Those Creative Types

“Do we have to go?”

Brenda just looked at me. I turned back to the mirror, tried tucking in my shirt, then untucked it again.

“It’s a frigging tribute band, Bren. It’s not like they’ve made it to the Rod Laver Arena. They play that stadium, I’ll be in the front row. Honestly -”

“Honestly,” she parroted. I don’t know how she could seem so busy in a bedroom. It was as if she was managing an international courier business from the dressing table, she moved around so fast, picking up this, doing something with that.

“Honestly, I don ‘t see how we are even having this conversation. In fact I think I’ll step out of the room and come in again, because it must be that I have fallen through a wormhole in time to another dimension in which this conversation could honestly be happening.” She fluffed her hair crossly, so that bits stuck up out the back, then went to the mirror and palmed them back down again. “Seriously Steve, don’t you try and take this one out on me. I don’t see how this is my fault. He’s your brother-in-law.”

“Ex-brother-in-law,” I grumbled, but to myself, because she was right. Johnno was indeed my ex-brother-in-law and had, worse luck, ostensibly been my friend before that, which was why we had to go tonight. It was a damn shame that such ties last beyond a divorce: personally I wouldn’t have missed him, but for some reason or other, everyone assumed we would stay friends “despite it all.” Those were their exact words: his mum, and my mum, and even my dad said to me, faces all solemn and at the ready with a pat on the shoulder, that “at least you and Johnno have stayed friends despite it all.” Some consolation prize.

Johnno fell victim to the family spin first. He called me about a week after Cheryl had moved out.

“This doesn’t have to be awkward.”

Awkward, I thought. His wife, Rhonnie must have told him to use that word.

“I mean, you and me, Steve. We were always mates.” I could just see Rhonnie standing behind him, arms folded, her raw, red face nodding approvingly.

“How about a beer then? Talk about old times!” I had been kidding, but Johnno gushed down the phone, “Yes, that’s a great idea, how about this Friday down the footy club?”

Johnno and I had only been “mates” for about two weeks, having met randomly through mutual friends at the Waverley footy club, before I got together with his sister Cheryl. I didn’t meet Cheryl through Johnno, but at a party in a better part of town, Richmond, where I had just shifted to. Cheryl and I had that in common from the start: aspirations to move up, which we both knew was measured in the number of kilometres we had moved away from our families. Johnno and I got a little better acquainted once Cheryl and I hooked up, but you could not say that we were bosom pals; we just didn’t have a lot in common. If I hadn’t married Cheryl, I doubt we would have stayed in touch.

Yet there I was, having a beer with him a week after his sister had left me. I hadn’t been to the Waverley footy club for years. It was a small affair, with a few old timers permanently attached to bar stools and the obligatory collection of five or six pokies keeping the place going. I had played in all the club’s age group sides growing up. I looked around now and could remember as clearly as if it were yesterday when I had made it into the under 19s and had my first (legitimate) beer at the bar, the cardboard coaster sticking to the bottom of the glass as I toasted myself into adulthood.

I stared at the pot of beer Johnno now handed me and wondered why he hadn’t bought pints. We sipped in silence, staring at our own reflections in the club’s glass walls.

“How’re the kids?” I finally asked. As soon as I had I cursed myself inwardly. It was a stupid question. The poor bugger couldn’t ask me about mine as follow-up. I had painted him into a corner without even meaning to.

Same went for when he asked me “How’s the house?” Instead of being able to moan about renovations, I could only nod and say, “Fine,” because he knew and I knew that Cheryl and I were yet to discuss the house. We were yet to discuss anything. She had left me in the lurch, in the middle of the night, taking my kids, leaving me no ideas as to where she had gone -

So you can see how that line of conversation died in a hurry.

The next Friday my mother donned her most funereal tone to call. The first thing she asked after, “How are you?” was “Have you even tried to get in touch with her?”

As a matter of fact, I had spent the previous two weeks with Cheryl’s mobile number on regular redial, driving around to all her friends’ houses, sifting through my memory for the names of guys she had mentioned, maybe as she handed me coffee in the morning, maybe as she walked in the door from work, maybe as she talked about the rattle in the bathroom drain, maybe as she I didn’t know I couldn’t think of any but if I did I swear I would -

“She knows where I am,” I answered.

My mother sighed meaningfully. “Well, if you’re going to be like that about it – ” she paused and changed tacks suddenly, the way my mother has. It’s unsettling, like she has a sixth sense for knowing exactly how far she can push me before she’ll lose me completely, then she’ll lay it on and I feel guilty for ever having doubted her maternal loyalties.

“Steve, I want you to come home. I’m cooking a roast, with the potatoes done crispy how you like. We won’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to.” Delicate of her, I thought. “Unless you have other plans?”

