Bluebird, page 10
‘Thanks, Dad.’
‘Don’t thank me for the offer,’ Ronald said, ever insensitive to double meanings, as wedded to the literal as if it were the staff of life. ‘Accept it! I could provide professional services, your mother-in-law could pay me, you could secure your little clubhouse’s future and I could secure your mother’s, uh’—he paused to scratch his chin—‘her security. Everybody wins—all you need to do is listen!’
Ron’s yellowish-crimson colour didn’t change, but an agitation in his fingers and neck indicated a rising tide of head piss. Gordon couldn’t figure out what professional services, engineering or otherwise, his father believed he might offer. Ron had the confidence of the made-good, even if his financial success as a small cog in big wheels and his prudential planning had provided a storehouse of funds that was now—bitter irony—paying his nursing home fees. If only he ran out of money, he could escape from the home. Just as well he lacked the insight to see this.
‘And you could start by contacting the JPA,’ Ron concluded. ‘Council and the courts would take you more seriously if you were a person of character.’
As a JP, Ronald had always placed a high value on character, an even higher one on having a certificate to prove it. A great revelation of Gordon’s childhood relationship with his father was when he, Owen and Sam were punished for trying to burn down the fire station. After they turned themselves in, Tony Eastaugh went on a rampage of self-righteousness and convened an extraordinary general meeting of the surf club to expel the boys. It was a bullshit overreaction, but Mr Eastaugh was running for re-election and fancied campaigning as the president brave enough to punish his own son. The meeting was halfway through when Ron Grimes stood up and delivered an oration of Churchillian impact. He confronted Mr Eastaugh with evidence that fire-lighting had been a ‘rite of passage’ for generations of surf club members. Ron called in former surfboat crewmen and captains who confirmed the tradition. He produced signed affidavits from clubbies who could not attend. There were even suggestions that Mr Eastaugh himself had taken part, if not during his youth then as a ‘mentor’ to younger arsonists. The expulsion move backfired on Mr Eastaugh, who cut the meeting short and let the boys off with a reprimand, the first crack in the eventual shattering of the edifice that was King Tony of BSLSC.
Gordon had revered his father for outgeneralling such a huge personage. Yet, over the years, as Gordon told people about the episode, it began to seem less admirable. Ron had styled himself as the incorruptible advocate of personal responsibility, yet his shining paternal moment was to spare the boys a punishment which even Ron acknowledged they deserved. If accountability was life’s keystone, the boys should have been expelled from the BSLSC. They had lit the fire. Being the one to raise the alarm didn’t excuse Gordon. But Ron had stood up for them, and won. Gordon had taken his father’s actions as a valuable lesson about fighting the power and not letting hypocrites win, but over the years, he understood that Ron had taught him a slightly different lesson: that those in power always have a weak spot, and suborning them was how you survived. Not character, but leverage.
Gordon nursed these warmer thoughts as he escorted his father down the road. Ron wasn’t such a bad fellow, and whatever else went on between him and Norma, they still loved each other. In the right mood, they cooed like doves and bought presents and showed each other more affection and kindness than they received anywhere else. They had suffered terribly. Gordon couldn’t stand as their judge, nor deny them their morsels of solace.
As Gordon had been waxing sentimentally, his father, instead of turning his walker left up Sinker Street to complete a lap of the block around the nursing home, was facing right at the traffic lights to cross Fishman Avenue into Capri. One hand on the walker, he reached out and punched the pedestrian button.
‘Dad, we’re going this way.’
‘Going for a walk,’ Ron said over his shoulder. ‘Exercise.’
Ron’s head hunched into the collar of his checked shirt like a turtle retracting into its shell. He leaned at a steep angle into his walker and, when the light changed, set off to cross the four-lane road. He tried to work the walker past Gordon, who blocked him with his hands raised.
‘Get out of my way!’
‘Dad, it’s not happening.’
Ron rammed the walker into Gordon, and then tried to weave it past him. Gordon stepped into his path, edging him back off the road. Aware that cars were slowing down to rubberneck, Gordon kept his hands defensively raised, palms out.
‘Dad, you can’t go to Mum’s.’
‘Get lost!’
