THIS IS THE LIFE
ALEX SHEARER

Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

Copyright © Alex Shearer 2014

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014

Cover photographs © Seb Oliver/Corbis (figures and beach); Shutterstock.com (sky and plane)

Alex Shearer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007529711

Ebook Edition © February 2014 ISBN: 9780007529728

Version: 2015-02-06

For Bob, who understood the problem.

About the Book

“I don’t have much advice to give anyone; I’ve learned very little in my life; but here’s a gem of wisdom. Don’t take a dying man’s kettle away. You won’t be doing him any favours. Nor yourself either.”

This is the story of Louis, who never quite fitted in, and of his younger brother who always tagged along.

Two brothers on one final journey together, wading through the stuff that is thicker than water.

Tender-hearted, at times achingly funny, This is the Life is a moving testimony to both the resilience of the human spirit and to the price of strawberries.

About the Author

Alex Shearer was born in Wick in the north of Scotland, and now lives in Somerset. He has written for television, radio, film and the stage and is the author of many books for children, including the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize-shortlisted The Speed of the Dark. Several of Alex’s novels have become films and TV series, all over the world; one became both a Manga comic and a full-length Anime film in Japan. His books have been translated into many different languages.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

About the Book

About the Author

1. Haircut

2. Terri

3. Plumbing

4. Terri Two

5. Babies

6. Old Black Dog

7. Fried Fish

8. Matadors

9. Strawberries

10. Cat

11. Tricks

12. Crossing

13. Chain

14. Jack and May

15. Numbers

16. Free Lunch

17. Ashes

18. See Red

19. Phascogale

20. Observer

21. Interlude

22. Good News

23. Masks

24. Melon Claw

25. Dictation

26. The Way

27. Reprise

28. No Dramas

29. Wildlife

30. Flat White

31. Shell

32. In Time

The Origins of This is the Life

About the Publisher

1
HAIRCUT

We walked in and the two Chinese girls who ran the place looked up and gave us a nod. They were both busy and neither of them seemed too pleased to see us. But Louis was oblivious to that, so we sat down anyway and waited our turn.

Soon as we sat down, the two Chinese girls started working very slowly, as if there were a competition between them to be the last to finish. The prize for coming in first would be to have Louis as the next customer, and neither of them wanted that. So they both attended diligently to detail and went snip-snip-snipping with fine precision and they used plenty of combing and lots of changes of blade sizes and plenty of holding up of the mirror for a look at the back of the head.

By this time Louis was all beard, moustache, straggly hair and eyebrows. The eyebrows arched quizzically, or, if Louis had been fiddling with them, which he did, they pointed up like small devil’s horns. I didn’t think he had had a shave or haircut in six months, maybe longer. Nor had he trimmed his beard in any way. He looked like a wild man, like one of those rough sleepers you feel part sorry for, part afraid of, and part repelled by.

The remains of some ancient dinners were hiding in the moustache. No wonder the Chinese girls were working slowly. If I’d been a Chinese girl, I’d have worked slowly too, or have closed the place early, or simply have said no and have pointed at the door.

But they were too polite, or kind, or resigned, or simply didn’t want to lose the business. Finally, one of the seated customers was done with. The taller Chinese girl – who also appeared to be the older – shook hair from the gown and then invited us to step forwards.

‘She’s ready for you, Louis.’

Louis looked at me in that milky-eyed way he had adopted, and in which fashion he looked at almost everyone. It was a strange look, one of appeal and also of stoical resignation. It took me back half a lifetime, to when we were kids. No, more than half. It was a lifetime. His, at least, and maybe mine too soon – who knows?

‘Louis?’

He stood up and took the beanie hat off, handing it to me along with the blue cooler bag he carried his needed possessions in – things like drugs and paperwork and his mobile phone, which he seemed to have forgotten how to use, and his bank card, the number for which he could not remember.

He sat in the barber’s chair.

‘So what will it be?’ the Chinese girl said. She half looked at Louis, but really she was addressing the question to me, and we all knew it. But Louis was an adult and he still had a brain – well, most of one.

‘What would you like, Louis? How short? General trim? How about the beard? Short but not too short, maybe? That all right?’

He gave me the milky-eyed look and nodded.

‘Short but not too short, please.’

The Chinese girl nodded, and she got to work. If she felt any revulsion or repugnance, she didn’t show it. She knew there was something wrong and that Louis wasn’t firing on all cylinders, but that maybe he had done once. It wasn’t as if he’d always been this way, which would have been a different matter. But it wasn’t like that at all.

She seemed to realise all that, and she clipped and snipped almost with respect and reverence for the old Louis, the Louis as he was, Louis as he had been. Not, in all truth, that he had ever been so different. You wouldn’t have called him dapper or well-groomed at any stage of his career. (If you could call it a career – maybe random trajectory might have been better.)

