Something Special, Something Rare (22 page)

When he returned he asked me who I liked to ‘read'. I began to make my list. I had been reading the minor poets, from Clough to David Jones, for the last few months, I said, but I remained rather fond of Larkin. I found his adept use of half-rhyme and para-rhyme quite daring. It made me want to write.

‘Wrong verb, wrong verb,' the poet said.

I stopped. There was the hint of a smile on his thin lips. Yet I sensed, in the way he looked about for the waiter and winced when he saw no one, the chill edge of some distilled, exquisite anger.

Poetry should be the least interesting of topics to a young man my age, he said. What about the great Germanic verb in our English language? Did I find myself at present in a domestic situation?

I looked down, and blushed. It was painfully clear from the length of time I hesitated that I had thought of making something up. No, I said, at last. Of course, I added quickly, there had been ‘encounters'. I hoped the term was vague enough.

He gestured for the bill.

It was a deep blue night outside. The air of the laneway was still and damp. Five girls and three young men passed us, laughing, on the street which led up to the Gardens. He hunched over a cigarette and watched them. I noticed that he swayed a little as he lit it. He did not look at me. I had no conversation. I thought I could smell the tank stream which ran for blocks beneath our feet.

In the end, he said at last, as if he spoke to no one, he recommended women highly.

Women, with their tight little jackets and impossible perfumes, he continued, had always infuriated him more than they had pleased him. But they were indispensable for poets.

He turned and looked at me intently. ‘They understand faith, you see. They are the great interceders. Between you and your reputation.'

I was not sure if he expected me to laugh.

He straightened and seemed suddenly quite sober. He began to walk, stiffly, ahead of me, in the direction of the Cross. I should not take him seriously, he told me. Seriousness was the affliction of old men. Here was a limerick I might enjoy, he said:

He smiled tightly. His was a rather pedestrian para-rhyme, he feared, compared with Larkin's.

I followed because he seemed to like my company, or at least he did not mind it. Now and again, he would point out some place he remembered or pause to share a joke. He showed me the boarding house where Virgil the hunchbacked artist had invited pretty girls and sketched them for
Smith's Weekly.
And I seem to remember, although I have been unable to recognise the street again, that he took me through a breach in a wall behind a block of flats where there was a mossy grotto, its steps and niches carved into the cliff. It was all that remained of one of the colony's first gardens and the optimism of that time, he said.

We passed a revival cinema, a drycleaners, a corner shop with tables of pawpaws on the pavement, and took a narrow street towards the naval base at Garden Island. I found myself in the vestibule of his building. He stood back at the bottom of the stairs to let me walk ahead. It was a white mansion, divided into quarters. The carpets were grey. I had glimpsed a small chandelier behind one window. There were dwarf maples in the garden.

Inside I exclaimed at the view. There was a full moon and the Harbour filled the window of the lounge room. I had not yet learned that it was unacceptable to urbane modesty to draw attention to its follies. Nor, by expressing my approval quite so openly, that I had instantly disqualified it. The water had the febrile glow of cine-film, I added. He appeared with two glasses from the kitchen. He said he was glad I liked it.

I stood and looked about me while he searched a drawer for coasters. The flat was dustless. I could see a music room with books of libretto piled up on the floor, his study beyond it which also faced towards the Harbour. I noticed gradually the smell of thinning carpet and dark suits.

He poured two whiskeys and added water with a silver teaspoon from a jug. No ice, he said, not ever. And one teaspoon only. The water released the flavour of the scotch. He had also brought out a platter of stilton and some water crackers. ‘Some of life's small compensations.' He placed them on the coffee table in front of the sofa where I sat. He settled in his armchair. He did not remove his jacket. His eyes closed each time he sipped the scotch.

There was a line of condiment bowls on the sideboard. He saw me looking at them. He liked to make curries, he told me, which took three days to cook.

I had placed my folio on the floor and it sat between us.

