Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [46]
‘A bunch of white cockatoos flew over. They screeched my name from out of the blue. There were these grey little parrot things.’
‘Gang-gangs?’
‘Watch your tongue. It used to be like that when I was a kid. There was even a topknot pigeon, just ahead of me, looking at me from the ground—God, how I loved them—and a pigeon with a zigzag on its chest, like the mark of Zorro.’
‘A wonga.’
‘Speak English,’ said Tony. ‘Hissa, huzza, hissa hissa hissa. Huzz-ah!’
‘What’s that?’
‘A lyrebird, stupid.’
As he spoke, Tony cupped a hand and shook it beside his ear.
When they rose from the table they made a time to drive down south to inspect Tony’s bush block. Judy gave him the name of her doctor—she was always looking out for him. Worried sick about him, was how she expressed it.
‘But there’s nothing wrong with me,’ said Tony.
‘There’s a good reason to keep it that way,’ said Judy, kissing his cheek. He looked rather drained and exhausted. It was towards the end of his contract, his farewell few weeks behind the mike: years had been spent anticipating the end and worrying about Tony’s reaction. Judy and her pals went on about it.
‘I’ll be sticking to you like glue,’ said Judy. She felt that if things went well she’d be getting the old Tony back—the boy who played with her, games without end, with dedicated fondness of spirit. If not? Such desolation.
Complaining, upbraiding her, Tony went to see her ‘complimentary’ practitioner in Randwick. That was the way it was spelled in the handout.
‘It would help,’ said the doctor, a nutritional bloke, ‘if you could fill out this questionnaire.’
‘Jesus,’ said Tony, ‘must I?’
All very well to be asked intimate questions about history of diseases, operations, sexual infections and number of sexual partners (Tony wrote in that square: Information available on request, if deemed relevant). What knocked him sideways was the genetic slant on things, page after page, where your cousin’s uncle twice removed’s propensity for strokes or palsy pointed a finger down into the seat of one’s pants.
The doctor, who rather fancied himself on the psychological scale, wanted to know a lot more than Tony was willing or able to tell.
‘You can have no idea how this makes me feel,’ said Tony, hovering with his pencil and hitting on a rhythm of two ticks, three crosses, three ticks, two crosses, and so on through several pages addressing the nothingness of being.
When he phoned Judy to say what a load of crapola it was, she said, ‘Tony, come on around.’
‘Where?’
‘To my place.’
‘When?’
‘Now.’
A dusty tan stetson hung on the hallstand of Judy’s Rushcutters Bay flat. There was a knobbly cane of mulga wood leaning against the wall. A pair of dark glasses with side shades, ‘burglar glasses’ for the elderly, lay where they’d been placed by the owner of them, whose identity Tony guessed.
‘This is a set-up,’ he said, as he came into the room.
Warwick Mickless rose from a chair.
‘Tones,’ he said, completely without sarcasm (sarcasm Tony deserved).
This craggy giant of a man—he looked eighty—had pouches under his eyes, yellow horsy teeth, a cattleman’s blebs and blemishes of crusty skin cancers on the backs of his hands. Standing beside him was a small Indonesian woman, Betty, his wife.
Tony had the feeling that he was looking into the mirror, an impression gained by the way he hated what he saw, it was so much the best of all his own possibilities ripened and dried like wood. Then he looked away, turned back, and realised that he wasn’t having some sort of optical fit the way the room fractured into cubes and rainbows. Judy fetched a box of tissues into which he plunged a fist.
Now to the present—well, to yesterday, to be exact; the previous afternoon shading through to a crisp, starry night, and then from that purple deepness into a morning where throughout the state at breakfast, on ninety-eight syndicated stations, there came no smash-bang of kettledrums to usher in the daily dose of you-know-who.
‘Aren’t you going to listen to your successor?’ said Judy.
‘No, I’m not,