Later, Gordon wondered if he should have let the old man go. It was a steamy morning. Ron would have got halfway, at best, before falling in a heap. Gordon could have driven beside him like a support vehicle in an ultra-marathon. But Ron might have dropped dead. Or, worse—and more likely, knowing him—made it to Norma’s. Possession was law, and Ron was possessed. If he could get into the unit, they could not legally shift him.
Gordon and his father were coupled in this mortal dance at the traffic light on Fishman and Sinker: Ron assaulting Gordon with the walker, Gordon blocking his father’s path to freedom. Ron clawed Gordon’s wrists, digging his nails into the soft tissue and pulling Gordon’s hands towards him.
‘Ball up, you weak fool!’
‘Dad, what are you doing?’
‘I said ball up!’
It seemed that Ron was trying to pull him closer. He began reefing each of Gordon’s wrists towards his own face, one at a time. As his slack fingers kept brushing Ron’s face, Gordon realised with a new burst of horror that his father was trying to make him punch him.
‘You can’t even hit me,’ Ron growled.
‘Of course I can’t hit you! Look at the state of you!’
‘You can!’ Ron gripped Gordon’s wrists harder and wrenched them towards his face. ‘Ball up!’
‘Let me go!’
‘You won’t hit me; you won’t hit that fuckwit who stole your wife. What’s it going to take, you rotten sod? Who on this earth will you hit?’
Gordon ripped himself clear. Ron howled in pain, wringing his hands. Gordon leant close to his ear and asked if he was all right. As the light changed again, Ron took advantage of Gordon’s proximity and began throwing haymakers. Gordon bowed his head and shielded himself with his arms.
‘Dad! Stop! Please!’
‘Bloody idiot. Why did it have to be you? Eh? Why were you the one?’
Ron rammed him again with, Gordon felt, years of pent-up vengeance. Ron was trying to get him not just out of the way, but out of memory. This was what it had come to. After a whole life, this was what it had come to.
Astonishingly, then, Ron began to weep. His face fell into his hands.
‘You’ve got to get me out of there,’ Ron was sobbing. ‘I can help at The Lodge, I can save it for you! I know all the tricks in the book. Even when your mother objected, I knew how to get past them, and now you’re telling me you don’t need me. Oh ho ho …’
‘Dad.’
‘You’ve got to talk to the doctors, your mother—they won’t listen. You’ve got to get a man doctor to look at me. I can’t bear it anymore. You’ve got to get me out, I can save that place for you! Don’t you think you owe me something?’
‘Dad …’
Gordon’s heart was twisting. He let a hand fall on Ron’s trembling shoulders.
‘Hello there, you look like you need some help.’
Gordon looked around. A car had pulled up at the traffic light.
‘How about a lift, Mr Grimes? It’s warm out there.’
The electronic window on a carnelian red Prius had scrolled down to reveal what Gordon already knew would be beaming out at him, the one smirking face he dreaded even more than all the others he didn’t want to see.
‘Small world, Gordo.’
‘Frontal.’
Gordon ground his teeth, regretting being caught fighting his father on this street, a list of regrets going a long way back, but most of all regretting being caught by this man.
The deputy general manager of the merged Northern Beaches supa-council stroked his beard, reddish and trimmed but kind of thinning, a match for his ginger coxcomb, ninety percent of which was not hair but the general impression of hair. Frontal, real name Michael, who had been at Bluebird Public right through Bloodbath in the same year as Gordon, Kelly, Dog, Red Cap and Tonsure Man, had gone on to greater things. He was now one rung from the top of his lifelong climb up the greasy pole of the municipal public service. What an odyssey it had been, Gordon thought but didn’t say, for if he said it Frontal would be sure to take it the wrong way. Or the right way, such as it was.
‘You need to take me home.’ Ron collected himself and spoke to Frontal in a firm voice, like a defendant stating, ‘Not guilty.’
‘And where will that be today, Mr Grimes?’
Ron named the nursing home. Mugging at Gordon, Frontal got out of his car and helped Ron fold his walker in the correct manner and stow it in the hatch of the Prius. Ron chatted amicably as if nothing unusual had happened. Gordon recognised his tone: social niceties cloaking that raw angry animal. His father wasn’t yielding, just switching plans.