I decided at last to ask if he would look at them. I took a breath to speak.

‘When I was a cadet journalist, about your age,' he began quite suddenly, ‘I was approached to write a small pamphlet on Australian vineyards. I seized the opportunity eagerly. I had three weeks vacation owing to me, and I thought that this would supplement my wages, which at the time were not inspiring. I also imagined, quite correctly as it turned out, that I would enjoy the company of vintners.

‘I caught a train to Melbourne and discovered at once that I despised everything about the countryside around it – the low skies filled with imperturbable grey clouds, the mournful cattle, the tattered yellow paddocks – but the wines were pleasantly surprising. On my last day there I met a German who made ice wines. The wine he brought out for me to try was miraculous; clear and sharp, and infinitely sad, as if cursed with an awareness of its own chill depths.

‘He brought up three more bottles from the cellar and we walked across the overgrown yard towards his house. I had come to expect a cautious wife, a prolific flock of children, but the house was empty and quite bare, with the exception of a piano and a clock. He had devoted the main room entirely to his experiments with wine. There was a variety of corks lined up along the piano lid and there were grafted grapevines, their roots bound up in handkerchiefs, between us on the table.

‘Each winter, he told me, he waited for the perfect temperature to pick his grapes. For a fortnight he would set thermometers among the vines and sit a vigil. He sang songs to the mice to keep himself awake. The grapes had to be picked, with the ice still on them, at precisely minus four degrees. By the second bottle he had become quite sentimental, and with the third he began to stop every few minutes and look about the room. I remember that he said he thought he was probably the greatest aristocrat upon this earth. For he could not bear, even for a second, the thought of an uncomplicated pleasure.'

A distant foghorn sounded on the Harbour. He looked at me and smiled, and I thought I felt a fleeting warmth.

‘I have thought of him quite often since.'

I went to speak again but he seemed to have withdrawn himself from the room and into his armchair by some elusive alteration of his posture. When I put my empty glass down he did not offer me another. I reached for my folio. He jumped up to see me out.

At the door he shook my hand and said he hoped that we would meet again although I knew he did not mean it. He brushed aside my thanks for dinner. He said he hoped I had not found it boring. I said sincerely I had not.

‘A young man who wanted to be a poet once asked for my advice,' he said. ‘I told him. Invest in fine stationery. Be open to all social occasions. Always be shaved by a barber.'

I expected him to smile but his face appeared remote and blank again.

He closed the door behind me.

Outside, the night still held a gentle warmth. Random laughter drifted from the high white cupolas and minarets of the Del Rio apartments next door. A smell of gardenias mingled with the weed and mussel of the sea wall. I flattered myself, as I stood for a moment between the dwarf maples, that he would be standing at the darkened window, watching.

Then I began to walk towards my narrow rooms.

Author's note:
The headquote is the last stanza of Kenneth Slessor's last published poem, which begins ‘I wish I were at Orange …', written for class 5A at Orange in April 1962. It appears in Geoffrey Dutton's
Kenneth Slessor: A Biography,
Melbourne, Penguin, 1991, p. 11.

SOMETHING SPECIAL, SOMETHING RARE

REBEKAH CLARKSON

It was not the first time Graham and Liam Barlow had sat in matching chairs on the wrong side of a school principal's desk. Graham folded his arms across his chest and cocked his chin towards his son.

‘Was it by accident, or on purpose, Liam?'

Liam shook his hair from his forehead. He began to open his mouth as the telephone rang shrill on the desk. The principal picked it up and raised an index finger midair.

