For Everyone Concerned (7 page)

It was my parents’ wedding anniversary. Forty years. I rang to say that I’d take them out to a restaurant. Mum said that wasn’t necessary. Anyway your father doesn’t like to go out, she said. He always complains he can’t get enough to eat.

Then we’ll order a lot of food, I said, and if he’s still hungry we’ll order more. He won’t be able to stand up after this meal.

It sounds terrible, she said, but if you’re going, then we’ll go.

At the restaurant Dad tucked his serviette into his shirt. Mum took it out of his shirt and put it on his lap.

Dad looked at the menu for a long time. He turned it over and turned it back. The steak is right there,
Mum said. He always goes for the steak, she told me. She would go for the chicken. I always go for the chicken, she said.

Though Mum said it was a waste of money, I ordered a bottle of wine and we raised our glasses. To forty years, I said.

It doesn’t seem like forty years, said Dad. He picked up his fork and looked at it.

I remember when we lived in our little flat, said Dad, brighter suddenly.

I remember the walls, said Mum, like paper. Are we thinking of the same place?

This was when we were first married, Dad said, and your mother worked in the fish place. She was their best filleter. She used to bring us back fish, cheap.

I didn’t know about this, I said.

I wasn’t their best, said Mum. Maybe second. You get tired of fish. It wasn’t a treat to have a nice piece of fish.

But, said Dad, it was wonderful all the same.

It was boring hard work, said Mum.

Dad studied her. Did you know her? My wife was working as a filleter too.

Now you’re just being silly, she said.

My Dad leaned forward as if he had something important to say.

At the fish factory there was a pregnancy contest, said Mum, and I lost.

You mean you did or didn’t get pregnant? I said.

The waitress arrived with the meals: Mum’s chicken, my pork. They’re bringing your steak, Mum said to Dad, and don’t say anything about the portions, we’re not paying for this.

It’s very kind of you, Dad said to me.

Then I spoke without thinking. The dinner wasn’t about me but still I spoke. You’ve been together forty years, I said. I was with Sharon for only six.

You can’t compare marriages, Mum said. You can’t judge from the outside.

Who’s Sharon? said Dad. Is that who we’re waiting for? He looked across the table at the vacant chair.

I laughed. This laugh went up to the ceiling and got caught in the motionless blades of the fan and failed to return.

Nice tablecloth, said Mum. She inspected it and smoothed it down with her palm.

Finally the waitress came through with the covered plate. She put it down in front of Dad and lifted the lid. Steam flew up. It was a whole fish! We all looked at this fish. Its flesh shone, its mouth was set in a sort of kiss, as fish are prone to. Mum put down her knife and fork. Her eyes filled with tears and she let them. You won’t finish it, she told him.

Watch me, he said. I love fish. My wife is the best filleter around. The knife, she says, is an extension of the hand, you treat it as a natural process, as part of you,
you won’t get hurt. Then he stared at me. Remember, wife is short. He actually said wife is short.

Wife is short? I said.

Yes, said my mother, gripping my hand, wife is short.

My father regarded his fish and finally looked up. Your friend is very late, he said to me. Do you think she’d mind if we started?

They pulled the kayak up from the river, took the picnic stuff out and sat under some trees. The top of the long grass carried the day’s heat but the ground was cool. He opened the wine while she took out the sandwiches. Birds made the only sound above the sound of the water. This was the day he’d chosen.

But not yet. He would pour the wine first.

He filled the two cups and gave her one. Still it wasn’t quite the moment, he thought. Better to have the wine first. She gave him a sandwich. He was hungry from the kayaking and he ate the sandwich in about three bites. He looked at her and she was chewing—better to wait until she’d finished. She was already passing him another sandwich. It was her thoughtfulness and kindness that got him. He wasn’t
nearly as nice. Sometimes the difference bothered him. Then again, to be with her would be instructive. He’d learn and improve. If that didn’t sound too dull. She was not dull. She was in that army of female fans of Shane MacGowan, for instance. She could drink. He’d held her and put his hand on her back in a public toilet while she was being sick. Great days.

Then they heard voices downstream. Two men in waders, carrying fishing rods were approaching. The men stopped nearby and began to make their casts, whipping their lines out over the river. The picnickers sank lower into the grass. Her ear was right beside his mouth—clearly an opportunity—but he thought: not now, not with the fly fishermen there.

He’d never caught anything himself, excepting the gaffing of cockabullies off the pier when he was eleven or twelve, which, if he thought about it, was more akin to wholesale slaughter.

