fiction | Jeremy Fisher

WINTER AFTERNOON

MALCOLM SMILED AT what he saw out the window as he crushed the pills in the pestle to a fine paste that would mix into the orange juice.
    In a few minutes when he took the medication down to the bedroom, Fred would be pleased to hear the eldest Fitzroy boy, Andrew, had a girlfriend. Pretty young thing. Long brown hair, pleasant smile, pert crimson beret askew on her head against the July chill. Walking her down the Fitzroys’ driveway past Malcolm obscured in the evening gloom of the kitchen in the house next door, Andrew couldn’t take his eyes from her face as she waved her hands and chattered at him.
    Malcolm and Fred had watched Andrew grow from a baby to the twenty-two year old he was today. As a small child, Andrew had ridden his tricycle up their driveway while they were composting roses.
    “It’s smelly,” he’d said as he approached the wheelbarrow full of rich, fecund compost.
    “No, it isn’t,” Malcolm protested.
    “Morning, Elaine,” Fred called to Andrew’s mother, who was standing anxiously at the gate.
    “Come home, Andrew,” she called.
    “I want to help the men.”
    “No!” she screamed.
    “You better go to your mum,” Fred said and the two men turned back to their roses as Andrew pedalled down the driveway to his mother. As soon as mother and son were back in their sanctity of their own yard, Malcolm went down the drive and closed the gate. They kept it closed against young children from then on.
    In later years, assorted balls would come over the fence into the backyard. Andrew and his younger brother, Michael, liked to play tennis, cricket, soccer and rugby. Poor Sammy the spaniel heard their shouts and the thumps of the ball, and ran up and down the fence on which the boys’ shadows played, destroying irises, jonquils and the hydrangeas, chasing after incoming missiles from errant kicks.
    When the men were home, they’d go out and throw the balls back. Occasionally they’d hear a “Thank you” from the other side. Sometimes when they came home from work or weekend shopping they found several balls in the garden or on the back lawn and they’d throw them all over the fence into silence.
    One warm, lazy evening in a February, after the day’s heat had abated, Malcolm was sweeping the side path, the one under the kitchen window. The window was high enough for anyone inside to have a view of the Fitzroys’ driveway, but on the ground the fence was too high to see over. Suddenly, Andrew’s head appeared above him.
    “Can you get my soccer ball, please?” Andrew asked.
    “Sure,” Malcolm said. “Where is it?”
    “Down there.” Andrew pointed towards the brick wall that sealed the side path from the front garden. Fred kept orchids in pots there in the summer because it was cool and shady. Malcolm walked over to the pots and found the soccer ball wedged amongst them. He picked it up and gave it to Andrew.
    “Here you are.”
    “Thanks,” Andrew said. He was about thirteen then. “My mate threw it over as a dare.”
    “A dare?”
    “Yeah. We’re not allowed in your place.”
    “You can come over and get your ball if we’re not home.”
    “No,” Andrew said. “We’re not allowed. Thanks.” His head disappeared back behind the fence.
But two weeks ago Andrew had waved a greeting to Malcolm watering the front garden.
    “How’s it going?” Andrew called across the murraya hedge.
    “Good,” Malcolm replied. He didn’t mention that Fred was lying inside heavily sedated against the pain. He could see the young man was simply trying to be friendly and he responded in kind. “How’s it going with you?”
    “Got bloody chemistry exams,” Andrew said. He was studying nursing. Elaine had told Fred this about three years ago when he was out watering the front garden and Elaine was planting daffodils. Elaine stressed over the fact that her garden never looked quite as fecund and colourful as Fred and Malcolm’s. “I hate chemistry.” Then he’d bounded up the front steps and clattered his way inside the Fitzroy house.
    Malcolm stirred the small jug of orange juice vigorously. The crushed pills needed to be thoroughly mixed. At least, he assumed they did. He wasn’t following any directions, just instinct.
It was what he’d done all his life, before he met Fred, and after. It was too late to try cool, rational analysis at his advanced age, seventy-six in November. He’d bought this house because the light and space felt right, even though it was in a then unfashionable area, blighted by white ants, and cost much more than they intended to spend. He and Fred had lived in it for nearly thirty years. They’d moved in just before Fred’s forty-fifth birthday. The house had cost them so much, neither of them had any money for a party, but Sal and Vi and Terry and his then young man had come over with wine, Turkish bread, hummus and baba ganoush. It was the season for Lebanese food. They’d helped the two men unpack the kitchen cutlery and crockery, Fred’s several suitcases of clothes, and Malcolm’s thousands of books.
