This is the Life

‘He said, Terri, would you like to go to bed with me?’

‘Wow,’ I said, feeling I had to say something. ‘Well, that was Louis for you, always subtle.’

‘I was so surprised. So surprised.’

‘I bet.’

‘Because I’d never ever thought of Louis in that way. I’d always just thought of him as a friend of Frank’s. Not to say though that if he’d trimmed that beard and moustache off he wouldn’t have been quite a good-looking man.’

‘Well, Louis always had a beard,’ I said. ‘Since his twenties. He’d had that beard a long time.’

‘So anyway, I was that taken aback.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘I didn’t know where to look.’

‘A very difficult situation,’ I agreed. ‘To have come out with it like that. I mean, no preamble or anything.’

‘Not a word. No preliminaries. No what you’d call—’

‘Courtship rituals?’ I suggested.

‘No warning at all.’

‘Well, Louis always preferred the direct approach.’

But I was just stalling. I was just trying to keep things on a neutral footing so as not to put her off from telling me what had happened next.

‘Well, I did not know what to say,’ Terri said.

‘Quite an embarrassing situation,’ I nodded, ‘to be put on the spot like that.’

‘And he was looking at me with such sad eyes. He had such sad eyes sometimes, your brother.’

‘He had to put drops in them for his glaucoma,’ I said. ‘In fact I sometimes wondered if it wasn’t the roofing that caused it. You know Louis, he’d never wear sunglasses, and up there on those roofs in the Australian sunshine, and it reflecting off the surface. Surely that could damage your eyes.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘They were more like a labrador’s eyes. They’d look at you sort of sadly, but affectionately too. And Frank never got glaucoma, but then he drank a lot.’

‘I’m not so much of a dog person,’ I said. ‘Though I had a cat once when my girlfriend left. She went off with my best friend but she left the cat behind. Interestingly, Louis introduced that friend to us and then he went off to Australia. He ruined half the furniture – scratched it to pieces. Cats and sofas are a lethal combination. I think the cat resented me and he’d rather have gone with my ex, only she didn’t want him.’

‘But what a thing to come out with, I thought,’ Terri said. ‘Terri, would you like to go to bed with me? Just like that.’

I felt there was nothing I could say now that would have been appropriate. So I just waited.

‘Well, once I was over the surprise, I said, Louis – Louis, for us to do a thing like that would spoil a beautiful friendship.’

‘So you—’

‘I just couldn’t. I mean, if he’d dressed a little smarter maybe, or had had a shave more often. But you can’t expect to live without hot water for ten years and still—’

‘No, of course.’

‘Maintain normal standards,’ Terri said.

‘So how did Louis take that?’ I asked. ‘He was okay, I guess. Because you obviously remained friends.’

‘Oh yes,’ Terri said. ‘I really liked Louis. And so did Frank – until he got the drinking problem.’

I looked at my watch.

‘I’d better go,’ I said. ‘It’s late and I’m not so sure of the route in the dark.’

Terri gave me detailed directions for a short cut, but they were so complicated I couldn’t follow them, and I went back the way I had come. I was driving Louis’ ute, which was a noisy rattle trap with a falling-down window and a heater/cooler fan permanently stuck on high. It also had a quarter of a million miles on the clock. And that was Louis too, always buying old and high maintenance. Even when he could afford better.

I said goodbye to Terri and thanked her for everything and we said we’d keep in touch, though I doubted that we would and I believe she doubted that too.

The last I saw of her was in the rear-view mirror, her and her little dog watching me drive away.

I hadn’t said a word to her about Louis’ version of events; I’d felt it would have been impolite to mention this contradictory story. But I did wonder which version was true. And I also wondered why she had even mentioned the incident. Did she know that I knew something and she wanted to put me right? Or had she really slept with Louis, but was embarrassed about it, because of his paint-splattered clothes and his torn shorts and his creased T-shirt and his untrimmed beard and his not having been under a hot shower in ten years?

And if her version was the true version, then why had Louis told me a different one? Had it been a tale of wish fulfilment? But he hadn’t needed to tell me a single thing about it. If she’d turned him down, he could have kept quiet about that. Only the two of them need ever have known.

So where does the truth lie, and does it really matter?

But I liked Terri. She seemed like a good person to me. Good and kind and generous – someone who’d had a hard life but had come through without cynicism and with her values intact. And she said some nice things at the funeral service, and she didn’t have to.

So what the hell. What you are supposed to do anyway, with all the fathomless stories that you’ll never get to the bottom of, and all the contradictions? People’s lives seem like entangled balls of string, with a thousand knots in them. You’ll never unpick them all. The best you can do is just carry on and forget about it. You could drive yourself nuts if you brooded over it. And what good would that do anyone? Least of all yourself.

5 (#ulink_c9ed2b78-30d2-510a-8d68-8c0f7ef282af)

BABIES (#ulink_c9ed2b78-30d2-510a-8d68-8c0f7ef282af)

Back in my juvenile delinquent days I had been apprehended for tearing the leaves off a rhododendron bush, but had given a false name and address, so the cops had come looking for me and stopped the school bus on the way home into town. I guess I must have been the only person on board who looked guilty, so they said it was me, which it was, but I denied it, and they escorted me off the bus to the police station across the road.

I used to try to sit on the long back seat of the bus with the trouble-makers and no-hopers and those who had aspirations to play the electric guitar but who would probably end up working behind a counter.

Seeing me being taken away, Louis – who was a respectable pillar of society back then, with a prefect’s badge and high status as deputy head boy – got off the bus too and accompanied me to the station.

When news got to the school the next day, they said they would expel me for what I had done to the bush, as it was plain I was a bad lot and a corrupting influence and heading for the pan.

Louis went to the headmaster’s door and knocked on it and requested an interview, during the course of which he relayed the fact that if I got kicked out, he would leave too, and they didn’t want to lose him, so we both stayed.

I should have been grateful, I suppose, but I wasn’t particularly, as I hated the place and left anyway after a couple of months. But I appreciated his loyalty, as we hadn’t been getting on back then and fought constantly. Once he tried to break a beer glass over my head and told me I treated home like a hotel. I told him it was a pretty poor hotel and not what I was used to – which was a lie, as I’d known nothing else. After that I tried to hit him over his head with a cricket bat, but he was too quick for me. But apart from small skirmishes like that, we got on fairly well.

At one time though, Louis had a religious period and our mother started panicking when he let it be known that he felt he maybe had a vocation and would one day become a priest. Our mother went straight to church and prayed that such a thing should never happen, and God, being bountiful, let that particular cup of woe pass to someone else.

All the same, Louis took possession of the high moral ground and defended it staunchly for several months. When he came across the James Bond paperback I was reading he tore it up and binned it and said reading it was a sin.