Inevitably one of the men had a strike. He played the fish for a while—if that was the term—and reeled in a large trout. As it came out of the water, she gasped. The men inspected the fish, holding it up in the sunlight; from a distance it appeared perfectly still, a varnished wooden model. She held his hand. The men bent down and lowered the fish into the water, and for a moment the trout’s dark shape was motionless—then it was gone. After that the men waded up the river and disappeared from sight.

They sat up and she asked for more wine.

Did you see it? she said

Yes, he said.

Did you?

Amazing, he said.

She said, wasn’t it wonderful they let the fish go. And he said, yes but if it had been him he would have had a hard time deciding; the trout would have made a beautiful dinner. But you would have let it go, she said. For a moment he thought about telling her of the cockabullies. You threw a three-pronged hook into the water, waited for the little fish to surface, then you yanked up from underneath, snaring them through the belly. Sometimes they landed beside you on the pier, ripped open.

I know you would have let it go, she said. I know you too well. That’s what’s wonderful about us.

She had, he noticed, a few pieces of grass in her hair. Why did that bother him? Yes, he said, you’re right, and he poured himself more wine and he forgot to pour some for her. Then he remembered and she said thank you darling. They listened to the river and the birds. He was already thinking of the next day. He could wait, couldn’t he? They both could. Actually, when he considered it, they were pretty young.

All the way home they looked for trout. She said, the first person to see one wins a prize. It was a slow trip. She’d lift her paddle and look fixedly, grimly into
the water. One time he thought he saw something—a kind of shadow that moved alongside the kayak, then drifted off—but in the end he kept his mouth shut. After all, he wasn’t sure he’d seen anything down there, and also she seemed to want to win so badly.

They told me I had to have two wisdom teeth out. It was going to be a wonderful procedure. As instructed, I handed in the CD I’d chosen to listen to while they were to cut into my gums. Miles Davis’
Kind of Blue
. Yes, I know, a boringly unassailable choice. I had toyed with the idea of AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’, a song which always puts me in a good mood, but then it would have had to be on repeat for an hour and my mood might have changed.

The receptionist gave me a few tiny pills to swallow, which I did right there in the waiting-room. Then I waited, along with a couple of other patients.

I picked up a magazine and I was thinking, these pills aren’t working, I’m going to have to ask for a top-up.

Suddenly the receptionist and the oral surgeon’s
assistant were at my elbow. ‘I think we’re ready now,’ said the assistant. They lead me to the surgery with a surprising kind of insistence and it struck me, pleasantly though, that I might have done something very stupid in the waiting-room. Had I been dancing on the table? Had I been singing ‘Highway to Hell’? Oh, little pills. I felt nuts.

They were definitely trying to get me out of there fast.

I was in the chair and they put the headphones on me and Miles Davis played a very short set, about twenty-five seconds. Wow, what truculence, I thought.

Then, as they say, I came round. I was in the car going home. ‘How do you feel?’ asked my wife.

‘Goush,’ I said. It was true. I was in high spirits. Was I driving, or was she? Everything familiar flowed by changed. I did experience the beauty of things, in the way a petrol station can seem suddenly lovely. But there was the tiniest presentiment of disaster.

The next day I went to the chemist for some antiseptic mouthwash. ‘I bet you’re sore,’ said the chemist.

‘Yoush,’ I said. It wasn’t good. The oral surgeon had called to say that it was the most difficult extraction he’d ever performed. I nodded but he couldn’t hear me. There was a truckload of swelling and pain—and not like a toothache. More like someone had left
something inside me and they weren’t coming back for it.

A second chemist was talking to the person next to me. ‘Have you tried kiwifruit?’

The man moved his head a little. He looked grey, unhappy.

‘Have you tried prunes?’

‘Yes,’ said the man.

‘What about your water intake?’ said the chemist.

‘I’ve tried everything.’

‘Exercise?’

‘Is that my bottle?’ said the man, reaching for the package the chemist held.

‘Lots of bran in the mornings?’ said the chemist, still withholding the package.

Finally the poor man cried out, ‘Please, I can’t shit for anything!’

That evening when I told my wife the story of the constipated man, she said, ‘So now you feel like your present condition isn’t so bad after all.’

We were watching TV. It was the ads. My face was a grotesque version of itself.

‘No, no,’ I told her. ‘That’s not the point at all.’

‘What is the point then?’ she said.

‘If I pass out,’ I said, ‘catch me. The point is something to do with the humiliation we put up with. To have one’s private business aired like that.’