Graham tried again to remember the principal's name. Using someone's name was a persuasion tool. Graham had learned that in the government program he'd done years ago, the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme. His enterprise hadn't worked out; landscaping was hopeless with a crook back, but excellence is a state of mind put into action, they say, and that's why Graham had called his new business Winners. The name was just right: relevant, memorable, a good ring to it. Winners would specialise in supplying medals and trophies to sporting clubs. Graham had a pitch ready for the Hahndorf Football Club, once the president returned his calls. He'd put Troy Campbell into his Contacts so as to be ready and while the principal talked he dragged his thumb across the bluetooth in his jeans front pocket. He wished he'd left the earpiece switched on and attached. He was a businessman, with work to do and people to see. He wouldn't even be here if Jenny hadn't refused to leave TAFE for the afternoon. She'd missed enough lessons looking after her mum and dealing with all Sophie's dramas, she said, and Liam's school didn't need them both to go in. Plus, she said, it was embarrassing.

The principal was making professional cooing sounds into the phone and nodding slowly.

Graham pulled his fingers into fists, resting them on top of his thighs, like kids do in the front row of class photos. Supplying the medals and trophies for Hahndorf Football Club alone would set Winners off and running. He tightened his fists till his knuckles turned white. Then there'd be word of mouth. Then you'd get your tennis, basketball, netball, hockey, all the carnivals. Other towns through the hills and the Fleurieu Peninsula would jump on board. Everyone would know that Winners had the best products and service, that online wasn't easier or cheaper, though how to make it cheaper and profitable really would depend on the bulk orders coming in. That was his biggest hurdle. It wasn't as if he didn't have a business plan.

‘That's as stupid as a birth plan,' Jenny said when he showed it to her. ‘You haven't factored in bad luck. Or bad timing. Or bad genes.'

The principal hung up the phone and pursed his lips. When he spoke, it was quiet and deliberate, just like the doctor after Jenny had been in labour for twenty hours.

‘Well, that was Mrs Callow from the emergency department. Josh has concussion. And he's been given six stitches across his left eyebrow.'

The principal paused, but Graham knew what was coming next. The kid could have gone blind. It was always about someone nearly going blind.

‘You know, Liam, if your light saber had been just a couple of centimetres lower, just a fraction lower …' The principal lowered his chin, leaned over the desk.

Liam looked up and turned to Graham.

‘Accident?'

The principal stretched back in his chair and put his hands behind his head.

‘How do you think you'd be feeling now, Liam, if Josh was blind in his left eye?'

Liam's mouth flinched to one side. ‘Not good?'

‘No, that's right. I don't imagine you'd be feeling very good, would you?'

Graham wasn't feeling very good. He visualised his shop locked up again, the hopeful, hand-printed ‘Back in 5 Minutes' sign stuck on the door with Blu Tack. He was going to have to close for half a day again tomorrow, in order to drive Jenny down to her mum's in Modbury North. Jenny was refusing to drive on the freeway. You're not going to die from driving on the freeway, Graham had told her, over and over. It's not the freeway per se, she told him, it's the trucks. She said she had a panic attack whenever she saw one coming up in her rear-vision mirror. She said she froze and when they passed, her whole car shivered and the first time it happened she had tears in her eyes and her life flashed before her like people say it does when you have a near-death experience. She wouldn't drive on the freeway, she said, because a man couldn't raise a girl without a woman around. This was so illogical, so off the point, that Graham hardly knew what to say back. And it miffed him; it wasn't as if Jenny had an all-star relationship with their daughter. Apparently, his was worse.

‘Liam, what do you think you could do, to make this right with Josh?'

Graham wondered if he needed to spell it out to the principal himself: the kids were just mucking about; it could have been Liam's eyebrow with six stitches; and it wasn't a light saber, it was just a stupid stick. There seemed to be a fine line when you were in this position and Graham never really knew – was he meant to be on Liam's side or the principal's side? He knew which side he felt he was on. He felt it like a ball of fire in his gut.

‘Say sorry?'

Graham's hands flipped over so that his palms were now facing up. He shuffled forward to the edge of his chair.

‘Okay. Well, that's a start,' the principal said slowly. ‘How do you think you could show Josh that you are sorry, Liam?'

