Читать книгу Surviving Hal - Penny Flanagan - Страница 11

5.

Three months later I was deemed ready. I was introduced to Hal over lunch at a trendy café in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. It was BYO and Andy brought four bottles of wine, which he clutched in a plastic shopping bag like giant worry dolls.

“Four bottles? Are you sure?” I asked.

“Trust me,” Andy said, ripping the cigarette in and out of his mouth with a one-last-request desperation as we walked along the beachfront towards the restaurant, “we’ll need them.”

Hal was waiting at an outside table. I recognised him immediately from the Shrine to Hal wall in Tom and Anita’s hallway. Still the same foppish hair, but white now instead of blonde, his face was a melted version of the young guy in the headshots.

When we were introduced Hal uttered, “Yes, lovely, lovely. Nell Wylie.” He said my name as though to confirm the identity of the object in front of him. Then he lunged forward with wet lips. I was nimble. I faked left then right, so he caught me awkwardly on the ear. But he grabbed me in a tight embrace all the same, pressing his spongy old body against me. Then he held me at arms length for an intense visual examination with his pale, watery eyes.

It does seem especially odd now, that Andy would not simply shield me from Hal for as long as possible, but, looking back, I think relationships, sexual conquests, held currency with Hal. Despite his better judgment, Andy still wanted to impress his father and to do so, he had to deal in Hal’s currency.

I needn’t have worried about what sort of impression I was going to make on Hal. In fact, I needn’t have stayed beyond the first meet-and-greet impressions. About ten minutes into the lunch, bored with the polite get-to-know-me chit-chat, he stopped communicating with me directly and proceeded to conduct entire tracts of conversation about me while I was still sitting there.

“You like them thin, don’t you son? Yes, very thin.”

“Isn’t she gorgeous?” Andy redirected him, grinned at me, kissed my cheek firmly and put a protective arm around my shoulders.

“She can talk too,” I smiled.

Andy laughed. Hal didn’t notice.

“Bit of an improvement on the drug addict,” Hal said, casually rearranging his cutlery.

“Dad, she wasn’t a drug addict.”

“Well, a heavy drinker.”

Hal turned to me, just to make sure I was clear that we were now discussing Andy’s ex-girlfriend. “His last girlfriend, very heavy drinker. It really takes a physical toll on women, the drinking. You can see it in their face, the skin.”

I’d actually seen photos of Lindy by that stage. Contrary to Hal’s inference that she was some sort of scaly-skinned alcoholic, she was in fact a dark-eyed beauty with a mane of glossy black hair. I’d have been intimidated if I didn’t know the phone-throwing story.

“Anyway . . . ” Andy tried to move him on.

“Remember the whippet?” Hal said.

“Not now, Dad.”

“She was so thin, we nicknamed her the whippet.” He chucked back a half a glass of Andy’s chardonnay and held out his glass for a refill.

Andy topped him up, a strained smile on his face.

“But you were quite taken with her, weren’t you? Very taken.”

“Yes, I was,” Andy said, his voice tight.

I took the opportunity to look out at the surf, sip my wine and wonder deeply when the entrées would arrive.

“But rough. She was a bit rough, wasn’t she?” Hal continued.

“You thought she was.”

“A Westie,” Hal said, keeping his eyes on Andy as he knocked back another glass.

“Now, now.” Andy kept his voice light.

“You were furious when I threw her out of the house,” he hooted at the memory. “Furious!”

“I was furious because you called her a slut,” Andy said in a tone of voice so light and congenial that I almost mistook it for something like, ‘didn’t we have some fun times’.

“Fair’s fair mate. You were humping under our roof.”

“I was eighteen.”

I felt an urgent need to go to the bathroom and excused myself.

When I returned, the entrées had arrived. Hal was attacking a plate of prawns. Caught without a finger bowl he began to bark orders at passing waiters.

“Finger bowl!” he demanded. “Here. Quickly. I smell like a whore.”

Did he really say that?

“Dad!” Andy cautioned.

“I’m up to my balls in prawns here,” Hal cackled like a naughty school boy, chastised but secretly pleased with himself.

Andy motioned politely to a waiter and with much practised charm procured a finger bowl for Hal who continued to rip the heads and legs off his prawns before devouring them.

“So you’re in love, son?”

“I am. Very happy,” Andy glowed at me. The open admission to being in love caught me off guard. I didn’t think we were up to that yet and for the briefest of seconds I felt cornered. But Andy didn’t do things by halves, he didn’t hesitate or weigh up options, he just followed his heart and went barrelling into love and commitment. This, from a man, was a novel concept to me. And despite my instinctive sense of reservation, that inner voice that said ‘Careful!’, I was completely smitten.

“Oh, he likes the ladies,” Hal sing-songed to his plate of prawns. “And family? You’ve met them?”