‘Oh please,’ she said. ‘I’ve had my breast discharge
pus in a projectile fashion right into the eye of a stranger.’

‘What are you saying? Back to the old “women handle suffering better than men”?’

‘All I’m saying is when Dad severed his thumb on the farm, it was Mum who found it and put it in the freezer.’

‘Maybe he had other things on his mind, like bleeding etcetera.’

‘Next she attended to his bleeding.’

I reasoned that slaughter was daily in the rural sector. ‘You reach inside cows up to your elbow and pull stuff out,’ I said. ‘It’s an exposed existence.’

She unmuted the TV. ‘Here,’ she said, and she pulled my feet into her lap. I was lying on the sofa. She took off one sock. God, my feet looked white and ugly in her beautiful brown hands. She began to rub.

‘If only you could reach into my mouth and do that,’ I said.

‘Don’t be disgusting,’ she said. ‘Now be quiet, I’m watching my programme.’

For some reason I thought then of a story from her childhood, which I asked for occasionally because it cheered us both up. It was the one about the school bus pulling up outside their place and driving over their pet lamb. It was a funny story, or rather it made my wife laugh a lot when she told it. There was the alcoholic bus driver who’d failed to stop in time and
who then, to cover his tracks, as it were, reversed over poor lambie. My wife could never remember the bus driver’s name, unless she was with her sisters. Together they could dredge it up but they needed each other. What was his name? It always looked hopeless at first, then not so. They’d shout his name, scream his name. The bus driver lived again! Of course for the lamb it was a different story.

For weeks after the crash there were threatening phone calls.

She’s been prepared for a scar, the voice on the phone said. There will be a scar.

It was the boyfriend’s father making the calls.

That’s terrible, I said. I’m so sorry.

She hasn’t got her mood back, he said.

Her mood?

You caused her to have these headaches all the time, so she’s always in a bad mood. She’s foul now.

Oh—

Once she was sweet, not a temper on her. Now she’s mad with everyone. She’s mad with my son because of what you did out there on that road.

Look.

Look yourself. I know where you live.

By this time I’d usually become silent. I should have put the phone down. Yet I couldn’t hang up on the boyfriend’s father—how many people did I want to hurt.

Are you listening to me? Imagine being her. Imagine a headache which is with you all day, every minute you have a headache. Can you imagine that? Even from the outside? It gets her in the left temple. I know who you are. She has to comb her hair down because of you.

Please—

You are responsible for this and I don’t hear any contrition in your voice. Do you have a feeling of contrition somewhere?

Yes.

Don’t agree so quickly. Do you think these are just words?

I listened to him on four or five occasions, then my father started taking the calls.

Are you trying to threaten my son? said my father.

I’m not trying to kill him, said the boyfriend’s father.

My son’s upset enough.

I’ve been pointing out his ways to him. Are you, by any chance, religious?

No, said my father, we’re Catholics.

I was once in a creative writing workshop when the teacher, Charlie Vincent, suddenly told the student whose story we were discussing to get the characters out of the car. Get these people out of the fucking car! he said. The characters were a young couple, as best I can recall, driving down to Florida on vacation. It was going to be a long drive. They’d been in their car for about seven pages already and they hadn’t made it out of their own neighbourhood. Charlie Vincent was actually a subtle teacher, a funny man with many miles of sentences under his belt, though occasionally he became exasperated enough to say things. This car is driving me fucking nuts, he said.

I had my car crash after drinking perhaps an inch, no, less than that—maybe half an inch, a splash. We’d taken Michael’s mother’s car out on Saturday night against her express orders. Michael said he felt nauseous from his new prescription glasses and couldn’t drive. Ian didn’t drive and neither of the girls had licences. I remember everyone wandered around for a while after the crash. We talked to each other with our heads close together. Claire. Bridget. The police arrived and were startlingly kind. The lovely smell of the police uniforms as murky rain began to fall on us. It was very intimate in those moments, although at first we just sat there—we’d side-swiped another car which had come out of a tunnel after I’d misjudged a Give Way sign—
and wondered if we were alive. I looked down at my knee which had hit something, but it was fine, a little sore. Everyone was fine but we were dreaming of the beds in our parents’ houses. We’d suddenly become a lot younger. Babies. Michael’s mother had gone away for the weekend. Don’t use Rosemary, she told him. Rosemary was their nicely maintained old Wolseley. You mean there’s a car and keys sitting in your garage and your mother is away for forty-eight hours, Ian said. How will she ever ever know? I said. Next this big guy from the other car was coming around towards us, walking in the middle of the road, shouting, pointing at me and, for a moment, I thought I would have to run him over. They say I actually tried to start the engine again. You, he was saying. You.

