Losing Face, page 14
He yelled, ‘Do what right now?’
The film in the lounge room paused for a moment before resuming.
‘I’m going to a friend’s place for dinner tonight. I’m gonna put this roast on for you three and I’m going,’ she said.
‘What? You’re leaving us with him again? You orchestrated this shit, didn’t you? This was all planned. Just say it.’
She turned to him with wet eyes and flushed cheeks. ‘Joey, please. Please.’
He stormed out of the kitchen and slammed the door to his bedroom.
The film stopped again and there was chatter in the kitchen. A minute later there was a knock at the door and in walked his father. Joey scoffed and stood up to leave but his dad shut the door and stood against it.
‘I’m going to need you to get away from the door, please,’ Joey said.
‘I just want to talk. I know this is complicated, and I know you’re scared and in trouble. Trust me, I know the feeling.’
‘What would you know about being in trouble? It’s in your convict genes, is it?’ Joey’s words came out hysterical, singsong.
‘Joey—’
‘Don’t call me Joey. I’m Joseph to you, understand?’ They were standing face to face and a blob of Joey’s spit landed on his father’s shoulder.
‘I’ve been where you are right now, mate.’
‘What are you on about?’ Joey asked.
‘I got into a brawl when I was your age. In a kebab shop in the Cross. We got arrested.’
Joey clapped slowly. ‘Damn, you’re a heavy motherfucker, aren’t you?’ The sarcasm poured from his mouth, plopped on the floor.
‘You have a very bad attitude, you know that?’
‘Thanks. I get it from Mum.’
Joey looked out the window at the backyard that Jiddo Youssef used to take care of. It had become a dust bowl. He could hear his mother busying herself in the kitchen exaggeratedly. Drawers slamming, cutlery tinkling.
‘Can you get the fuck away from the door?’ he asked again.
‘I told you, I just want to talk. Why don’t you sit down on the bed?’
For a second, Joey was overcome by the desire to obey him, which had more to do with the man’s heftiness than the fact that he had any sort of authority over him, and then without any thought, he grabbed his father’s arm and tried to pull him away. His father didn’t budge. He tried again with more force and the door rattled against the pressure of their staunch bodies. After a second of tussling, his dad hit him across the face with the palm of his hand. Joey punched him back in the chest and in a moment they were on the air mattress that Alex hadn’t put away, brawling and tangled in the two-metre phone-charger cord.
His mum burst into the room, yelling at them to stop. Alex stood behind her, cupping his hand over his mouth. His father got up and stood against the wall. Joey pushed past his family, barefoot, shirtless and proud and ran for the front door. His dad bounded after him, knocking into things.
They made it to the reserve at the end of the street before Joey turned and yelled at him to fuck off and then his body shut down in one convulsive sweep and he dropped to his knees and cried thick tears into the dry grass. His shoulders heaved to the rhythm of his panting, the crying onslaught following its own trajectory. His father dropped to his own knees in front of Joey and wrapped his arms around him. Lorikeets squawked overhead, his father sat back and lit a cigarette. It rested between his fingers so lightly that it could have slipped away without him realising.
‘I was arrested another time too. That’s why I had to leave. I was in jail most of your life.’
His words entered Joey intravenously. They swam around inside of him, soothing sores in his nervous system, palpitating fright in his chest, ageing him.
In the middle of the park, sitting cross-legged across from him, his father said, ‘I crippled somebody.’
The gravity of his father’s words carried them back home, grubby with sweat and anticipation. His mum and Alex stood in the front yard with their phones to their ears. They dropped them to their sides in unison when they saw them approaching.
His mum stormed into the house, but Alex stomped over to them. ‘What is wrong with you two? You think she needs this crap?’
His dad reached out and put his hand on Alex’s shoulder and Joey continued to the front door.
‘Mum!’
‘You have the hide to yell out my name—’
‘Stop talking and sit down right here.’
Joey pointed to the sofa nearest the front door. He expected her to resist, to tell him to shut his mouth, but she must have read his face. His father and Alex entered the room and needed no direction. They sat across from his mum. His dad put his arm around Alex’s shoulders. Joey expected Alex to flinch, but he didn’t.
He pointed at his father. ‘Tell Alex what you just told me.’
‘Joey, why don’t we chill for the rest of the day and maybe talk tomorrow before my flight? Everyone is a little exhau—’
‘Maybe talk about it tomorrow? Maybe talk about it tomorrow? You think you have an option, do you? You think you can just come here and fucking call the shots. And you’ – Joey spun around to his mother, his accusatory finger poised in the air – ‘you better be prepared to talk too. Today is the day you both come clean to us. No more bullshit. You think we’ve gone through our whole lives believing your crap?’ He looked at his father. ‘Start talking.’
‘Amal, I …’
She stared at her lap.
His father pulled his arm away from Alex and put his head in his hands before taking a deep breath and looking up. ‘I don’t know how to start.’
Joey spoke up. ‘Okay, I’ll help. Why did you and Mum break up?’
‘Well, it’s tied to what I told you earlier.’
‘So start with that.’
His father turned to Alex. ‘When you were around three years old, Alex, I … I got into an incident that resulted in a man becoming quadriplegic … because of something … stupid I did.’
