldn’t fail her, he must not fail her.

  ‘You don’t have to thank me, Mum. I’m glad I came.’