Oh, no, said one of the girls in the backseat. Oh, go away.

You. With his finger. Then the guy must have heard something from his own car—his girlfriend moaning—because suddenly he hit his forehead with his hand and said: Oh, my God. He was running back to his car. I thought I’d killed his girlfriend with Michael’s mother’s car because of a pair of glasses and an inch or less. Michael has never got on with his mother. His mother’s sister, Aunt Betty, once said, on meeting me for the first time, Well, they both have nice faces.

My son has admitted fault, my father said. (I was listening in on the extension.) What’s the point in making him feel worse with these calls?

What’s the point? What’s the point of any pain?

The boyfriend’s father was beginning almost to enjoy these discussions with my father. Now, when I happened to answer the phone, he asked for my father.

Pain teaches you, he said. Pain instructs.

I agree with you, said my father.

It tests you. It’s put there for a reason.

Yes.

You find out about people when real pain happens.

What they’re made of.

What’s behind them, said the boyfriend’s father.

Right.

I’m talking about faith. The strength of faith.

How’s the girl? said my father.

Who?

The girl in the accident.

Oh, said the boyfriend’s father. Devastated.

She’s being tested, said my father. Instructed.

Don’t use my own words against me, Ken.

You know, you’ve never said your name. Who am I speaking to?

Andrew, said the boyfriend’s father. Andy.

Walking home at night from parties or from friend’s places, I went through a period when I couldn’t resist
trying the doors of cars parked on the empty streets. I was sick with car door handles, the interiors of other people’s cars. My cousin in Auckland was a great stealer of cars and pleasure craft. His father had died under anaesthetic while in hospital for a routine operation. My father was vastly alive a few streets away and I had no intention of stealing the cars I felt my way inside. I climbed into a Jaguar once. The smell of leather, that smell which seems almost like a taste, as if you’re sucking the seats. O Jaguar. The seats were like beds, the headrests pillows. The instruments on the dash set into the walnut like they were miniature trophies. I was inside a mobile hunting lodge—smouldering logs, heavy rugs. In the glovebox, which was as deep as a filing cabinet, silent as a cave, I found a big wad of keys. There were perhaps twenty-five keys, of all sizes, buttoned up in a leather pouch with a brass clip. I kept that pouch of Jaguar keys for years, until the leather grew chalky with mould. I must have had in that one wad the keys to several homes and several holiday homes and to businesses and lock-ups and private areas—drawers, secret chests. I was always keeping keys. They were the coins of my adolescence—great rings of hope.

For some time after the crash, as a passenger in cars, I carried around with me a stupid and self-regarding fatalism. I was satisfied not to be driving. I had an
awful and false smugness. Let this other person have the accident. At least it won’t be me that kills us or someone else. I’m in the clear.

Priests drive smallish cars, never saloons or wagons. Non-family cars. I could never imagine trying the handle of a priest’s car if I came across one at night. They drive automatics mostly—widower’s cars— because the gear lever is a business. Priest’s cars are garaged cars—not because they believe in caring for the cars but because church properties have large garages. They can’t hear engines, priests. They’d go up hills in fourth and never know. They forget about the petrol. They can’t read temperatures and dials. They can’t read smoke. They don’t know where the full-beam switch is kept. Priests are hopeless parkers. They’ll drive around for ages, unmindful of the petrol, looking for a park they can drive straight into. A priest will hit you three times, front and rear, trying to get out of a straight park. They have no vision. They’re talking drivers, busy, late-planners, last-minute deciders. I’ve seen priests pull out into a line of traffic without looking—they think the traffic will part for them.

At the time of the crash I had a little job servicing the parish car fleet—three widowers’ cars. I didn’t know anything about cars except oil and water. My father got me the job. I checked the oil and water
every third day. I drove the cars to the garage to fill them with petrol. I had the windscreens cleaned while I waited. I took the cars to get the dings hammered out, the paintwork retouched. And I drove the old priest, Father Liddell, who was suffering from, among other things, glaucoma, to and from his weekend appointments. He wasn’t kindly. He was taciturn and testy and old and he forgot things. He ached—not just in his eyes. Father Liddell winced with every movement he made. He was a pained shadow of something once formidable. I drove him to doctors. Sometimes he was rude to me. He found out I didn’t attend a Catholic school. My father didn’t trust the Brothers. Father Liddell often mistook me for other people.