Was he talking about my family?

“No, I haven’t met them yet,” Andy said.

“Know anything about them?”

Why didn’t he just ask me about my family?

“Nell?” Andy brought me into the conversation.

“Yes?” I was beginning to tire of this whole weird thing, where I was at the table but no one would speak to me directly.

“Would you like to tell Dad about your family?”

“Would you like to ask me something about my family?” I said, looking Hal in the eye with what I hoped was a steely ‘don’t mess with me, you old fucker’ gaze.

Hal chuckled.

“Ooh look out, she’s waxy.” He fussed around with the last of his prawns, sucking the juice out of the heads. His hands feathered around nervously. He realigned his plate, his glass, the salt shaker.

Andy refilled my glass. “Have some of this chardonnay darling, I think you’ll like it.”

“So, your parents, where do they live, darling?” Hal asked. He settled his napkin back into his lap, clasped his hands in front of him, then leaned forward towards me, and gave me his full attention in a forced, unnatural way. Had he forgotten my name already?

“In Manly, on the northern beaches.”

“Big house?” Hal said. “Near the beach?”

“Not . . . particularly,” I said, a bit bewildered, looking to Andy for direction.

“Nell’s dad is Paul Wylie,” Andy said hoping to score points with my father’s (obscure) fame as a residential architect.

“Oh?” Hals’ face drew a blank but he stayed attentive, sensing there was something in this worth knowing.

“He’s a famous architect,” Andy said proudly. “He’s won all sorts of awards. There’s a walking tour you can go on in Willis Cove that takes you past all the houses he’s designed.”

“Not all his,” I corrected.

Andy took a lot of license with this sort of information. The truth was, Dad had been part of a collective group of architects who had been commissioned in the ’70s to design homes for a new bushland suburb on the (then) fringes of the northern suburbs. At the time, everyone thought them a bunch of crazy arty-farty hippies and the project was widely dismissed as a waste of taxpayers’ money.

Gradually though, the mood had turned and now, the suburb and its eco-friendly, Lloyd Wright-esque homes were being hailed as progressive modern classics, houses returned to their original glory by the upper-middle-class families who clamoured to buy them. Hence the walking tour.

“Oh yes, those hippy places on the north shore. Very impressive,” Hal crooned. “So that’s how you got your job then?” He was looking at me again.

“What?”

“Dad got you in.”

“Got me in?” I repeated, not quite believing he would go this way so blatantly.

“Andy says you’re also an architect.” So he did listen. To things that might be of use when he wanted to bring me down a peg or two.

“Yes,” I said, visibly irritated. “But Dad didn’t give me a job.” This was my Achilles heel. He’d hit it perfectly within an hour of meeting me. The precision was frightening. Underneath all that mad professor blathering that he was doing, his mind was trapping facts and stashing them away for later.

“Nell works for an entirely different firm,” Andy clarified.

“But Dad must have some influence,” Hal said innocently, as though it was a perfectly acceptable thing to imply. “You said he’s pretty influential, very accomplished. He probably opened some doors for Nell. You know, proud dad, his golden daughter.”

“He didn’t open any doors for me,” I said evenly. My heart was racing with fight or flight. Come on, you old fucker! I thought. Bring it on!

“But it’s that sort of industry. Everyone would know he’s your dad.” Hal was all sincerity. Unfortunately for all my bravado, I was gobsmacked. Rendered speechless. Fuming but speechless.

“Nell’s very good at what she does,” Andy said in that same congenial voice. It was as though we were all just having a nice conversation. As if someone wasn’t implying my whole career was owed to nepotism.

“Oh! You’re very proud,” Hal said, as though it was a surprise that Andy would be proud of me and what I did.

“She’s just won a big design competition.”

“Gee!” Hal crooned. “Very impressive, a house design was it?”

“No, it was an urban design competition,” I mumbled, knowing already where this would go.

I’d been through this a number of times since winning. It never came out sounding as impressive once you drilled down on the detail.

“Urban,” he repeated, as though the word were foreign.

“It was . . . ” I was searching for a way to put it that wouldn’t sound lame. Unfortunately Andy got there before me.

“. . . for a bus shelter.”

“A bus shelter,” Hal repeated.

I knocked back my wine. Andy refilled it and gave me a ‘be nice’ smile. The waiter cleared the plates. One course down, two to go. Hal looked like he was still processing something about me, my bus shelter perhaps. I prepared my comeback based on the fact that it was a large interchange in a busy part of town. It wasn’t just some bus shelter, it was a massive structure that housed four or five major city bus routes. But Hal went in a completely different direction.

“Dad didn’t help?” Hal said to me innocently.

“What?”

“Dad, just drop it,” Andy said, his composure slipping momentarily.