But she cut away, first with the scissors and then with the electric trimmer. Gradually, Louis emerged from behind the disguise, and then suddenly there he was again, just like he’d been when we’d been punching the daylights out of each other all those years ago. Just older and greyer, that was all. I started to wonder if he hadn’t always had that sad, milky, lost and appealing look in his eyes, as if to say life was just one bewildering mystery, and why didn’t he fit into it, when he could do so many things, and be good at them too. But nobody ever had an answer to that. Nobody, in my experience, has the answer to much along those lines.

‘Eyebrow?’

Louis looked at me again and he raised one of the eyebrows to which the Chinese girl was referring as if to ask my opinion.

‘If you could,’ I said. ‘That would be great.’

It wouldn’t be great. It would just be shorter eyebrows. But that’s the kind of thing you say to people in shops. It’s along the lines of Have a nice day and How are you doing? and Awesome and No worries and No dramas.

Louis settled back and closed his eyes to let the eyebrow work begin.

I wondered if maybe he was developing cataracts, and that possibly accounted for the milky look that was turning to cream. He already had glaucoma. He’d had a lot of ailments. Maybe he hadn’t looked after himself. He’d lived with Bella for fifteen years and Kirstin for seven. She’d moved out ten years ago and he’d spent a solid decade neglecting himself.

The Chinese barber took a comb and trimmers and deftly cut back the mad eyebrows. By the time she’d finished, Louis looked normal and sane. He wasn’t the wild man any more. You even realised that he was almost good-looking. In fact I wondered if he wasn’t better-looking than me and thought that he might be. But then, as any not so good-looking person can tell you, looks aren’t everything.

It took her a while to do it all, and when she was finished, she did the business with the two mirrors and the back of the head. But when she had done, she didn’t charge any extra, just the standard rate. Louis looked at me to pay, so I took the money out of his wallet and the Chinese girl seemed surprised when I gave her a tip, though she plainly deserved one.

We thanked her and left and I handed Louis his wallet back.

‘I gave her a tip,’ I told him. ‘With your money. Hope that was all right.’

He didn’t respond, just put the wallet away in his blue cool bag.

‘How do the bits and pieces look?’ he asked, taking a glance at his reflection in a window. The sun was high and bright and the shop windows were like mirrors.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘She did a good job.’

‘Where’s my hat?’ Louis said.

I gave it to him and he put it on.

‘Aren’t you too warm in that?’ I asked.

‘It’s all going to fall out anyway,’ he said.

I saw that the brand name on his beanie was Piping Hot.

As he put the hat on, I saw his scar clearly for the first time. It had healed well but still looked ugly. I didn’t like the thought of it – of having your skull cut open and a part of your brain taken out, even an infected part.

‘Let’s go and have a coffee,’ Louis said. ‘I’ll shout you a coffee.’

Louis always had the knack of sounding particularly generous, even when he wasn’t actually doing that much.

‘I’ll stand you a coffee,’ he said. ‘Or lunch.’

We walked on down the street. The Brisbane suburb looked American to me; it had that wide-spaced look, with buildings sprawling out instead of up – like some outback town.

‘How about here?’

There were cafés everywhere, but this one had plenty of free tables outside. The waitresses were young and friendly. Not Chinese, maybe Malaysian. But I guess they were all Australian really. They’d just started off as Chinese and Malaysian once, and now they were Australian, same as the one-time British and Irish and Greek and Scottish were. It was a broad church, you might say.

We sat at a table and a waitress brought a menu over.

‘Can you light one of those gas burners?’ Louis asked. ‘I’m cold.’

‘You want to sit inside?’ I asked him.

‘No. But I’d like the burner.’

‘Sure,’ the waitress said. ‘No worries.’

And she opened a valve and pressed some button to light the burner up.

When she’d gone I said to Louis, ‘How come no one here has any worries?’ He looked at me, puzzled. ‘Everyone says “No worries”,’ I told him. ‘I can’t believe they don’t have any.’

He didn’t respond. He kind of looked right through me. But that was nothing new. He’d always done that, since we were kids.

He was staring at the menu but couldn’t make sense of it, so I read it out.

‘I’ll have that,’ he said. But then he wanted to know the price, and when I told him, he almost changed his mind.

‘I’ll pay,’ I told him.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘But it’s expensive.’

‘It’s the cost of living, Louis,’ I said.

And what else did he have to spend it on anyway? And how long left did he have to spend it? The world was full of people with money worries, but there were also people with no money worries at all, yet they were still worried – they were worried that something might happen and their money wouldn’t be able to fix it.

I sometimes think that if you started listing all the things that money can’t fix, it would be even longer than the list of things it can.

Sometimes money is as much use as rocks in the desert, when what you need is a glass of cold water.

2
TERRI

Terri has two stories – or, rather, she has one story, but there are two versions of it, with contradictory endings, and this is permutation number one.

The first time I heard about Terri was when Louis rang me one morning. It was always morning when he rang – morning my time, late evening his. He’d have got back home from whatever particularly crummy job he was doing that day. Louis had a good brain and he had a degree and a masters and an engineering diploma, but for all that he worked in low-skilled, low-paid employment, for, like the character of Biff Loman in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, it was as though he couldn’t ‘get a hold on life’.