Wild, wild boy, he said to me from the back of the car. Wild, ungrateful Archie.

In cars, despite the appearance of speed, life tends to stop. Children know this. No child enjoys a trip of longer than two hours. They know the true motion of their lives has been arrested. The enclosure which has trapped them grows hateful. Its stillness makes them enraged. Here, outside the moving car, thinks the child, is another view which I can do nothing in. This is the real nature of carsickness. It’s also of course what Charlie Vincent was saying about the car-story. He wanted the windows down, the doors open, air, escape. Some natural velocity. Or incident, happening.
Crash this fucking car, he said. I don’t care how you do it. Just get them out of there.

Ken, said the boyfriend’s father, I want to ask your advice.

Very well, Andy, said my father.

Wait. Is there someone else on the line?

Is there? said my father.

Yes, I said.

It’s my son, Andy.

The one I threatened?

Yes, I said.

How long ago was that accident? Four, five weeks?

Eight and a half, I said.

Really? said Andy.

Yes, I said.

Time heals, said my father.

She left him, said Andy. The girl in the car that night. The one who got hurt. She’s gone.

Oh, no, I said.

Packed her bags.

Oh, I said.

But you didn’t cause it, said Andy. Ken, your son didn’t cause that to happen.

No, said my father.

They were on the rocks. You were just the last big wave that came along.

I’m glad, I said.

She had nothing behind her. Nothing to draw from.

She was revealed then, said my father. Your son found out about her.

He didn’t find out a thing. He’s never found out anything in his life. Andy cleared his throat. Did I really threaten your son, Ken?

A little, Andy. Yes.

Boy. Thing is that scar wasn’t even a scar in the end. One day it just dropped off.

We’re relieved, said my father.

Andy’s throat made the noise again. Sorry, he coughed.

What’s that? said my father.

I was just apologising to your son, Ken.

We appreciate it, Andy.

I’m still not good at admitting my faults.

Maybe if we, you and me, Andy, said my father, can now be left in peace.

I hung up the phone.

They talked about religion for almost an hour.

Andy was a convert. My father got few opportunities to speak.

He said once: But we must be allowed temptation, Andy. Temptation is not the problem itself. If we’re allowed it, then we can resist it. It’s the resistance that—
Later on he got to say: That’s the Holy Ghost’s role though, isn’t it.

My father said not to tell the priests about the accident. It would only bring complications. I drove Father Liddell about as usual. I’m going to injure or probably kill you, Father, I thought. We’re going to have an accident any day. Will that meanness really be your last act? I hoped that when it happened, Father Liddell would have just done me some unexpected kindness, some surprising good. With that ancient, unforgiving spiritual head behind me, my fatalism was in full flight. I was chauffeur to a holy ghost. We drove to the orthopaedic specialist. The parking was difficult around the consulting rooms. It started to rain. A storm. There was always a painfully slow walk of several hundred metres to the specialist’s rooms. At first the weather made it more likely that we’d have our accident. Then, when we failed in that, the downpour made it more likely that Father Liddell would be very sour towards me. He hated the wet. He forgot he was a priest and he forgot who I was. Fuck it, Archie, he said as we tottered through a whipped-up puddle. He started to turn around. I had his tiny arm in my hand, all coat. This way, Father, I said, trying to ease him back on course. But he had a strength. He turned us both around and we began to move back towards the car.

The specialist’s rooms were in a nice old converted
villa which was set back from the road and drowned in big trees. These trees spread to the street. They arched over the footpath, making a dank canopy for us. Leaves fell with the rain. The rain was so heavy it sparked silver against the road. Father Liddell’s front foot skidded out a little and I held him more tightly. Let me be, he hissed. Let go of me! I’m older than you. He jerked his arm away and set off without me.

I stood under the trees and watched him. Bent over, he moved in a shaky diagonal across the footpath, towards the wrong car. In the afternoon dark the car had its lights on, the engine was running. Father Liddell put out a hand towards it. Perhaps he just wanted to rest. I watched it all in that quick slow-motion familiar to me from the car crash I had not told the priests about. My life had become a series of quick slow-motion episodes. I caused things to happen at a disastrous, unnatural speed. Father, I said. Father! He was turning slowly to face me, some terrible utterance on his lips. The car pulled away and Father Liddell fell. He did not fall to his knees first, then crumple neatly, then fold. He fell like a building, with the same astonishing and complete diminishment. There was suddenly less of him on the ground than had been in the air.