There they were again, the screws. Are you mocking me? I wanted to ask. I had been planning a sum total of nothing, had not even really known it was Friday. I hadn’t been thinking much beyond couch, or bed.

It was just at that moment my call waiting signal went off. It was Johnno, seeing if I wanted to catch up for another beer.

“Actually I’m going to the pub with Johnno,” I told my mother when I switched back. In amongst the debris of feelings I experienced a brief flare of something good: I had got one up on my mother. Hooray for me.

Johnno and I began a bit of regular thing after that: meeting down the club to watch the Friday night football and have a couple of beers. After a few goes at it, we stopped trying to talk, instead just focusing on the game. I suppose Johnno felt he was fulfilling an obscure moral duty towards me, and as for me, I didn’t care what I did, so long as it was not dinner with my parents.

Looking back, I could see with piercing clarity hat first beer for what it had really been: the first slip back down the slope I had just spent the last ten years clambering up, away from the remotest possibility of spending a weekend night at a suburban RSL listening to a “mate” play in a tribute band. And it had happened all because my mother had offered me crispy potatoes.

I yanked my good shoes from their box in the wardrobe, then shoved them back in and grabbed my scuffed day shoes from where they lay by the bed and put them on instead. A man has to take a stand.

The Springvale RSL was exactly how I imagined it. I mean, exactly. A big fluorescent sign on a five metre high pylon announced its existence to all the highway travellers for miles around. There was a carpark the size of a footy field out the back so I couldn’t use up any time fussing about finding a spot on the street where my car wouldn’t get scratched. Its shiny neon lights, the glint of brass from the balustrades gave off a giant magnetic repulsion, slowing me down as we approached. I couldn’t go in there. I might never get out again.

I lingered on the steps but my scuffy day shoes had no laces to tie. Dammit. I had no capacity for foresight. Brenda took my arm and steered me inside to a foyer held up by bright lights and pinned down by swirling gold carpet.

“You know they pattern the carpet like that so if drunks vomit on it, no one can see,” I muttered into Brenda’s ear. She pretended not to hear me. She had on a smile of the exact right proportions to match her current circumstance: that of bravely attending a concert because it was the right thing to do, despite the possibility of meeting hostile friends of her boyfriend’s ex. I wondered if it was a kind of make-up that women didn’t tell us about: the smilestick, a smile for every situation. I could have gone some of that.

To the right was a massive hall dimly lit from above, the better to accentuate the glowing multicoloured flashes from the regiment of pokies standing to attention, the only sound the jingle and ring of the machines. It was eery, like the people had handed in their voices at the door when they exchanged their money for tokens. To the left was an equally large hall from which wafted the smell of overdone roast beef and boiled carrots: the bistro.

Before us was a staircase with a brass railing smudged from hundreds of gallons of human hand oil. At the bottom of the staircase was an A3 size poster stuck crookedly on to a metal stand. In bright yellow letters it said, “Come with us to Jamaica man! Bob Marley Tribute Band, Friday 29th July, tickets selling fast!” There was a picture of the band beneath the writing, so their faces were somewhat obscured, but I could see enough to know I was not here for any pleasant surprises.

They were into “No Woman No Cry” when we walked in, and I murmured a silent prayer of thanks that the singer, despite the predicted knitted cap and fake dreadlocks, could hold a tune, even though he was making Marley’s songs of protest sound like lounge hour on 4KQ, the easy listening radio station my dad said you couldn’t go past. Johnno looked like a pig in mud, happily slapping his guitar and grinning blindly at the audience. I guessed the stage lights changing the band’s faces at regular intervals from red to green served at least one purpose: they prevented the band from seeing its fans.

The hall was just under half full, mostly with people who looked as if they had wandered up here because their brains bad been so fried by the pokies downstairs that they had lost all higher level brain functions. They sat at their round tables, slumped and unresponsive, clapping only when someone else started to. Brenda and I found our seats at a table towards the middle of the hall but off to one side, which was good: I didn’t fancy having to act enthralled on the off chance that the lighting guy did one of those crowd sweeps and caught me with my hands over my ears pretending I was just resting my head.

We settled into our seats. Brenda breathed a sigh of relief, letting on how glad she was that we had not yet bumped into anyone she had to pretend to be nice to even though they were throwing dagger looks at her. I smiled at her sympathetically and patted her hand. I had known Brenda longer than I had known Cheryl, and had started to think about whether I should maybe ask her out on a date, when Cheryl had come along and put paid to those ideas. In the intervening years we had stayed in touch: she worked in a retail outlet for women’s handbags just down the street from my tile display room. Tiles had become pretty hot in the last few years, and I had managed to get in early with a shopfront on a trendy street of cafes and clothestores in Richmond. As a tiler, I’d seen how people in inner city Melbourne had started to treat everything about their houses with the kind of reverence they used to reserve for art galleries, so I leased my little store instead of a bigger place further out of town like my dad had done twenty years earlier.