‘I think you are misunderstanding what is happening here. You and Mum are going to give details, do you hear? No talk of incidents. Details.’ Joey looked at his mother. Why wasn’t she saying anything? His father started again.
‘When you boys were kids, I went out with my mates. I hadn’t been out with them in a long time because your mum and I had been busy with you two and with work. I drank more than I should have. Way more. And I drove at the end of the night with my mates in the car. There had been a storm so there were puddles everywhere. There was a cyclist. I drove into him and … and I broke him. Broke him to the point that he can only move his mouth and eyes. I went to jail for a long time.’
Alex flinched. Joey sat down next to his mother who still hadn’t moved. The knot of their family was coming undone.
Alex piped up. ‘So it was an accident.’
‘Well, in a way, yes. I had no intention of harming him, but …’
His father’s unease stank. It wrapped itself tight around them and Joey welcomed it, basked in it.
‘We had been having a lot of fun. We were very loose. Drunk. And when boys are drunk and around each other in that way, you know, you lose sense of … of good measure.’
A knife twisted in Joey’s back.
‘There was a puddle of water in the gutter. I thought it would be funny to veer into it and splash the cyclist, to make the guys laugh.’
Alex wrapped his arms tight around his chest.
‘I swerved too hard and hit him.’
A balloon of silence had been expanding against the walls of the house in the past years. As his father finished admitting to his crime, the balloon finally burst, but it made no sound.
The sun was setting, and its light, fed through the slits of the venetian blinds, cast gashes over his mother’s arm, his father’s leg, the coffee table. So much of what was unfurling in their lounge room was storytelling. The thought comforted Joey, reminded him of how much he loved story time in primary school. A man used to come to tell them Dreamtime stories. Stories that had made Joey feel tiny. And that’s how he felt now.
His father went on. ‘Being inside is hell. It’s not something I was prepared for. Your mum came to visit me in the beginning. She brought you boys once, with my mum too, but I told her I didn’t want you to see me there. I got mixed up with a group of guys. Basically, if I hadn’t I would have ended up dead. They cared about me, but they also led me into some dodgy shit.’
Alex’s face was resting on his fist. He mumbled, ‘Like what?’
For the first time since they had convened to thaw it all out, his mum spoke and looked directly at Joey. ‘Like drugs.’
‘What are you looking at me for?’ Joey’s attempt at defence sounded meek. They all knew why she was looking at him.
Alex asked, ‘Dealing or using?’
‘At first, they got me using. Being high was the only time I wasn’t counting the hours until my release. Until I got to see you again.’
The sentimentality was passing straight through Joey. ‘What was your sentence?’
‘I was given seven years for the cyclist and, because of the dealing, another three years on top of that.’
‘So you’ve been out three years?’ Alex asked.
‘Around that, yeah.’
‘And in that time, you didn’t want to try and see us?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘How?’
Their father looked out of the window. ‘I tried, but maybe that’s something your mum wants to explain.’
She cleared her throat and breathed out slowly. ‘I could tell your dad was on shit by the third visit. I thought he would get over it, that maybe it was a one-off type thing cos he had just gone in. But then … the last time I went to see him he was trying to get me to bring shit in and, you know … be part of the process.’
Joey thought of Emma, the festival, Kyri, Ivan. It hadn’t even been that extraordinary an experience, but he wanted to go back to that. His parents had been young. They had made bad decisions, done stupid things too.
‘That’s when I told him it was all over. I sent him the odd photo of you guys over the years, and he sent letters that I never read to you. And since his release, yes, he has messaged me to say he wants to see you but I … I was working up to it.’
Alex kept asking questions. ‘So, you didn’t even give him a chance to get clean and come back?’
Joey was filling in the gaps in his head without the need for detail.
His father chimed in. ‘There was no point. I was in pretty deep and your mum could see that.’
Alex was angry. ‘And you just gave up?’
‘It’s not that I gave up. I … I was lost,’ he said.
‘That whole time? That whole fucking time you were lost? You had me, you had Joey, you had mum out here to help you find your way, and you were lost? That’s all you’re going to call it? And now you decide to come back when Joey is about to get lost too?’
Joey’s anxiety whirled. His mother had tears falling down her cheeks. The conversation was doing nothing good for any of them. Words out of mouths and into ears.
His father went on. ‘I tried. I promise, I tried. And I failed every time. And that’s something I have to live with—’
Alex cut in. ‘It’s something we’ve had to live with.’
‘Yeah. Yeah, it is. But I’ve been clean for a year now. I wanted to be clean for a while before I came back into your lives.’
Joey laughed. ‘I think it might be a bit late for that.’
His father looked at the floor and then shut his eyes.
Where were they all supposed to go from here?
18
Elaine pushed a twenty-dollar note into the poker machine. The twenty lasted ten minutes. She’d thought to only play the twenty, maybe have a free coke at the bar and head off, but it had been a while since she’d won anything, and she had a good feeling. She peeled a fifty-dollar note from her purse and fed it to the machine. She lost ten, made twenty. So, she was ten dollars up. She would play to forty. That way she would have only lost thirty all night if the machine hadn’t paid out by closing time.