He told me once that he didn’t work in the field he was qualified for as he ‘didn’t like the politics’. The problem with that, as far as I was concerned, is that there are politics everywhere. You could have the dirtiest, least-respected, lowest-paid job going, but there’s still politics in it; there’s still a boss, still co-workers. You can’t get away from politics any more than you can get away from other people. It can be done, but it’s not easy. You’d need to be a hermit.

But, in common with many people who don’t fit into the world as it is, Louis just had to do things right. No slacking, idling or cutting corners. The bummest job had to be done just so, and he was always complaining about bad management and employees who didn’t care, even when he was working as a maintenance man on the minimum wage, or in a factory somewhere, on the assembly line. Louis always appeared to know what needed to be done to run a business properly, he just couldn’t seem to do it for himself. He tried setting up on his own a couple of times, but lost money on both occasions. Yet, for all that he was so well qualified and educated, he believed that working with your hands was superior to working with your mind for some reason. Maybe he thought it was more genuine, more authentic. And the irony of that was that all our parents had ever wanted for both of us was an education and an escape from the drudgery of factory labour and manual toil.

Anyway, he called up and I answered the phone. There had been a time when calls were rare, just Christmas and birthdays and emergency measures. But the cost of international calls had come down and we spoke frequently, maybe once a week or a fortnight.

‘Hey!’ he said.

‘Hi, Louis,’ I said, a little annoyed at being interrupted at what I was doing but trying to conceal it. You can’t blame people for ringing at inconvenient times. When you call them it’s probably the same. ‘How’s it going?’

‘You won’t believe what happened,’ he said. And then, as usual, having said that, he fell silent, like he wanted me to extract the information, like he was the winkle and I had a pin.

‘What happened, Louis?’

‘I went round to see Terri this afternoon,’ he said.

I felt I ought to know who Terri was, but I’d forgotten.

‘Terri? Who’s she again?’

‘Terri, you know, who was married to Frank.’

‘Ah, Frank. Right.’

I should have known who Frank was too.

‘That I used to work with. The roofing.’

‘Right, yeah.’

I recollected now. Louis had been in business a while with Frank and they fixed roofs together. It all went wrong when Frank acquired a dog and brought it along with him to the sites. It was a traumatised rescue dog and it barked incessantly. The barking drove Louis mad and he threw a spanner at the dog one day, which got Frank mad, and the working partnership didn’t last much longer after that.

Terri had had enough of Frank too, as his drinking had moved from heavy to alcoholic levels. So she divorced him and she bought a small bungalow in a retirement village. She wasn’t so young any more, but who was? And she was still attractive and had the proverbial heart of gold.

‘So why’d you go round to see Terri? Just visiting?’

‘No, she called me about her guttering, asked me if I could fix it. It had come loose. There’s supposed to be some maintenance guy round there for all that, but he’s up to his eyeballs. So I took a ladder and went over with the ute after work.’

Louis had a ute – a utility vehicle, a battered old Nissan van with a flat-bed trailer and a silver aluminium box screwed to the flat-bed, in which you could keep tools, and which you could secure with a padlock.

‘So was that okay?’

Long pause.

‘Yeah. I fixed the gutter and she asked if I’d like to have a cup of tea, so we had some tea and we were sitting there talking, you know, about Frank and what have you—’

‘How is Frank?’

‘He’s in hospital. He’s got diabetes now and something wrong with his liver. He kept coming round and wanting me to go drinking. I’d just have a couple of beers, but that wasn’t enough for him. He’d bring Scotch as well, and when I refused to drink any more, the last time he came round, he lost his temper and we had a row. And I haven’t seen him since.’

‘Ah.’

‘Anyway, I was sitting there with Terri, and I don’t know what got into me or what came over me, but right out of the blue I suddenly said and I don’t know why, I said, Terri, would you like to go to bed with me?’

Silence then, like Louis wanted me to ask a question or needed some prompt to continue. I wanted to sound politely curious but not pruriently nosy.

‘Wow, well, that’s pretty direct, Louis. No kind of preamble then? Just straight out with the main question.’

‘Well, I don’t know what came over me. It just came out.’

It had to have been about seven years since he’d split up with Kirstin. I wondered if he’d been celibate all that time, but that’s not the kind of question you ask your brother.

‘So how did she react? What did she say?’

‘Well—’

I heard a faint but colourful chuckle.

‘Well – she said okay.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Just like that!’

‘Yeah. Just like that!’

‘Were you surprised?’

‘I was shocked at myself for saying it!’

‘Well – well done.’

That was pretty inappropriate, but I didn’t know what else to say right then.

‘Yeah,’ Louis agreed, then went silent again, as if maybe fishing for further queries or compliments.

‘So – eh – how did that go?’

‘Great. And then she asked me to stay to dinner.’

‘Least she could do,’ I said.

‘I mean, I’ve known Terri for years,’ Louis said. ‘And always liked her. But not, you know—’

‘In that way?’

‘No. But just sitting there, well, I don’t know what came over me.’

‘Lust?’ I suggested. But Louis just laughed.

‘I’m going back to see her again next week,’ he said.