‘You need a lift too, Gordo?’
If Gordon Grimes were a toadfish, he would have been at full bloat, spines out.
‘My car’s just back there. Thanks.’
‘We all need a Good Samaritan sometimes,’ Frontal said as he clipped Ron into his seatbelt.
Gordon followed the Prius to the nursing home, to make sure his father got inside without dying or pulling another swiftie. Frontal parked in the disabled space out front. Gordon had to drive around the block to find a park. By the time he got to the visitors’ register on the ground floor, he saw that Frontal had checked Ron back in.
When Gordon emerged from the elevator on Banksia floor, Jada, the efficient head nurse, greeted him with a sympathetic expression.
‘Your friend has taken your father to his room. I hope you three had a nice walk.’
The nurses were not gulag guards, Gordon reminded himself. Even Ron admitted that these Nepalese were excellent at their jobs; no local would put up with the stomach-turning displays to which he subjected them.
‘I don’t like them.’ Ron’s voice was audible from the corridor. Gordon stepped into the room to find his father snug in his armchair, Frontal pouring two glasses of water before settling into the other. Why? Gordon thought. Doesn’t a Good Samaritan just piss off once he’s done his thing?
‘They’re not that bad,’ Frontal was saying. ‘Most of them have lived in the area all their lives.’
Gordon unspooled with relief. He had thought his father was talking about the nurses, not the residents.
‘They’re so old. They’ve both feet in the grave, just need someone to give them a push. Terribly depressing, the poor things,’ Ron said, seeming to undergo a shift of mood. Then, remembering himself, he went on: ‘They stare at me. I don’t like them.’
‘Aren’t they people you know?’
‘Why would that make me want to talk to them?’ Ron asked with an unyielding look towards Gordon, prompting Frontal to glance over his shoulder and acknowledge his arrival. Like a host, Frontal nodded Gordon towards the commode in the bathroom, which doubled as Ron’s spare chair. Gordon dragged it out and perched on, or in, it. ‘Nobody’s any good. They didn’t want to know me then, and I don’t want to know them now. How the mighty have fallen! Just don’t tell them to come crawling to me!’
Jada came in to replace the water jug, exchanging a smile with Gordon. She asked if he wanted a chair, but he said he wouldn’t be staying long. He just didn’t want to leave his father alone with Frontal.
‘The staff aren’t bad, though.’ Ron’s eyes followed Jada’s hips out the door. ‘These Pakis, I never thought the women were much to look at, but if there’s one thing about old age, it’s … it’s …’
‘That you lose the thread of what you were saying?’ Frontal suggested.
Ron refocused on Gordon. ‘It’s your mother’s side that had it in for the darkies, I want you to know that.’
This was one thing Gordon and his father could agree on. For Norma, the most important pigeonhole for any person, in any circumstance, was their race. To Norma, Dr So-and-so or the Woman From The Health Fund was Chinese (which embraced all East Asians except sometimes Japanese), Indian or Paki (which embraced all South Asians, including Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis, Thais, Burmese and Indonesians) or darkies (miscellaneous races but also a catch-all for Chinese, Pakistanis and Indians). For Norma’s taxonomic outlook on life, it was critical that everyone know that Ron was being looked after by Pakis, albeit Nepalese Pakis. Ron’s non-racism, such as it was, made a nice relief from Norma’s open bigotry. But Gordon could not, to be honest, tell whether this was because Ron was not a racist, or because the non-white races were too far beneath Ron’s notice for him to care about categorising. His ogling a Nepalese nurse because he was discovering a late-in-life appreciation of ‘Pakis’ could be a positive or a negative step, when it came to his being racist, non-racist or super-racist, if only you could tell where the starting point was.
Gordon was growing tired of thinking about his parents.
‘You don’t have many personal items in here,’ Frontal was saying. ‘When my mum was in the nursing home, you could barely move for all the family photos, albums, knick-knacks. She made it just like home.’
‘And why would I want to do that?’ Ron thrust his jaw.
