"Exotic Illnesses" Second chapter of novel

TWO

The economy of Rosella is almost entirely in the sugar cane crop. My family was always removed from this central economy; my mother, an administrative worker who sometimes ironed people’s clothes for cash, and my father, who had once been a diesel mechanic. I, therefore, never understood much of the sugar cane business. I knew that some farmers would set their crop alight to burn off the useless green parts, right before harvest. This would lead to the town being blanketed in tiny black flakes of ash, which lingered until enough of a breeze came through to move them on. It also meant for part of the year the sky would be pastel pink at dusk, as the light from sunset got refracted through the burning pastures. It felt alien and I never got used to it.

When the hospital released Dad and he went to stay at Uncle John’s farmhouse, it was one of those pre-harvest days. The verandah was covered in ash from neighbouring farms. The rows of sugar cane that once surrounded my uncle’s house had died along with my uncle, leaving barren fields. I vaguely recalled John having horses, so I asked Dad what happened to them. 

“They got too expensive. Two years ago, ya Uncle had to…” and Dad mimed firing a shotgun. “I’m sure it was painless for ‘em.” He smiled then, walking alongside me in the farmhouse driveway, and put his arm around me. “Don’t get mopey about the horses, Thom. No one could afford to look after ‘em.”

But I didn’t care about the horses. However, the same year Uncle John apparently executed the horses with a shotgun, he turned that shotgun on himself, placing it in his mouth, and fired it so that his entire head ‘was exploded to fuck’, as Dad had described at the time. I had always wondered how Dad felt finding his older brother like that, headless, but we stopped talking about Uncle John immediately after his wake.

Dad didn’t need much help moving in. Uncle John’s furniture remained in the house, unchanged, and Dad only had a few bags of clothes and toiletries. I ran a finger along the top of the staircase banister, leaving a clean line in the dust.

“Maybe you can help me spruce it up, give it a spritz?” Dad said, like an optimist. I nodded. He placed his bags down in the middle of the room, in a spot that made no sense. “Hey, Thom – if I can get Uncle John’s old truck running, you wanna learn to drive?”

“Can’t get my license till I’m sixteen, Dad.”

“I was driving when I was your age,” Dad said. “So by the time ya do your test, you’ll be an expert.”

And so, I watched Dad as he leaned deep into the workings of an old Nissan ute that belonged to Uncle John. It had been stored in a farmshed alongside many cobwebs. The ute had revved but not started when Dad turned the ignition, and he set to work on it. 

Dad narrated to me what he was doing to the engine, getting grease and oil on his clothes. I was standing behind him passing him tools that I didn’t know by name. I suspected Dad had always hoped I’d be handy like him, knowing how to change the oil on a car, doing repairs, using a lawnmower. It was entirely unspoken, and Dad had never tried to teach me so directly before. He must have assumed it was a skill I’d pick up genetically.

Within an hour, the truck roared to life. Dad grinned at me when the engine turned over. The smile was genuine and warm, and made me want to hug him. His medication set his expression perpetually stunned and affectless, so watching the light flick on again in his eyes felt momentous. But the only times we ever hugged were those Wednesdays when I’d visit him in hospital, on the good days, the days when he was present.

I sat in the driver’s seat and Dad gave me a crash course in manual transmission, most of which I didn’t absorb. The truck dribbled and spat out of the shed in spurts. I grinded gears and stalled it several times. Dad howled with laughter, and I saw the light flicker in him again.

“We’ll keep practicing. Next time you visit.” He reached over me and turned the car off, taking the keys out of the ignition. “You’ll visit next weekend?”

“Yep.”

“Sounds good.” Dad played with the keys in his hand for a moment, not making eye contact. “Can you ask ya mother something for me?”

“Ask her what?”

“Well, tell her something.” He looked up at me. His nervousness made him seem so tiny. “Tell her I’m doing better. I’m taking my meds, y’know, and teaching ya shit. Please. I’m sorry to ask.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

“You’re a good boy, Thom.” He outstretched his right hand and we shook, like men do. 

Before Mum picked me up, Dad asked if I was hungry. I thought he was going to cook something. When I said ‘yes’, he seemed panicked, confused, and he shoved a five dollar note in my palm. “Get some dinner on the way home with Mum, from Red Rooster or something.” 

Dad stood at the veranda and waved as I drove away with Mum. She stayed in the car the whole time trying not to look at him and he kept his distance. They were both pretending the other didn’t exist. I felt an impulse to open up both their brains and look inside, to figure out what was going on.