It had all worked out for me, business wise: now I had two outlets, a nice car and the terrace house in Richmond that I had bought soon after I had taken the shopfront. When my parents had first come to visit, my mother had stepped down the floorboarded hallway as if she was afraid she might catch something. She frowned at the train-like efficiency of the rooms all coming off the one corridor, and when we had reached the house’s heart and soul, the bright, welcoming kitchen with its original wooden cupboards, she said at last: “But it’s just the kind of place your father and I moved out of when we had you!”

When Cheryl first came over she had still been living out in Waverley, near where her parents and brother all had their homes, the same neighbourhood I had grown up in, suffocating in the suburban fist of smooth-faced house fronts and gravel driveways leading nowhere. She took in the dimly lit corridor, the blocked up fireplaces crammed with books, the picture rail lined with cracked mosaic tiles I had picked up in nurseries and antique stores. She smiled and put her arms around my neck.

Bren hadn’t exactly been carrying a torch for me all the time I was married to Cheryl: she’d had boyfriends and at one stage I think she had been proposed to. But when I finally showed back up at work, three months after Cheryl had left me, she came into the store. She handed me a coffee in a mug, not a takeaway paper cup, which meant she had made it herself. We started going out in a friendly way shortly after that. It was another three months before I said to myself, “I have a girlfriend.” It was like playing golf and sinking the ball into the hole after about five shots, when the first had been so well placed you had expected a birdie at the least: you’re sort of pleased, but there’s a nagging sense of failure because for a while there it had really seemed like you were going to do better.

I looked over at Brenda now and saw that she was tired underneath the make up she had carefully applied. Poor Bren, I thought. She’s doing this for me and I’ve just been railing on about it like it was her fault. I patted her hand. She glanced at me and smiled, properly this time and I felt my heart go out to her. I leaned forward and I kissed her cheek gratefully.

The band moved on to “Redemption Song.” “All I ever have…” the white man with the woollen dreads crooned. “I’ve got to go to the ladies,” Bren murmured. She glanced quickly up into my face before she stood, as if looking for something. I squeezed her hand. She dropped her eyes and picked up her handbag, a delicate thing which looked like it was made from apricot and pink flowers to match her pastel dress which she now tugged at, the fabric bunching around her stockings. I smiled at her as she turned to go but she wasn’t looking at me any more.

“Didn’t think I would see you here.” I didn’t have to look up to know it was her, but I did anyway. Cheryl’s hair was longer than when I had last seen it and swept up in a bun. She was wearing a long, clingy white dress, with some kind of shimmery sparkles along the top. Cheryl remained standing for a few moments, as if she was on a film set, allowing the camera to linger on her profile. Then she sat down in the seat Brenda had just vacated.

“Cheryl,” I said. I had not seen her very often since she had left me. We had had meetings; our lawyers and our families made us have attempts at reconciliation and we had even tried living together again, which lasted all of two weeks. Now we only saw each other briefly when I picked up the kids on my weekends. I had no idea what she was up to these days.

“How’s Brenda doing?” she leaned back in the chair. A scent of roses wafted over to me. She had always smelt of roses, even if it had been days since she had applied any perfume. I never did fathom the chemistry of her skin.

“Fine,” I said.

“Why-y-y-y, why-y-y-y ….” The band filled in the silence with the tune of “Buffalo Soldier” We both watched Johnno as he dipped his guitar back and forwards in an attempt at coolness.

“How’s your parents?” I finally asked.

“They’re good. Dad just had his knee done. They’re sitting over the other side of the room.” She waved her hand. I thought I could make out the silhouetted forms of her parents, hunched over their table at the far end of the hall. Her father’s nose stood out like a beak from his bald head.

“How’s your mum’s bronchial cough? The doctors figured out what to do about it yet?” she asked. For a moment I couldn’t answer, struck by the situation: here we were, two people who would recognise the sound of each others’ farts in a crowded room, with no more use for our shared history than to eke small talk from it at a tribute band concert at Springvale footy club on a Saturday night.

There are things I knew about Cheryl. For example, I knew she applied the eye make-up first, then the foundation, depsite her mother’s repeated instructions to the contrary. I knew she brushed her eyelashes three times, each side, with mascara before going out to dinner, but only twice in hte mornings when it was just for work. When I looked at her across from me now, I didn’t see the make-up. I had seen her devoid of the layers designed to shape what other people saw. I would always just see her face.

A man came and stood behind her chair. For a dumb moment I thought it must be a waiter. It took him putting his hand on her shoulder before the penny dropped.