Gordon had given up the fight to bring Ron reminders of family or home. Ron had been an inveterate stamp and coin collector, and Gordon had offered to bring his collections here for him to enjoy, but Ron had stated that he didn’t want anything of value in his room ‘because they’ll nick it’. (So much for his non-racism.) He wouldn’t even have a radio.
‘I’m here under protest,’ Ron said. ‘I’m not going to settle in.’ ‘But no home comforts?’ Frontal pressed. Gordon was unsure whether he was trying to trigger Ron or help him.
‘Norma brings the Herald every morning, that’s all I need.’
That said, when he stabbed his remote control like a shiv at the TV and set the ABC to maximum volume, Ron did look perfectly content, doing no differently from what he would be doing at home. He could forget for a half-hour that he had only the nursing staff and not Norma under his thumb.
‘You must enjoy your loyal Gordo visiting so often,’ Frontal said.
Gordon felt the insult: whereas a man like Frontal was in the prime of his career and chronically time-poor, an unemployed bum like Gordon, well, what was there to do but visit his father? He wondered if Frontal knew how little he had visited Ron lately.
‘He only comes to make sure I haven’t got out,’ Ron said.
True, Gordon thought. Ron had never enjoyed his company. But some people change near the end. Gordon’s maternal grandmother, Norma’s mother Mary, had been a lifelong Catholic martyr, devoting her days to the church, Meals on Wheels, serving the poor, inviting strays for Christmas dinner, making her family’s life a misery because misery meant duty to the bloody church … and then, right at the end, Grandma Mary decided she didn’t believe in God. Normally it was the opposite; they find God as a panicked last-minute each-way bet. But Grandma Mary was adamant that she didn’t want a priest, didn’t want the last rites: it was all hogwash. After a lifetime of Christian devotion, she died a born-again atheist. She’d only just started thinking about it, see.
Maybe one day his father might start thinking in a new way about Gordon.
Ron blinked at the younger men in apparent surprise that they were still with him.
‘Haven’t you two got places to go?’ He peered at Frontal. ‘You must.’
‘Run off my feet,’ Frontal said, without getting up.
Ron checked his watch, another old habit. If anyone tyrannised Ronald Grimes, it was Father Time. For his whole life, whenever he needed to go somewhere, he was agitated about being late. As soon as he arrived, he began to fret about getting away to the next thing. In what sliver between arrival and departure, Gordon wondered, had Ronald Grimes ever found release from the clock?
‘Why do you keep checking the time?’ Gordon asked.
‘Drinks at four.’
‘Drinks?’
‘They bring a trolley. Scotch, wine, beer. You’re allowed one. Well,’ Ron chortled, ‘I am.’
On cue, a drinks trolley nudged Gordon out of the commode. A man whose name tag said Nick poured a nip of whisky into a plastic cup and bore it on a tray to Ron.
‘Oh, that’s good. Bugger!’ Ron began the laborious process of levering himself out of his chair, which was holding on to him like a deep-sea squid. ‘Highlight of my day, but I get so excited, the thought of that first sip gets me going.’
Ron shuffled towards the bathroom, taking a detour to reclaim his commode. Frontal rose to help, but Ron brushed him off with a rude familiarity that unnerved Gordon.
‘You talk sense into him,’ Ron said to Frontal.
‘About?’
‘About calling the JPA, what else? He doesn’t even have to do any training—they’re desperate!’
After Ron had nearly yanked himself off his feet sliding the bathroom door shut, Frontal regarded Gordon with silent satisfaction. People used to say you couldn’t trust a man with a beard. Gordon had no issues with beards—how could you, these days?—but he could never trust a man who trimmed his beard with slide-rule accuracy, a precise line around the cheeks and under the jaw, the moustache equally maintained. Wasn’t the whole point of a beard to dispense with shaving? Why would anyone grow a beard and shave every day?
Jada appeared at the door and shared some small talk with Frontal. When she left, Frontal explained: ‘Overseeing nursing homes takes up a surprising amount of council time. You’d be stunned,’ he added, placing a characteristically high estimation on Gordon’s emotional investment in how Frontal spent his time.
The conversation was interrupted by a volley of swearing from the bathroom. Ron was either dying or having difficulties.