She had a hunch and doubled the bet. She was at forty within a minute. Then thirty and then ten. There was no point pulling ten out of the machine. She lowered the bet to ten-cent hits. When she was at around four dollars, the feature hit. The graphic was a silly coin that flipped and glimmered on three lines. Fifteen free spins right after she had lowered the bet to this pathetic amount. She cursed the composer of the poker machine music as it rang. She didn’t bother waiting for the winnings to rack up. All that drama for a five-dollar gain. She hit the play button and let the free spins roll. The feature was entirely fruitless. One or two dollars gained in the last few spins that she bet on black of spades and lost. Both times it was red diamond. ‘Kess ekht el red diamonds,’ she whispered.
She played the remaining few dollars in the machine and on the last hit kept her fingers on the button, staring at the flashing Insert credit graphic, the blood draining out of her. She reached into her purse. There was ten dollars left. She was keeping it for half a kilo of ground coffee because she had used the dregs that morning. The next pension payment wouldn’t come until Thursday. That was two days away. She had enough food in the fridge to last until then, but she was definitely out of coffee. She would not last two days without coffee. If the ten dollars got to thirty, she would take it out immediately.
She walked to a machine on the other side of the cluster, where there was only one other person, a Chinese man she had spoken to before. He smiled at her, but she wasn’t in the mood to be courteous. She sat at the machine that she always thought of as quite welcoming. Its theme was the Australian outback, and the feature character was a smiling kangaroo wearing one of those hats with corks hanging off the brim. She squinted at the kangaroo, beckoned his good fortune with a prayer.
The credit vaporised in a minute. Her chest tightened. Her face sagged into her neck. She would go without coffee until Thursday. ‘Fucken ugly kangaroo.’
Hopefully Salma would wave her over for a coffee tomorrow morning and then she could have one at Amal’s the following day, even though she had been trying to avoid going there.
She couldn’t believe that Amal had been in touch with him and not mentioned anything. All the time and hurt and effort Elaine had invested in their relationship and Amal didn’t have the decency to say that she had reached out to Simon. And what was the point, anyway? He was hardly going to be able to become the boys’ father out of the blue. They didn’t remember him. Even though she wanted her grandchildren to know more about their father, she wasn’t quite prepared for his real-life existence. It was just too late. It was obvious that Amal was only prepared to reintroduce Simon to his sons now that she had the comfort of the lawyer boyfriend. Humans were leaves in the wind.
Elaine’s mobile rang. She plopped her handbag on the seat she had just been sitting on and fished the phone out. It was Amal. Every time her daughter’s name had flashed on her mobile since the arrest, Elaine had been overcome with anxiety. It was late. Amal never called this late.
Elaine answered. ‘What happened?’
‘Ma, are you going to answer the phone like that every time I call now?’
‘Everything okay?’
‘Yeah. Where are you? What’s that music in the background?’
Fucking stupid phone-call anxiety. She wouldn’t get away with it. The sounds were too recognisable.
Amal continued. ‘Are you at the club?’
‘Yes, I come with Salma last minute. We leaving now.’
‘Okay. How often have you been going?’
‘Never. I come once or twice with Salma, that’s it.’
‘Are you sure? Cos if it’s like when Dad died, you can tell me—’
Elaine was electric. Charged by the machines surrounding her. ‘Amal, khalas. If I’m going, I know what I’m doing. Why you call?’
‘I was just going to tell you that the boys know everything. About Simon, and me, and all that shit.’
‘Everything?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Ya allah, why? What good is it for them?’
‘It kind of just happened. Joey lost his shit and he wouldn’t stop until we told him everything.’
‘Okay. Anyway, I talk to you tomorrow.’
‘Alright. Mum?’
‘Yeah?’
‘You can talk to me if there’s anything wrong, you know?’
‘I don’t know what you saying. Bye!’
Elaine threw her phone into her bag and went to the smoking area. A guy covered in tattoos stood near the door. She asked him for a cigarette and he obliged, smirking as though he were amused by the request. She dragged on it like the tar was keeping her alive. By the time she finished smoking, she was venomous. She needed a drink.
At the bar, she ordered a double scotch and coke that she grabbed as soon as it was placed in front of her. When the young bartender asked for sixteen dollars, she put on her sweet-old-lady act, apologised and said she’d be back in a minute with her husband’s card. She downed the drink as she walked to the club’s other bar near the restaurant. The bartender there was even younger, and she repeated the act, but only ordered a single this time. The club quickly became a soup of lights and faces.
She walked to the exit. Her senseless daughter patronising her like that, as though her own life weren’t a mess. Elaine knew what she was doing. She was in control, wasn’t relying on anyone. If she cut it close from payment to payment, that was her prerogative. She didn’t go hungry; her bills were paid.
The bills. That’s how Amal had found out last time. Stupid Elaine, letting them pile up in the letterbox instead of stashing them away somewhere. But she hadn’t wanted them in the house, and she hadn’t been game enough to just bin the blasted things. Amal and her sticky beak. Thank God she had agreed not to tell Michael. Elaine wouldn’t have been able to deal with his judgement.