    Terry’s young man – what was his name, not that it mattered now, he was a three-month wonder, then Terry was on to another – put on some music he’d brought. Jeff Buckley and Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell. It wasn’t the type of music to which Malcolm or Fred usually listened. Up until then, Malcolm hadn’t been one for music, though Fred was fond of Shirley Bassey, Judy Garland and Barbra. But Malcolm liked the new music and in the slow months that followed he bought the albums with the meagre amounts left of his pay from the library after the mortgage for their dilapidated suburban folly had been extracted.
    Maybe he should put some music on. The old stereo still occupied a corner of the living room. The old records were in the hall cupboard. He went down and rummaged a bit. His neat cataloguing had been tampered with a little over the years but mostly the albums were in alphabetical order.
    In the end he put on a CD rather than the older vinyl version and soon, Joni’s music was once again in the house like holy wine, so bitter and so sweet.
On his way back to the kitchen he checked at the bedroom door. Fred was dozing, his face thin and pinched from the pain and the weight loss. The diagnosis of cancer nine weeks ago had been shattering enough, but a week later the news that the disease was in his bowel, his stomach, his liver and his lungs, too advanced for any treatment, had been a devastating blow and neither of them had felt any desire for music.
    Out of habit, he wiped the clean kitchen bench again. What was Terry’s young man called? Kevin? Keith? He sniffed at the jug of juice. It smelled just like juice should. Why wouldn’t it? The pills had no odour. Kyle? Or was that another one? There had been so many. Terry would pick them up, shower them with gifts, then dump them when another one took his particular fancy.
    Terry had been dead over twenty years now. The virus caught him along with too many of his young men, too many of the friends Fred and Malcolm had acquired over the years. All before the doctors could do much. The eighties were a terrible decade of deaths and funerals, though, with the constancy of death, there’d been others, less frequent, in the years since.
    Ten years ago, Sal had died after a long struggle with breast cancer. Within two days of her demise her family had moved to take possession of the house she and Vi had shared for almost forty years. Sal had never written a will and the property had all been in her name because publicly she and Vi never admitted they were a couple and privately Vi let Sal run her life as women once let men do.
    Vi was in a home now, demented but serene. Malcolm had visited her last week to say goodbye but she didn’t recognise him. She thought he was the banana man, whoever that was.
    “Where’s your banana?” she’d asked.
    “It’s me, Vi. Malcolm,” he answered, “Fred can’t come. He’s too sick.”
    “I want a banana.”
    “I brought some cherries, if you’d like. Fred’s very, very sick. I’m going to lose him.”
    “Banana! Banana!”
    Once he was home after the difficult drive through the afternoon traffic from the nursing home in Loftus, he cried down in the bedroom as he told Fred all about Vi. Vi who’d helped him cook Christmas dinner every year, the two of them in aprons in the kitchen preparing prawn cocktails, rolling pastry for mince pies, testing the turkey, stirring gravy, creeping around a slow oven while the pavlova crisped, slicing beans, all the time chatting to each other about Sal and Fred, the cats – they all had cats then, and they too had passed on – and other inconsequential bits and pieces of their lives. Like Fred, Vi had an eye for the small things important only for an instant but memorable nevertheless for her. Now, all these trivial memories had been washed from her mind and replaced, inexplicably, with bananas. Fred beckoned him with a weak finger to lie on the bed beside him and place his head on his shoulder where contact hurt least. Fred whispered comforting words.
    “I’d love to hug and hold you but it will hurt too much. Don’t cry, dearest, Vi is happy. She is blissfully unaware. You were right to go see her. I would have been with you if I could. But that’s the end of it. It’s only us left.”
    In reality, for the bigger things, the way they presented themselves to the world, there had only been the two of them for more than forty-five years, despite the friends and despite the families.
    Even Malcolm’s mother. Malcolm only had his mother, his father having walked out to live with his secretary (whom he subsequently left for another, younger woman) when Malcolm was two and a half. His mother received some small payments from her former husband, but still had to find work to buy Malcolm’s clothes. She took in ironing and cleaned houses when Malcolm was at school. She was always home by the time he clambered up the two flights of stairs to their cosy flat in Stanmore.
    Malcolm left school when he gained his leaving certificate. His mother knew the owner of the local draper. She did ironing for him. She talked to him and Malcolm found himself employed as his assistant. He kept the job for a few years as the draper’s business slowly faded away, customers preferring the flashier shops in the city or Burwood, until eventually the draper was forced to close his doors.