“So you don’t get Dad to help out. Just thought he might give you advice, sort of work with you on things.”

“Ah, no.” It was all I could manage.

“So you’re not that close?” Hal kept on. “To your dad?”

“Yes. We are very close.”

“But you don’t discuss work?”

“Sometimes we do.”

I believe the expression is painted into a corner.

“Nell’s very talented, Dad,” Andy broke the rhythm.

“So she’s on the big money then?” Hal said.

“She’s doing fine,” said Andy deflecting the reality that architects don’t actually earn as much as people think.

“But it’s a pretty prestigious title, award-winning architect,” Hal was drilling down. “Sort of more prestigious than garbage coordinator.”

Andy chuckled, it was a brittle noise that had no air in it. Andy worked for the city, overseeing the waste management program that covered the entire central business district. He was not a garbage coordinator. He worked at Town Hall for Christ’s sake, with the Lord Mayor himself.

“She’s quite ambitious,” Hal said, as though narrating Andy’s thoughts for him. “That can be a bit emasculating.”

All this was said in a light, bantery way. Not in a nasty tone of voice. If you weren’t listening properly, it would have sounded like we were all having a nice conversation over lunch.

“I’m very proud of her, Dad,” Andy said with a forced smile.

“Oh, he’s very taken,” Hal crooned, now talking about Andy as though he wasn’t here. “Look at him, he’s done his balls.”

Things went downhill from there. After the mains, he started on Maude. Andy had warned me about this.

“He’ll start calling Mum names,” he’d said.

“Why?”

“Because he thinks he’s been hard done by.”

I’d tuned out by that stage. I’d realised it was actually easier to let Andy and Hal conduct their conversation around me. Whenever I got drawn into it, Hal said something that made me want to punch him in the face. And apparently, I wasn’t allowed to do that.

So I didn’t notice it happening at first. He said it in the same sort of voice that you’d say, ‘Your mother forgot to collect my dry-cleaning.’

“Of course, your mother took all my money.”

“No, she didn’t Dad.”

“And gave it to that fat cunt.”

“Hey, settle!”

“You know, she assured me I wouldn’t need any super, because she had this inheritance. Then she just nicked off with it, leaving me nothing.”

“She left you the house.”

“Well, all my super, you know, I’m in pretty dire straits.”

All the while he guzzled as much of Andy’s wine that could possibly be consumed within the time frame.

“How’s Helen?” Andy redirected, referring to Hal’s second wife.

I tuned out again after that. I looked at the ocean, I looked at the specials board, I looked at the people opposite us, having a normal time. They were laughing occasionally with real, unguarded happy faces. I wished I was at their table where you didn’t have to enter the conversation with your dukes up defensively, ready to jab and duck.

I heard Hal and Andy talking, occasionally I heard Andy say, ‘settle,’ or ‘now, now’. But I didn’t listen. Certain words floated across to me and I sort of batted them away like flies: ‘humpers’ and various forms of the verb ‘to hump’, ‘bitch’, ‘your mother’, ‘my money’. It went on. I screened it out. What else was there? Except to come across all stitched up, like a school teacher, saying things like, ‘Here, here, I will not stand for such vulgarities.’

But it must have been bad. Because after we’d bade Hal a false fond farewell, after he and I had done our ‘fake to the right, to the left dance’ where he tried to plant a big wet kiss on my lips and I offered only my right ear, Andy took my hand and led me across to the beach.

“Feel like a swim?” he said, breathing fast like he’d just done a workout.

I looked around me. The sun had gone behind thick grey clouds by then and there was a big coastal wind whipping off the ocean. It was cold. The water was dark and violently rippled by a gusting wind. It wasn’t swimming weather.

“Ah . . . no,” I said, with a very clear ‘I’d rather stick toothpicks in my eyeballs’ inflection.

Andy kept walking and led me down to the sand. He removed his shoes.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Going for a swim.” He was drunk and completely wired. “Come on!” His eyes were like spinning tops. He laughed in a mad, ‘I’m completely off my rocker and if we were on a cliff I’d jump off it’, sort of a way. I felt myself pulling back from him. After months of unguarded intimacy in the flush of new romance, I suddenly pulled back and realised I hardly knew this person standing in front of me. This person who was now disrobing at an alarming rate.

He dropped his jeans. He didn’t even have swimmers on. Just a pair of boxers. He pulled his shirt over his head and, leaving his clothes in a pile at my feet like shed skin, took off to the water’s edge. He bolted for the waves, which were dumping violently right on the shoreline.

I winced as he took two steps into the water, arched up and took a great leaping dive into the grey churn. He disappeared. Then his head popped up again and he shot upwards into the air, like a rocket, arced and then head-firsted into the next wave, and the next and the next.

Was it just me, or was that a bit odd?