‘So it could be a regular thing.’

‘Have to see,’ he said.

I still had the feeling that he would have appreciated a few more questions but I couldn’t think of any. And he never asked me about my sex life. In fact Louis never asked me much about my own life at all. His baseline appeared to be that my life was okay and further enquiries were not necessary and would have been superfluous.

‘Well, I hope it all works out,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ Louis said, and he was sounding a little pleased with himself now, I thought, as if he was the only man in the world to have persuaded a woman into bed, which annoyed me somewhat, as I’d done a bit of that too in my time, in a modest way, but who hasn’t?

We chatted a little while longer and then we hung up, promising to talk again soon.

It was my turn to call and I rang him a couple of weeks later.

‘How’s it going, Louis? How are things with Terri?’

‘Oh, okay. Okay.’

‘Still seeing her?’

‘Oh yes. I go round once a week and help out at the bungalow and do a little decorating or whatever, and then stay for dinner and, you know – do the business.’

‘Do the business?’

‘You know, do the business.’

‘You’ve got such a poetic way with you, Louis.’

‘Well, you know, whatever you want to call it.’

‘So it’s all going fine.’

‘Seems to be.’

‘Good.’

And I was pleased and to quite an extent relieved that Louis had someone else to unload his woes on, someone with a warm and sympathetic and absorbent shoulder on which to cry. I wondered if they’d move in together, he and Terri. But next time he called, things were under stress.

‘Hi, Louis, how’s it going?’

‘Ah – not too bad.’

‘How’s Terri?’

‘Aw, okay. I don’t see so much of her.’

‘Why’s that? I thought you were getting on.’

‘Well, I got a bit pissed off, to be honest.’

To cut a long one short, whenever Louis went round to see Terri she had some little chore waiting for him – a dripping tap to be fixed, a washer to be put on, a sash cord to be replaced. And then, one afternoon, it was a favour for a neighbour, and then another neighbour, for the street seemed to be full of women on their own, ex-wives and widows, who all had small jobs around the house needing done by somebody both handy and reliable.

According to Louis – by implication, if not outright expression – the price of sex was some initial house maintenance, and he was starting to feel resentful; he was starting to feel used.

‘She always needs something done,’ he complained. ‘Or, if not her, one of her friends. And I’ve already done a day’s work. Then I’m going round there and spending another couple of hours unblocking drains or whatever. I’m just getting a bit pissed off.’

Next time we spoke, he hadn’t seen Terri since the last time we’d talked. Intimacy was over. But they remained friendly. She even offered to have Louis to come and live with her for his last few months. But he wouldn’t go. He wanted to stay independent, and maybe he was worried about the DIY.

So that was his version. But there is another.

3
PLUMBING

We were sitting in Louis’ living room, which was all red, dust-matted carpet and Salvation Army furniture with the price stickers still on, and cheap plastic curtains that didn’t quite fit the windows, and which were coming off the end of the tracking for lack of stops.

The hand-basin in the bathroom took an hour to drain, so each time you used it, it filled up. You’d brush your teeth and spit out the toothpaste into the sink and the stuff would stay there and you couldn’t wash it away. The kitchen sink was the same. In the shower you had exactly one minute before the tray filled up and began to overflow.

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.

There was no comfort in that boat at all, just a couple of hard bunks and a stove to cook beans on.

‘It’s a doer-upper,’ Louis told me. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think,’ I told him, ‘that the trouble with you and your doer-uppers, Louis, is that you never do do them up. You never get round to it, do you? You lose interest and start on something else and you don’t finish that either. Because you lose interest again and—’

‘I’m thinking of doing it out in mahogany,’ Louis said. ‘I’ll put some partition walls up and get it divided into rooms. Bathroom here, galley there, living quarters here, guest bedroom there.’

‘Where are you putting the games room, spa and indoor swimming area, Louis?’ I asked. But he ignored me as if I hadn’t spoken.

‘It’s going to be something special once it’s done.’

‘It’ll be something special if it ever does get done. This is the story of your life to date, Louis,’ I said. ‘Things taken on and not seen through. Great projects started and never completed. Remember that astronomical telescope you were going to make when we were kids?’

‘I made a start on it but was trammelled by lack of proper equipment,’ he said.

‘Louis,’ I reminded him, ‘you were going to grind your own lenses. And the bits of glass were a yard across and six inches thick.’

‘If I was doing it today, I’d do it differently,’ Louis said.

‘Okay, Louis. If you really want my opinion – and I know you don’t – the first thing I’d do to this boat if I were you – apart from sell it – is to put a proper heating system in. Get a wood-burning stove or something. That little cooker is not going to warm this boat. Not once winter comes. It’s going to be so cold in here come January that brass will crack.’

‘We don’t need any stoves,’ Louis told me. ‘We’re tough.’

‘You may be tough,’ I said. ‘But when winter comes I’m going to buy myself a portable gas heater for the flat.’

I seem to recollect that Louis spent a lot of time that winter round at our apartment, sleeping on the sofa. He and my girlfriend Iona got on okay. But then they were both bohemians and weren’t paying any rent.