Graham fell back into the chair. He'd seen the school's pamphlet on redemptive justice; this was going to take a while. At the previous school, they just suspended the kid. Straightforward. Except for the three-strikes rule, which meant that Liam had been expelled and none of that or anything else had been straightforward at all. They'd ended up moving house, moving everything; a fresh start. He rolled his neck anticlockwise. This was not the way to run a new business – not being there. He turned his attention to what Liam might do in the shop for the rest of the week if he got suspended. There wasn't much he could do. Rearrange the trophies? Paint more road signs to try and direct people to the old mechanics shop behind the disused servo on Hutchinson Street? He was under no illusions; Winners was in a rubbish location – you couldn't even see it from the road – but the rent was minimal. It was for now.

And then he thought: maybe Liam could man the shop while he drove Jenny down the freeway to her mum's? Kill two birds with one stone.

‘Graham, what are your thoughts here? Liam's only been at our school for six months. Yet this is the third time he's been involved in an incident with another student where someone has been hurt by Liam's actions. What are your thoughts here, Graham?'

Graham felt himself heat up. He turned again to Liam. The way he sat slumped in the chair, with his legs splayed out in front made the roll of fat around his middle sit up like a sponge cake. The boy needed more exercise, or he'd be on the road to prediabetes like his mother. On the clean short carpet, his sneakers looked old and scuffed, the laces frayed and too long. He couldn't see his son's eyes through the hair flopped over his face. He'd thought he was the luckiest man alive to have a pigeon pair, a girl and a boy. He thought of Jenny again, probably home from TAFE by now. She was doing Certificate III in Aged Care and in less than eight months, she'd be qualified to get a job at Seven Oaks retirement village. They just needed to hold on until then, cash-flow wise. She was trying to lose weight too. Her biggest problem was using up all her points mid-morning with a Mars Bar or Snickers and then spending the rest of the day feeling cranky. None of this seemed an appropriate match to the principal's question. Had there even been a question? He shrugged.

‘I understand that Liam was expelled from his previous school as a result of similar behaviours. Was there any kind of intervention done then, or since?'

Graham levered himself up to a straighter position. He cleared his throat; there was a cobweb in it, snagging over the word.

‘Intervention?'

‘Well, I'm not suggesting there's a specific problem, or what the problem might be, but I'm wondering if there's been any testing done? We've got some pretty aggressive behaviours here. Behaviours that, frankly, I'm not happy to have at my school. I think it would be good for Liam, for everyone, if we tried to get to the bottom of it.'

‘Maybe Liam should spend some time at home, with me?' Graham offered. ‘To cool off. Liam said it was an accident, and personally I believe him. He's a good kid.'

His eyes wandered again over his son. Sometimes looking at Liam was a bit like looking at himself, but a hidden, unknown part of himself, like an internal organ, his liver or his kidneys. It made Graham feel sentimental and protective and repulsed, all at once. He tried to focus his thoughts. Liam was a good kid. He just had a bit of growing up to do. Graham felt a sudden clarity and wash of affection.

‘He always helps his mother around the house, puts out the rubbish, carries in shopping bags from the car. Rakes the leaves for his gran. He's not a bad kid. We have got his ears tested. No problems there. Excellent hearing, actually. He just gets a bit overexcited, is all. Loves his
Star Wars.
Wants to be Bear Grylls. You know what boys are like.'

Graham tried to laugh but couldn't get any traction beyond the first few syllables. It often went like this; he couldn't think of anything to say, but then suddenly he could. It was like finally seeing the face in one of those swirly optical illusion paintings, the way it all came together in his mind. It occurred to him to tell the principal that Liam's great-grandfather was a light horseman in the First World War.

When Liam looked up at him and smiled, Graham wasn't sure whether he wanted to cuff his son across the head or pull him into a hug.

*

The suspension wasn't allowed to be like a holiday, the principal told them. And Graham had to come back to the school in the morning to collect schoolwork from Mrs Murphy. He also had to be available to supervise Liam at least till the end of the week. Graham told the principal that, being self-employed, this wouldn't be a problem. He added that he had his own business. The principal just nodded, ushered them out, and said, ‘Right, then. Good, then.'

