Читать книгу Surviving Hal - Penny Flanagan - Страница 10

4.

Most Fridays we went to Tom and Anita’s house for beer, takeaway and cards. They lived in Glebe then, in a terrace that Anita’s father owned. Still in their early twenties, Anita and Tom were both eternal students and living that scratchy, minimalist existence where there’s never enough cutlery for the takeaway and none of the plates match. If we drank wine, we drank it out of middy glasses pinched from the local pub.

Anita was a sweet-faced pixie of a girl with a beautiful round face and the kind of short-cropped haircut that only certain women can get away with. She smoked elegantly, along with the boys, but was more considerate about blowing her smoke away from me. She spoke the Straw family lingo—this and that was ‘reeking’, said ‘balls!’ instead of bullshit, ‘base’ instead of bum, ‘you larries’—but her soft girlish voice made it all the more endearing. She held her own and she shuddered helplessly when she giggled, which I loved.

If my affection for Anita is somewhat magnified it is because she and Tom, high school sweethearts, eventually petered out before reaching that point where they should have married. We all miss her terribly, especially when you consider the way things turned out.

Anita’s brother lived in the other room but he was something of a Boo Radley character; we never saw him and if we did, he was lurking in the shadows of the hall with his spooky eyes and then gone before we could ask him to join us.

The first time I went there and met Tom, I was confused. Firstly, he was so much younger; eight years. Plus, they did not look like brothers at all. Tom was blonde—the proper white-blonde that stays until adulthood—and fair-skinned. Andy, on the other hand, was so cohesively olive-skinned, brown-eyed and dark-haired that people often mistook him for a Greek. But when they opened their mouths and spoke, the family tongue was unmistakable.

The house was typical of Glebe terraces back in the ’90s. It was dank. Attached on one side to its sibling terrace, the freestanding side then smacked up against a rock wall that absorbed moisture like a sponge. We sat in the kitchen at a formica table with the doors open to the courtyard on a hot summer night. The kitchen was updated, but not in any practical way; just a galley along one wall, with trendy down lights that left us sitting in semi-darkness in the no-man’s land between the kitchen bench and the wall. The smell of damp stalked us intermittently throughout the evening.

Anita was an art student and the entry hall was an eclectic gallery: her art; old framed photos from her childhood; a photo of her and Tom as teenagers and an old black and white of Hal and Corky.

When I first saw it, I thought the blonde teenager in the photo was Tom, but the era wasn’t right. It was clearly taken in the ’50s or ’60s. It had that deliberate and meticulous artistry about it that old black and whites have: a perfectly plain-lit backdrop; a beautifully art directed paling fence; Hal as a fresh-faced teen grinning on one side and Corky the aggressively upbeat puppet on the other.

“Jesus,” I said, peering closer when I first saw it. “I could’ve sworn that was you, Tom.”

“Spooky,” Tom agreed.

“He was quite the larry,” Andy said, a hint of pride. Larry, in Straw-speak, meant larrikin.

“And who’s this guy?” I asked, pointing to the puppet with its manic red-lipped grin.

“Corky, the puppet.” Tom sniggered. Then, both of them announced in unison, “The Bubble Up Children’s Happy Hour!”

“Never heard of it,” I said.

“Dad used to do quite a bit of improvising,” Tom said, adding air quotes over the improvising.

“Quite good sport,” Andy chuckled.

“Have you seen it?” I asked.

“Oh, Dad’s got his whole back catalogue on video tape.”

“It’s pretty funny,” Tom said.

“What are they talking about?” I asked, looking at the Tom-clone who was actually Hal and the slightly ‘Chucky’ ventriloquist’s dummy apparently named Corky.

“Girl troubles,” said Tom. “That was the segment, he’d talk about his girl troubles with the puppet.”

Andy and Tom were swaying between being proud and being dismissive of Hal. They couldn’t quite decide.

“And . . . then he joined the police force?” I said, confused. Next along the hall was a photo of Hal Straw as a young man, in a perfectly pressed police uniform.

“Ah, Constable Kershaw,” Andy said. “Magpie Creek.”

“The TV show,” Anita said, then when I looked at her puzzled, she shrugged in solidarity, I’ve never seen it either.

“Poor old Constable Kershaw, he met with a very unfortunate end.”

“Decapitated in a car accident,” Andy said, like it didn’t delight him at all. “So violent.”

“People bombarded the ABC with complaints,” Tom said proudly.

“Did you ever see the show?” I asked Andy.

“Not when it went to air, but Hal’s got every episode he was ever in stored on video tapes somewhere. He used to make us watch them before bedtime.”

“It’s quite stiff . . . the acting,” Tom giggled. “You know, it’s very, ‘I say, Constable!’ But when we were kids, we loved it.”

Andy regarded the old photos again. “He was a handsome prick,” he said, with begrudging admiration.

As it happened, Hal lived around the corner from Tom and Anita, in a three-storey terrace that had once been the boys’ family home. But they no longer went there to visit. According to the boys, Hal’s second wife, Helen, was ‘a reeker’; their own invented noun from the descriptive word ‘reeking’.

“Sometimes he walks by at night, down the lane,” Tom said, “and we’re lying in bed when we hear this voice coming out of the darkness, ‘No humping!’.”

Tom and Andy snickered at this, then Andy patted his pockets for the car keys.

“Shit!” He jumped up. “I parked my car right outside.”

He rushed out to move the car, not prepared to alert Hal to his presence.

After he’d gone, Tom looked at me and said, “You’re not quite ready for that, Nelly-girl.”

“For what?”

“For Hal,” Anita said warningly. Anita was an old hand with the family Straw.

“Who dealt this tripe?” Tom said, back to the hand of cards.

I eyed Anita across the table. We were playing together, as usual. Andy and I had resolved, for the good of our relationship, to never play 500 again after a particular incident early on in our courtship, about which we no longer speak. But suffice to say, when you play cards with the Straw boys, you need to keep your wits about you.

They learned by playing with Hal that mistakes, even at age eight, could result in you being called a little cunt.

They were very particular about the formalities, it was almost a bit OCD. The table had to be immaculately clean, the cards cut always to the person on your right and table talk of any kind was not tolerated.

“Six hearts?” I said hopefully. Anita’s eyes went immediately to the hand of cards in front of her. A small smile twitched at the corners of her mouth and I knew then she had the left bower, possibly the joker.

Andy came back inside and lobbed his car keys into my bag. “Whose call?” Then as he sat down beside me, “Breast! Breast! Breast your cards, Nell.”

I pressed my cards against my chest instinctively.

“Breast!” Tom shouted, just for the hell of it and we all snickered like teenagers.

“These two reekers are table talking again,” Tom said matter-of-factly to Andy as he fanned out his cards in his hand. “Your bid.”

“I never,” I said.

“Six hearts?” Tom did an exaggerated impression of me, the upwards inflection much more obvious. “Then she . . . ” he pointed at Anita, “. . . smiled.”

“I NEVER!” Anita said with exaggerated offence. See what I mean? They didn’t miss a trick. Their instincts were tuned way up; survival at all costs.

“Come on, then,” Andy said, “We’ll whoop your arses anyway.” Then, ever so casually like he hadn’t done it a million times before, he said: “Misère.”

We all groaned, even Tom.