The fact was that when it came to being tough, I only really helped the tough guys out when they were busy. My parents had wanted a girl as their second child, only they hadn’t got one, they had got me. According to my mother I was born so scrawny I wasn’t expected to live, but live I did. Even now there are people who bear grudges about that. But I can’t do anything about it.

Spring came and the air got warmer and Louis went back to his boat. Sometimes the harbour master would move the boat on a whim and Louis would go home after a night in the pub to find his boat gone from its moorings, and he would have to tramp round the harbour looking for it, which could take him an hour or more. He fell in the water a few times, but it was only to be expected and was probably character-building, and it never seemed to do him any harm, apart from the difficulty he had in drying his clothes.

Looking back now, I see that was the start of his sartorial problems and when he first began aiming for the rough-sleeper look, which he seemed to so effortlessly accomplish. He ripped his trousers once and walked round for a week with the leg flapping until Iona sewed it up for him, even though she was a strong feminist and it was old-style women’s work.

‘You should be able to sew up your own trousers, Louis,’ she told him.

‘I’m working on it,’ he said.

‘I thought you were working on your boat,’ I told him.

‘I’m working on them both.’

He was actually working on neither. He had a new interest, making occasional tables.

‘Does that mean the tables are for particular occasions, Louis? Or does it mean you just make them occasionally?’

He just looked at me as if I wasn’t there and didn’t answer.

I still have one of his occasional tables, sitting right there in the dining room. Tile inlaid surface and pine legs. It’s warped and buckled a little with the passing of the years, but it’s lasted the course. It’s outlived its maker in any event. It wasn’t that Louis couldn’t do things, it was that he couldn’t make money out of them. Nor was he a natural craftsman, he was more one by ambition and willpower. He lost his temper with inanimate objects quite a lot. I could be wrong but I believe that natural craftsmen don’t do that – they know how to bend the inanimate to their will, and how to persuade it into shape with cajoling and subtlety and cunning. And that’s the craft of it.

Louis’ savings slowly dwindled and he couldn’t be a bohemian any more. He went and got a manual job assembling generators. It was just a stop-gap thing, like so many of those jobs were. He stop-gapped for almost the rest of his life. And maybe I’m wrong about his stopping being a bohemian. Maybe he was just a bohemian in a nine to five job; the bohemianism was in his soul.

He never did do the boat up, nor did he ever install a stove. He ended up hauling the boat out of the water and chopping it up for firewood.

But before that, we had a crisis.

The phone rang in the flat and it was a woman with a French-sounding accent.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I was given this number and I want to speak to Louis.’

‘Who’s calling?’ I said.

‘Chancelle,’ she said. ‘I’m at the airport and have flown over to get back together with Louis and I want to have his babies.’

‘Who gave you my number?’

‘Your mother.’

‘I see. Well, Louis doesn’t live here, Chancelle—’ She stifled a sob. ‘That is, he lives near, but this is my place.’

‘But I have come all this way—’

‘Wouldn’t it have been better to take soundings first?’

‘What is this – take soundings?’

‘Chancelle, have you communicated with Louis about this? You haven’t seen each other in, what, three, four years? Have you written to him? Was he expecting you?’

‘I love Louis so much and want to have his babies.’

‘Well, you’ll need to speak to Louis about that. I don’t know where he stands on babies. That’s something you’ll need to discuss.’

‘I am coming to see him.’

‘Chancelle—’

‘I am getting on the bus.’

‘Chancelle, you don’t even know—’

‘Your mother gave me your address. I’ll be there tonight. Tell Louis I love him.’

The phone went dead.

‘Who was that?’ Iona said.

‘Chancelle,’ I explained. ‘Louis’ ex from Canada. She’s landed at Heathrow.’

‘What does she want?’

‘She wants to have his babies.’

Iona gave me a strange and narrow-eyed look. I didn’t know then that she wanted to have my babies. But I didn’t want any babies at that time in my life. Eventually despairing of never having any babies, Iona went off to have them with somebody else.

‘Well, is he expecting her?’

‘I don’t think he’s heard from her in years.’

I found Louis down at the docks, chewing the fat with his neighbours. Wherever you go in the world you will find men with boats chewing the fat. They rarely venture anywhere. Their boats are usually out of the water and need something doing to them. There’s some rubbing down going on, or some filling in, or they’re painting the hull in de-fouling liquid. The maintenance is long and the voyages are few. But that’s not the point. The point is the old boats and the tea and the bacon sandwiches and a place to go come the Bank Holidays and the empty vacation times and the long, hot, eternal summer days, when you can take your shirt off and let your belly hang out and show the passers-by your tattoos.

‘Louis,’ I said. ‘I just got a phone call. It’s Chancelle and she’s landed at Heathrow and she’s coming down here to have your babies.’

Louis looked panic-stricken.

‘She’s coming here?’

‘Right now. Even as we speak she’s on the bus and throwing her birth-control devices out of the window.’

‘Jesus,’ Louis said.

