This is the Life

‘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 (#ulink_0a66ada0-9ad7-5ccc-bc5a-3b81616bb081)

TERRI TWO (#ulink_0a66ada0-9ad7-5ccc-bc5a-3b81616bb081)

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.