    Malcolm worked at a variety of jobs for a couple of years as he sought a position more suited to his interests. He had also read a great deal, perhaps because he was a fatherless only child. He particularly wanted a position as a library assistant. He applied for a number of jobs and eventually was successful with the State Library. He was twenty-four. He moved out of home into a boarding house closer to the library, which allowed him to walk back and forth on night and weekend shifts.
    He started at the bottom of the library hierarchy. He began moving trolleys of books between shelves, then was given instruction in preparing the Dewey numbers for the spines of the books endlessly entering the library, and typing up the catalogue cards. Sometimes he worked in the reading room, keeping the newspapers and periodicals in order for the constant flow of readers.
    He enjoyed working with books. He liked talking to readers about their requests and choices. There were regulars for whom he kept books aside and others to whom he gave recommendations. He especially enjoyed working with the researchers and students, assisting them to retrieve material from the library’s vast reserves, digging deeper into history, discovering a wide range of facts until eventually he could offer new information to those who came to him for bibliographic assistance.
    For the first few years of his work at the library, he expected he would meet a girl and marry. He didn’t question that marriage was what was done. It was a matter of meeting the right girl, the one with whom he would know he could spend his life. He regularly went out to the pub and for meals with other young library staff. He fell naturally into the egalitarian ethos of the library’s lower orders, united in their fear and loathing of the chief librarian and his minions in their dark-panelled offices in the silent, upper floors of the old library building, far from the hushed chaos of the reference desk and the reading room. He maintained tenuous contact with friends from school, occasionally attending a weekend birthday party or an austere church hall wedding reception. He was introduced to many young women and, without thinking about it, he invited some of them out for coffee and to the movies.
    He always acted appropriately and escorted them home and, if they let him, kissed them, sometimes on the lips. Afterwards, disconcertingly, he often found himself at railway stations and in parks eager for a quick, direct glance from a pair of desiring male eyes. It was instinct. He couldn’t stop himself. Occasionally, he’d meet one of these men more than once. There was one man, older, who had a flat in Elizabeth Bay, whom Malcolm saw regularly on weekends, staying Saturday nights, for almost eighteen months.
    These many years later, he recalled the champagne the man offered him, the first time he’d ever drunk it, and the view from his windows over Rushcutters Bay. The man, a producer of musicals, wanted Malcolm to move in with him, be kept by him. Malcolm said no and ended the liaison. He wanted to continue working at the library where he had advanced a few bureaucratic grades, and he knew he could never tell his mother he was living off another man’s money.
    Truth be told, he never told his mother about any of the men he saw, though he told her all about the girls he took out, describing their dresses and hair and shoes in the most minute details. Perhaps because of this, she sensed something and made no comment on the fact that he was still single at thirty, even thirty-five.
    Then Fred came along and everything was different.
    It started with the manner Fred came into his life, part of the pattern of his day, not the shameful secrets of his nights. His scent, aftershave, brought him immediately to notice at the reference desk in a time when such affectations were regarded as effeminate. Malcolm glanced up as the scent wafted across the thick plank of pine that separated the library staff from its visitors. He saw a young man, only five years younger than him, wearing a dark blue shirt open at the neck, his jet black hair long enough to sit on his collar and shoulders. Malcolm’s eyes grazed over the small section of pale chest and neck revealed by the opened buttons of the blue shirt. Fred’s left wrist sported a silver bangle as well as a small-faced wristwatch on a slim leather band.
    “Can I help you?” Malcolm asked.
    “I hope so,” Fred batted eyelashes at him and Malcolm blushed. “I’m looking for a book about William Morris.”
    “Have you searched the catalogue?”
    “Wouldn’t have the foggiest how to start. Can you show me?”
    And Malcolm did, in the course of the instruction discreetly agreeing to meet the thirty-year-old nancy-boy for a coffee at David Jones in his lunch hour. The accident of their meeting proved fateful enough. Their courtship was quite brief – two days of coffee-shop encounters and intense conversations. On the Friday night, when the other young single people from the library were meeting for end-of-week gossip and gentle flirtation, Malcolm scurried over to Darlinghurst and the small flat Fred rented. They were together all weekend. Two weeks later, they were moving into a new flat together. It was the middle of the sixties. They could feel the disapproval and open hostility, but they didn’t care.
    Malcolm’s mother simply accepted Fred and they became close friends. Together, she and Fred discussed recipes, fussed over orchids and sought out cheap fabric offcuts for their upholstery and cushions. Sometimes Malcolm felt cut off from their occasionally inane conversations and intricate plans but, in their combined understanding of him, they connived to bring Malcolm around to accept their point of view and assure him of their love. Whilst Malcolm had never been conscious of what he was missing, he knew then that he had found it.