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘I’m going to have to go,’ Louis said. And he went on board his boat and started packing a bag. He had bought an old rusty car by now. He got it cheap as it had three hundred thousand miles on the clock.

‘Louis,’ I said, following him. ‘You can’t just disappear and leave me to deal with her. What am I going to say? She wants to have your babies.’

‘Well, I don’t want to have her babies.’

‘You what?’

He threw a grey towel into a bag.

‘That is I don’t want her to have mine. I haven’t heard from her in years. She’s crazy.’

‘I guess the separatist politics must have gone wrong.’

‘I’m not seeing her.’

‘Louis, where are you going?’

‘Walking,’ he said. ‘In Wales.’

‘Louis,’ I said. ‘You can’t just run off and disappear and leave me to deal with a woman who’s travelled six thousand miles or however far it is to have your babies.’

‘Watch me.’

‘Louis, it isn’t fair.’

He paused in packing his bag.

‘Remember the school bus? When you got arrested?’

‘Maybe, Louis. But who’s the delinquent now?’

‘Blood’s thicker,’ he said.

‘Louis—’

‘It’s your turn to do me a favour,’ he said.

‘Louis, I’ve done you favours. You’ve spent the whole winter in front of my portable gas fire and my girlfriend sewed your trousers up.’

He zipped the holdall and squared up to me. He was no taller than I was, but he was a stone or two heavier, and it wasn’t fat, it was muscle. Though when it came to a fight we were fairly equal, for though he was the stronger, I was the more desperate man. I think I had discovered that when we were children. And the reason I was more desperate and fought more ferociously was because I knew I was the weaker.

‘It’s little to ask from your only brother. It’s little to ask. I’d do it for you.’

‘You wouldn’t, Louis. You’d tell me to face up to my responsibilities.’

‘I’m going walking in the Black Mountains,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back Thursday or when she’s gone, whichever is the sooner. I’ll call.’ He hustled me out of the boat and locked it. Then he had a thought.

‘You want to come with me?’ he said. ‘You like walking, don’t you?’

‘Louis, I have to go to work. And how come you can take time off?’

‘They owe me holidays.’

‘Louis, what am I going to say to Chancelle about your babies?’

‘Tell her I had a vasectomy.’

And off he went. He had a little trouble getting the car started and almost suffocated the both of us with all the black smoke. But that was Louis for you – Louis and his vehicles. If they didn’t burn oil and belch out fumes and break down regularly, he wouldn’t buy them.

Chancelle turned up that evening and was nigh inconsolable. She had put on a lot of weight and looked as though she were expecting babies already, quite a few of them, or at the very least twins.

She sat and sobbed and sobbed, but I had to be hard and I told her it was over and there was nothing anyone could do, as Louis had gone off to the Black Mountains and he didn’t want to have babies with her at any price.

Iona held her hand and I made some tea and then we sent out for a pizza. She stayed the night on the sofa, and when I explained that Louis had spent the winter there, she seemed comforted slightly.

The next morning she got a bus to London and that was the last we saw or heard of her.

Louis rang the following evening and asked if it was safe to come home.

‘Louis,’ I said, ‘when you say “home”, where do you mean exactly?’

‘Where the heart is,’ he said.

He could throw me like that sometimes by coming out with the completely unexpected.

‘I’ve met someone,’ he said. ‘With blonde hair.’

‘What? In the Black Mountains?’

‘She’s a backpacker from New Zealand. I’ve invited her to stay on my boat for a while.’

‘I hope she doesn’t feel the cold then, Louis.’

‘No way,’ he said. ‘We’re tough.’

6
OLD BLACK DOG

It’s easy to think that you know where and when the rot started. With the so-called benefit of hindsight. Always presuming it is a benefit and not the opposite, some kind of handicap or millstone thing around your neck.

I was eleven years old and Louis was twelve and our father was dying upstairs in a room we were no longer allowed to enter on the grounds that he wanted us to remember him as he was. The flaw in this prohibition was that he hadn’t looked so great the last time we had seen him, and if I had to remember him in that condition, then I could equally have remembered him in his last few days and been no more the traumatised.

He’d been suffering from lung cancer due to twenty to thirty a day hand-rolled for years and years.

Whenever I see these tobacco company executives in their nice suits and white shirts and sober ties, as they make their justifications and announce their profits and explain how they are opening up fresh markets in the new world, I think the sons-of-bitches should be boiled in oil for all the suffering they have caused. And I wonder if they smoke, or if they would want their own children to smoke, and I firmly believe it’s the last thing they would want, to find their own offspring hanging out of the bathroom window with cigarettes in their mouths.

Anyway, he spent his last few weeks getting increasingly yellow and burning holes in the sheets to our mother’s fear and dismay, for he carried on smoking right to the bitter end – and it was bitter. She was afraid he’d set fire to the bed and the whole place would go up, and then we’d all die of smoke inhalation together.

So it wasn’t a question of if, just when. And I came home from school one afternoon to find Louis waiting at the back of the house. For the front door was a thing we never used except for visitors, or when the police came round to talk about the rhododendron bush.