They pulled open the door of the front office and felt the frigid late-afternoon air cut through their windcheaters.

‘And Liam,' the principal called, ‘I want you to really have a think about how Josh might be feeling; not just now, but tonight, and tomorrow, and for the rest of this week.'

Liam called back over his shoulder, ‘Righto.' His voice sounded light and carefree, Graham thought – exactly as though he was about to go on a holiday.

*

‘It's all the video games,' Jenny said later that night when they were lying awake, the wind knocking the broken awning against the side of their bedroom window. ‘I saw it on
Today Tonight,
violent video games.'

‘Nahsnot.' Graham rolled over to face her. He ran his hand across her hip and down her thigh. He picked up her hand and shifted her wedding band between his fingers. They'd hocked her diamond engagement ring eight months ago, right in between his job at the potato factory and a two-week stint at the abattoir. Remembering the boning room still made him twitch. He hadn't even got to the kill floor, but he'd seen it, and those two hours he'd spent locked in the coldroom had made their way into his dreams. He wondered if the engagement ring would fit Jenny again now, or not quite, even if he could get it back.

‘Well, Soph doesn't play those games. She don't bash other kids up.'

Graham laughed quietly through his nose. ‘Don't be ridiculous, love.' Sophie was small and stringy and kept to herself, like him. And she was a girl.

‘You should shave off that moustache,' Jenny said. ‘Makes you look shonky.' He smiled and rolled back onto his own pillow.

‘Maybe we should do more things as a family,' she said. ‘Maybe we should get a dog.'

Graham lay still, mulling over the bits of rope and lackey straps he'd kept from the shed at their previous place, something he could use to strap up the awning.

*

Liam sat at the front counter of Winners the next morning playing Solitaire on the old computer, his head resting sloppily in one hand. Graham had coached him for half an hour on answering the phone smartly but decided in the end it was best to switch the line through to his bluetooth. Putting in the landline didn't really make sense anyway; it just seemed more professional. But the boy's voice still hadn't broken and it didn't sound right, the way he squeaked, ‘Good morning, Winners' – more like a question than a fact. It didn't really look right either, the boy in charge. Graham wondered when it would, how long it would take for him to fill out in the right places and lose the puppy fat and look like a man. Handing a thriving business over to your son must be an awesome feeling. Graham had thought about it a lot, had even wondered about calling the shop Barlow and Sons, Trophies SA. But he did have a daughter too. She hadn't shown any interest, but she wasn't interested in anything these days, and Graham wasn't sexist. She'd come round. He'd settled on Winners when he imagined Sophie and Liam telling their school friends, ‘Our dad's the manager of Winners.' When Graham first came up with the business idea, he'd imagined himself becoming a sort of identity in sporting communities. He didn't know how it would happen exactly, but when he'd had this dream, he pictured the Graham Barlow Award. A trophy for something, maybe not even for a sporting achievement – maybe it would be for the display of a virtue, like never giving up.

‘Who's number one?' he asked his son as he pulled open the heavy glass door to leave the shop.

‘I am,' Liam smiled back.

As he looked back over his shoulder at the old petrol bowser, Graham saw that the set-up looked more like a garage sale than a proper business. He needed more stock, pure and simple. The opportunity to actually pick things up, handle them, feel their weight, was his point of difference with the major suppliers. He needed crystal trophies, fusion metal and acrylic, maybe some of those glass paperweights. Branching into corporate and giftware would make a lot of sense. It wasn't as if Graham lacked vision or ideas. What he lacked was capital, but his credit rating was rubbish. A loan for a Trotec laser engraver was what he needed most. At the moment, he'd have to send things away, not just for sand blasting but for any engraving at all. The truth was, Graham was just purchasing his stock from the online competitors.