    Not that they invited her too often to the studio apartment in Surry Hills where Fred could spend hours arranging the precise position of a small table or a print on the wall. They most often met her in town. By this time, Malcolm’s mother was living in a unit he’d bought for her in Waverton, an easy trip back and forth to the city on the train. When she did come to visit them, Fred would clean assiduously and ensure that there was a screen in front of the double bed they shared. Malcolm’s mother knew about it – she averted her gaze from it – but they never discussed this aspect of their living arrangements overtly. They’d have tea, a sherry perhaps, then go out for a meal at one of the many differently-themed Cahills.
    It was a year before Fred’s family down in the Riverina twigged that there might be something more to his living arrangement than two boys sharing, even though he’d been in the city for more than six years and was very much an adult. It was all the result of him meeting a cousin in the street, a garrulous, stupid woman with no malice and no brains, so no-one could blame her for the damage that eventuated.
    One Saturday morning there was a knock at the door of the little apartment. They were in bed together, of course, the screen moved from in front of the bed and placed against the wall. Malcolm got up to answer the door. Fred’s stocky mother and short father stood in the doorway facing Malcolm, who had only a towel around him. Fred was sitting up in the double bed in the space behind him.
    The short father shouted. The stocky mother yelled. Fred leapt out of bed naked and told them to go to hell.
    There was silence. Then his mother said: “No. You will.”
    The parents turned and left and Fred had nothing to do with his family again. His brothers and sisters didn’t even tell him when his father died seven years later after his tractor overturned. He found out through the same loud cousin who’d taken his address at their meeting those many years ago and continued to send Christmas cards, scrawled full with numbing minutiae, ever since.
    They lived for a decade in the inner city and over the years evolved a pattern of movement between Waverton and Surry Hills, which meant they saw Malcolm’s mother at least once a week. But contact became more difficult when they decided to move into the costly Federation wreck in Haberfield. She couldn’t understand why they’d want an old house that required so much work and cost them so much money.
    “If you were going to buy a house,” she said, “why not a brand new one, and somewhere on a train line and in a place they speak English?” She didn’t like having to change from the train to the bus at Town Hall nor the fact that Haberfield was full of Italians. She was having trouble with her left hip, as well, so they borrowed more money and bought a Datsun 120Y so they could visit her and bring her over to their new home.
    Malcolm took two glasses from the left-hand cupboard above the sink. They’d driven the 120Y for years until the Five Dock garage refused to write a pink slip for it one more time. By then, money was less of a problem and they bought a new Corolla. That was about nineteen years earlier, just before Malcolm’s mother was felled by a stroke. Their third Corolla was now parked in the garage under its dust cover. They’d paid the last of the mortgage on the house fifteen years ago. The house was comfortably renovated and worth more than five times what they’d paid for it.
    Outside in the Fitzroys’ driveway, Andrew Fitzroy placed a chaste kiss on his girlfriend’s lips and opened her car door for her.
    Before the Fitzroys came, the next-door neighbours were Vincenzo and Maria, old Italian migrants who spoke little English and kept to themselves as much as Malcolm and Fred did. If the two old people and their numerous children and grandchildren were curious about their male neighbours, it never showed. At Christmas, Vincenzo would bring over a plate of Maria’s crostini, dusted in icing sugar, and in return Fred would place a card in their letterbox.
    When the old couple sold to the Fitzroys so that they could move into a nursing home, Elaine and Bob came knocking at the door to introduce themselves. They were surprised there was no woman of the house.
    “It’s just you two?” Elaine said. The realisation spread across her face.
    “And the dog,” Malcolm added.
    “We’re not fond of pets,” Bob said.
    “And the cats,” Fred said.
    “I’m allergic to cats,” Elaine said. So they didn’t invite them in for tea.
    Malcolm was on the senior staff of the library by then, earning more than enough for the two of them, and fully covered by state superannuation. Fred had moved from dressing store windows to running his own interior design business. His clientele were mostly outsized ladies of a certain age who were looking for a complete change in their lives, though they’d settle for a new colour scheme, different furniture and revised floor coverings. Fred preferred a modernist style himself, but had a characteristic rare for designers in that he was able to listen to his clients and make their wishes coherent. He did not impose his own style on them.
    In their own home, though, where Malcolm allowed Fred free rein, Fred had taken up the cues provided by the house and allowed the Queen Anne and Federation motifs to dominate, while tempering them with an eclectic collection of antiques and some fun pieces from different decades.