Louis had been waiting for me to return, for though we were at the same school, we were in different classes, and he always took the high road home, whereas I took the low road, with its many distractions, and so I rarely got back before him.

‘He’s dead,’ Louis told me.

I shrugged, for we were tough.

‘That so?’ I said.

And we stood there a while, and then we went inside, and our mother was in the kitchen, and the rest is pretty much of a blank.

After the funeral we came home, the three of us, to our sad, shabby, rented home. I wouldn’t say it reeked of poverty, but there was certainly an odour of the stuff around the place and opening the windows and letting the air in didn’t ever make a huge amount of difference.

Our mother began taking her best and only jacket off and starting in on the tea-making, which was her recourse in all contingencies.

‘Well, Louis,’ she said. ‘I guess that you’re the man of the house now.’

I don’t blame her for what she said in her grief and loneliness, but to this day I’m convinced it was the beginning of at least half of the trouble. It’s a hard job to have to take on, being the man of the place at twelve years old. But Louis had to shoulder the burden. The corollary of that, of course, was all the resentment it created in me. I bit my lip and kept my mouth shut, but inside my heart was boiling, and I thought no way is my brother going to be my father, and I was stubborn ever after, and went to the bad for a while, and took up attacking rhododendron bushes.

What brought it all back to mind was when I first got to Louis’ place in Australia and walked in through the door and saw him in his beanie hat with a quarter of his mind gone and the next thing I saw was his kettle – which deserves a digression of its own at another time – and I clapped my eyes on his fridge.

There were things living in that fridge that even medical science didn’t know about. Its age was incalculable. They didn’t make fridges like that any more. Maybe they never had and Louis had constructed it himself out of old spare parts and tree bark.

But it wasn’t just the mould, the grime, the gone-off food, the brown grapefruit, the rust, the smell and all the rest. It was the fridge magnets. There were half a dozen of them, all of them rusty too, and they bore messages saying: Depression – you are not alone. And they had phone numbers on them of people you could call and could talk to. But whether Louis had ever called and spoken to anyone, I never asked. I just thought that well, the old black dog was back, or maybe it had never gone away. I knew that Louis had always had it snapping at his heels. But maybe it had got him by the throat lately, or even now was hiding in the house somewhere, under the bed in the deep, deep dust, or growling down in the basement. Or maybe that was it making noises up in the loft. Only when I later asked Louis about the loft noises that were keeping me awake, he said it was possums.

So I asked why he didn’t get rid of them, but he said they didn’t bother him too much, so maybe he liked their company. I asked him what they were doing up there that made so much noise.

‘They’re having a root,’ he said. ‘They’re rooting away, making more possums.’

‘Louis,’ I said. ‘What use are even more possums to you? You can’t even cope with the ones you already have.’

But he just shrugged and wouldn’t do anything about them. And I didn’t want to buy poison or anything, for I drew the line at poisoning possums, though had it been rats, I wouldn’t have thought twice. So we just had to put up with the racket, but it left you feeling tired in the mornings, and maybe it made the possums feel tired too.

‘Why can’t they have a root before they go to sleep, Louis?’

‘That’s how they are,’ he said.

‘But you know what it’s like when you wake up in the morning when there’s two of you.’

‘Farts and bad breath and stale alcohol,’ Louis said, for he was always one to cut to the chase and never mind the niceties. ‘But you do it anyway. Though in a possum’s case, there maybe isn’t the stale alcohol.’

‘Louis,’ I said. ‘Are you all right?’

And I meant regarding the fridge stickers. But some things, even when we reached out for them, we never really grabbed hold of. You know that famous painting, in the Sistine Chapel, called ‘The Creation’, with God and Man reaching out for each other but their hands don’t quite connect. That was how we communicated.

‘Let’s have a drink,’ Louis said.

‘What do you want?’

‘Cuppa tea,’ he said.

‘All right. Sit down and I’ll make us one.’

That was when I noticed the kettle.

‘Louis,’ I said. ‘What’s the deal with the kettle?’

‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

Louis lived inside but really he was camping out.

On his grease- and left-overs-encrusted gas stove stood a blackened kettle. It was one of the old-fashioned kind that you boil over a hob. Louis did have electricity, but it didn’t extend as far as his hot drink requirements.

‘Louis,’ I said. ‘This kettle has no handle.’

‘Broken off,’ he said.

‘Louis, when did the handle break off?’

He gave another of his shrugs. He had square, solid, powerful shoulders. If you’d been thinking of a fight with him, you’d think twice.

‘I don’t know. Few years ago.’

He went and sat in his Salvation Army armchair and opened up his blue cooler bag and fished out some eye drops for his glaucoma.

‘Louis, how do you pour the water out when the kettle has boiled?’

‘Tea towel,’ he said, with annoyance in his voice, as if I was being deliberately obtuse.

‘So let me get this right, Louis. You have lived for unspecified years with a kettle with no handle that you have to wrap a tea towel around to pour the water out of?’

‘I’m doing my eyes!’

‘Louis, how much is a kettle?’

‘I’ve been busy.’