“This is Cameron,” Cheryl said.

Cameron was a tall man with dark hair growing a little too close to his skull, I was glad to note. His eyes were dark brown but set over a nose that had a lump half way down the bridge, which could be interpreted as either aristocratic or beak-like, depending on your point of view. He had a runner’s build and I copped a vision of them on adjacent treadmills, laughing with pearly white teeth glinting in the sun coming in through the double doors of the house I had paid for. My jaw tightened.

“Cameron,” I nodded.

He nodded back and it was apparent he was waiting for me to introduce myself. He did not know who I was. Cheryl was dating someone who didn’t even know who I was.

Here’s something else I knew about Cheryl. She eats a very precise mix of nuts and fruit for breakfast, otherwise she gets these weird digestive grunts throughout the day. When am I ever going to need that information again? Maybe I should pass it on to Cameron and watch to see if I have made him uncomfortable, talking about his girlfriend’s bowel movements.

After waiting politely for me to say my name, Cameron eventually figured that I wasn’t going to. “Cheryl?” he said. Shock number two: he said it like he had a right to. It dawned on me that he might already know about the fruit and nuts.

Cheryl looked at me for a moment longer. I don’t know when my face had turned into a street map, something where people thought if they looked they might discover something they wanted to know. She hesitated, as if about to say something. Cameron squeezed her shoulder and looked across the room as if there was someone there they had to say hello to. Well, there probably was. She stood and nodded good-bye. Cameron traced a line down her back to her right hip as they walked away together down the hall.

I had a sudden memory of my own hand where Cameron’s had just been. It was in the kitchen of our house, my house, but back then it was our house and I had no problem saying so, liking the ring of “our” over everything we talked about: “our” pot plant, “our” garlic crusher, “our” life together. We had just had Melissa, our first baby, and she was blessedly asleep. Cheryl had black rings below her eyes and she hadn’t bothered with makeup since coming home from the hospital. Her hair was coming out from the clip she had shoved it back into, shiny brown slices of light and shadow moving against her cheek. I had felt a sudden, overwhelming surge of affection for her: my little Cheryl, although she was probably half an inch taller than me; my wife. I put my arms around her and lifted her to her feet.

“No,” she grumbled, “let me sit, I’m so tired,” murmuring like a little girl. I supported her weight and started crooning the words from, of all things, “Oh What a Night,” that cheesy hit of 1993, most definitely best forgotten. “Oh I-I-I…get a funny feeling when she w-a-a-alks…mmmmm….”

She laughed and rested her head against my shoulder, letting me dance her around the room, my left hand resting lightly on her right hip, my right arm wrapped around her, keeping her upright and leaning against me.

I stared at the seat she had vacated, thinking, she really isn’t coming back. I realised that my memories had not been entirely passive. A part of me had been holding on to information as if it proved something, as if one day she would turn around and say, “You known the last ten, twenty, thirty years has just been an interulde. I’m coming back, of course I am.” I felt suddenly, immensely, sad.

Brenda came back and sat down. The band was singing “No Woman No Cry” again by special request. “No sister, don’t shed no tear,” came over the speakers and I could hear the sound shifting when the singer moved in and out from the mike, his voice one moment too personal like he was sing-talking to you in your own living room, the next moment disembodied, the voice of a total stranger whose cadences would never be familiar no matter how long and hard you listened.

Brenda was humming and smiling to herself. She had re-applied her lipstick and fluffed her hair so it radiated around her head in a small halo of calculated unruliness. I could smell the light scent of her shampoo, sandalwood and something coconutty. It reminded me of summer, of warm things and Christmas to come. I contemplated her with a feeling akin wonder. She was so light with her smiling face, as if filled with an inner buoyancy. She could be carried away at any moment by the demons that wait in shadows to drag down happy people like her and keep for themselves. I put my hand out towards her. I didn’t want her to be plucked away.

“Are you singing along?” I asked. Brenda looked at me slyly, then leaned in and started singing off-key into my left ear, “Little darlin’, don’t shed no tears…” She bopped her head up and down to the staccato reggae beat, her hair brushing against my cheek. I started to laugh; it was tickling.

“Do you want to go?” she whispered.

“Only if you promise to sing Marley to me all the way home. Otherwise I’ll feel like I didn’t get my money’s worth.”

She stood. “It’s a promise,” she said.

We weaved our way through the hall and down the stairs. Brenda grinned as we passed the band poster in the foyer and took my hand. Her grip was surprisingly firm for such a little person, such a little thing. Together we stepped out of the club’s pool of neon and down the path to the carpark, the slap of our feet absorbed into the greater sound of the endless stream of cars motoring past, each to its separate destination in the starstrung night.