    “A home is never stuck in time like a museum,” he explained to Malcolm. “Houses reflect the fact that people live in them for years and they change as the people change.”
    The house hadn’t changed much physically over the past few months, but the mood was sombre, with Malcolm rarely turning on lights. Fred had always liked a lamp on in every room, inviting anyone to enter. But since he’d been unable to leave the bedroom Malcolm had only switched on a light near where he sat reading or quietly listening to music or watching television, though at night he left a soft lamp on near the bed where Fred lay so that he could discern where he was when he came to from the deep sleep the morphine gave him.
    Malcolm had stopped cooking as well. He’d always enjoyed putting together their evening meals and the weekend lunches, especially when guests were due. Now Fred could only take in water and the odd bit of pap. Mashed banana had become a staple. Malcolm ate tomato sandwiches and frozen pies he heated in the oven and doused with barbecue sauce.
    Neither of them had eaten today. Earlier, in the morning, Fred’s miserable eyes had regretfully turned away from the proffered spoon of banana as his throat involuntarily gagged. They didn’t say anything at all to each other, but they knew it was time. Malcolm helped Fred with the bedpan and the bottle then gently bathed him with warm water and a glycerine soap that soothed the dry skin and pressure sores. Then he changed Fred’s pyjamas. Despite Malcolm’s soft touch and the care he took, Fred still grimaced against the pain.
    After, Malcolm shaved him then patted on Fred’s favourite aftershave. This one was spicy and mellow but similar to the one Fred had been wearing all those years ago when he approached the reference desk at the library and the two men had found themselves living one life.
    While Fred slept, exhausted by the effort of bathing, Malcolm walked up the street to the shops and bought freesias and roses. He took them home and arranged them in vases that he carried into the bedroom. Fred woke around noon and Malcolm gave him water and read him some news from the paper until he slept again.
    During the afternoon, Malcolm worked in his study. He’d been concerned that neither of them had submitted tax returns, and had managed to complete all the details with their accountant two days before. He filed away the documents that were of only transitory importance and organised more lasting details on his desk in three neat piles, each labelled for further attention with a note in his neat librarian’s script.
    As the afternoon darkened, he went to the kitchen to begin to crush the pills. They’d been accumulating them for weeks. When Malcolm saw Dr Kumar, the GP who had taken over the local practice, he perfunctorily read the patient’s notes and wrote another prescription without asking too many details. He knew Fred was dying and he preferred to have as little to do with the process as he possibly could.
    Malcolm took one last look out the kitchen window. Andrew Fitzroy was staring after his girlfriend’s car, waving, as she accelerated away. Realising it was a Fred sort of thing to do, Malcolm checked the placement of the glasses and the jug on the tray again. He’d even put coasters under them all. He picked up the tray and solemnly carried it through the house down to the bedroom, noting with clarity the rooms and the objects in them as he passed.
    In the sunroom, there was the old oak table Fred had acquired at a garage sale, stripped of layers of paint and, over the course of months, slowly returned to its current polished elegance, as well as the four dining chairs they’d had made by a clever and very pretty young carpenter. In the sitting room, the paintings Malcolm had acquired over the years and piece by piece hung from the wall in the position Fred had decided for them. Though he couldn’t see them well in the dusk, he knew each one from repeated, intense study. There were more of his beloved paintings in the hall. Sitting next to the glass-topped table he’d made from the frame of an old Singer treadle sewing machine was a wooden chair with a padded seat, the cover of which had been embroidered by his mother. After years of scrubbing, chipping, plastering and rendering, Fred had painted all the rooms of the house in different colour schemes. The hall was a warm, dark red, almost the colour of blood, as the light of the setting sun suffused through the stained glass of the front door and the windows surrounding it. Malcolm carefully carried the tray through the hall and into the front bedroom where he and Fred had slept together all the years they’d lived in this house.
    Fred was awake.
    “At the going down of the sun,” he said to Malcolm, a faint smile on his thin face. Malcolm placed the tray on the dressing table. He poured two glasses. He placed a straw into Fred’s. He took them to the bedside table on his side of the bed. He took off his shoes and put them away in the wardrobe. He sat Fred against the pillows and raised his legs out straight. He took his glass and held it so Fred could drink. Then he drank from his own. He repeated this until the glasses were empty.
    “Lay down beside me,” Fred said. And he did.
    He took Fred’s hand and lay quietly listening to his breath fade into the white, bright light.
    Ten days passed before Andrew Fitzroy became concerned about the silence next door and called the police.

© Jeremy Fisher

Overland 189 – summer 2007, pp.49–55.

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