‘I’m going to buy one tomorrow.’

‘Don’t waste your money.’

‘Louis, a kettle with a handle will make life easier, right? If you make your own life easier, you’re not wasting your money. You’re just spending it on improving your situation, right?’

‘We don’t need handles on our kettles, we’re—’

‘Louis, not having a handle on your kettle doesn’t make you tough. Being tough has nothing to do with kettle handles. Scott of the Antarctic went to the South Pole, Louis. Was he tough?’

‘You’d need to ask him.’

‘Louis, I’ve seen pictures of Scott of the Antarctic and his men in their hut at the South Pole and I swear to God, Louis, that they had a handle on their kettle. They might even have carried a spare handle, for all I know.’

‘Are you making the tea or aren’t you?’

So I made the tea. I had to scour the mugs first. They were stained a deep tannin brown inside.

‘There you go.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I’m buying a new kettle tomorrow, Louis. While you’re at the hospital, I’m buying a new kettle.’

‘Don’t waste your money.’

But I didn’t listen to him and I did what I wanted. Who did he think he was anyway? My father or someone?

We ended up with two new kettles. One electric, and one for the gas stove – with a handle. I edged the old one out of the house gradually. First I left it out on the veranda. Then, when Louis didn’t notice that, I carried it down the stairs and left it in the garden. After a week I moved it next to the bin. The following week I put it in the bin. Then, on the Tuesday, I put the bin out for collection.

On Wednesday, when Louis was back from his radiotherapy, he began mooching around the kitchen.

‘You lost something, Louis?’ I asked.

‘My kettle,’ he said. ‘Where’s my kettle?’

‘Right there,’ I said, pointing at the electric one plugged into the wall. ‘Or did you mean this one?’ And there was the new and shiny blue one on the gas hob.

‘No. My kettle. My kettle.’

‘You mean the old burnt black and crusty one with no handle?’

‘My kettle.’

‘Louis, I didn’t think you wanted it any more. I didn’t think we needed it. As we have these nice new kettles. So I’m afraid – it’s gone.’

‘You threw it out? You threw out my kettle?’

‘Louis, it was dangerous, you could have scalded yourself, or set fire to the place, you had to wrap a tea towel around it. It was a liability.’

He just looked at me through his milky eyes, now filled with infinite reproach, and I felt like some kind of murderer for what I had done.

‘Louis, I didn’t know it meant that much to you. I thought it was just an old kettle.’

Without another word, he turned his back on me, and he went to his room and lay down on his bed. The mix of chemo and radiotherapy was very tiring and he spent a lot of the day asleep.

I felt bad. I realised what I had done. It was part of Louis I had thrown away. For years Louis had been the man with the kettle with no handle. People had come round and he had made them a coffee or a tea or a herbal something. And he had poured out their drinks, first carefully wrapping the dirty, scorched old tea towel around the body of the kettle. And they’d watched him do so, and everyone knew that Louis was the man with the kettle without a handle. And so it had been for many years. There had been talk and conversation and many a long hour of putting the world to rights, there in that choked and cluttered kitchen that had seen neither floor cloth nor mop for a decade.

But that had been Louis. That had been part of who he was.

‘You know, Louis, don’t you? The guy with the beard and the kettle.’

Now he only had the beard left and that had been to the barber’s.

I felt bad, like a tyrant, like one who had taken advantage of vulnerabilities. But I couldn’t bring the kettle back. It had gone to the dump and even if I searched I would never find it. It was there with all the other long-gone and inadequate domestic appliances. True, I had bought him a new one, but what use was new when it wasn’t what you loved?

I don’t have much advice to give anyone; I’ve learned very little in my life; but here’s my gem of wisdom. Don’t take a dying man’s kettle away. You won’t be doing him any favours. Nor yourself either.

7
FRIED FISH

Louis had a friend called Halley who was one of the bohemian types and who lived up in the hills forty minutes from the city, with trees for company and scrub turkeys and wallabies, and what sounded like perpetual wind chimes but which turned out to be bell birds – a kind of myna bird with a piercing call which would drive the overly sensitive to insanity in under a week.

Halley made a living from picture frames and he lived in a shed that he had built himself on some land he had bought. This wasn’t like a European shed, it was an Australian shed, a far larger and more substantial thing. Louis had put the roof on it. Close to the shed stood a barn, which Louis had also put the roof on, and which contained timber of all sorts – at least all sorts suitable for the making of picture frames. The frames were fine and artistic things, skilfully crafted. But it was a hand-to-mouth game. Halley said his profits were small and his hours were long. He too drove a ute, but it only had a fifth of a million miles on the clock, so it was almost in showroom condition.

The track he lived up was so steep and lacking in bite on a wet day that you would need someone to sit in the back of your truck to put weight over the rear axle, otherwise you’d be skidding back down again in a hurry or ending up in the ditch.

Like Louis, Halley was also a man of some education, interesting CV, and of varied and floundered relationships. He was also one to whom the odour of the nine to five smelt unpleasant, and he would work eight to six or even longer to avoid getting tangled up in it.

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