On the way home, I reached into my pocket. “Dad gave me some money for dinner.”

“Don’t be stupid, Thom. I have food at home.”

Mum was silent for the rest of the twenty-minutes ride home. The radio was set to 105.5 HotFM and played ‘hits from the eighties, nineties, and now’. ‘Glycerine’ by Bush was the only song I recognised. I didn’t know the words, but I knew the melody. 

#

I started visiting Luke most weekends. He lived outside town, but I could get there in a few minutes if I rode my bike. 

Shelly was always pleased to see me, and she smelt like perfume you have to go to big city department stores to buy. Sometimes, on Sundays, she’d set her hair in rollers, which I’d only seen in movies. “Luke’s in his room, love. Go through.” 

Luke showed me Monty Python’s Life Of Brian next, having unearthed it in a cardboard box late in the unpacking process. “Are you religious at all?” he asked me before pressing play. “Like, your family or whatever?”

“I don’t think so. My Mum went to church as a kid.” Mum still called herself Catholic, but she was mostly Catholic on Easter, or the anniversary of my grandmother’s death. I would watch Mum’s solemn face during grandma’s anniversary rosary, each year, while Father Spacey spoke Latin. In her quietness, she would always seem so needful, needful of something I couldn't provide. 

Luke and I clung to each other in fits of laughter at all the right moments in the movie, laughing loud, the kind of laughing that leads to hiccups. He gripped me on the forearm while he giggled, unselfconsciously. I wondered if he ever analysed the times that I touched him incidentally, or whether anyone but me did things like that. I also wondered if he ever touched himself to refugees on the news, and although I doubted he did that, I liked thinking about it.

Shelly came in with a packet of chips partway through the movie. She refilled our cordial. “How’s your Mum, Thom? Work’s been crazy lately. I hope she’s having a restful weekend.”

“She’s good,” I said, although I had no idea how she was. I opened the chips and passed them to Luke.

“That’s great,” she said, and left, closing the door behind her.

Luke turned to me. “Our Mums are, like, best friends, I reckon.”

“Yeah?” I asked.

“Seems so.”

I nodded. “So, where’s your Dad?”

Luke reacted to the question calmly. I then knew immediately that the situation would be something painless or uncomplicated. “Dad’s back in Joburg. He’s a doctor – we’re from South Africa – and it takes a while to get, like, your medical license transferred to a new country.” Luke took a handful of the chips, chewing while he spoke. “He’s gotta do some sort of course to qualify in Australia even though he’s been a doctor for, like, years”.

I nod. “So are you guys rich?”

Luke looked around at this room, as if he was considering it for the first time. “I dunno. Guess so.” He turned to me. “What about your dad?”

“He lives on a farm, outta town.”

“Close by?”

 “Twenty-minute drive.” Luke nodded and took a sip from his glass of bright green cordial. We went back to watching the movie.

Luke said we’d missed the funniest part, so he stood up and rewound the video tape to an earlier scene. It was the scene where Michael Palin says biggus dickus repeatedly, and it was funny, but now I forced myself to laugh harder than I would have otherwise.

There was a pair of Luke’s unwashed gym shorts draped over his desk chair. I changed my position so they wouldn’t be in my line of sight while I watched the movie, but no matter where I sat, I could still see them. 

#

It was a Tuesday, and I was in Mr. Farrell’s chemistry class. Rosemary and I had been experiment partners all year, and it was the only place we couldn’t avoid one another. I stood at the lab desk across from her, data sheets before us. Mr. Farrell went around the room lighting everyone’s Bunsen burners and reciting the safety instructions like a religious chant. “Do not touch the open flame…do not leave the burner ignited with no one attending it…”

Rosemary studied our data sheets and looked up at me. She was wearing the mandatory safety goggles. A painful red mark was forming on her skin around them.  

“I think your goggles are too tight,” I said.

“What?”

“You’re getting a red mark on your face.”

“Oh.”

Rosemary removed them, revealing a goggle-shaped pink line around her eyes. Mr. Farrell snapped to attention. “Rosemary, do not remove the goggles.”

“Sir, they’re too small for me,” she complained.

“If it’s between temporary discomfort, or losing your eye, which would you pick?” Mr Farrell asked. It wasn’t an actual question, so Rosemary stayed silent. “Well, Miss?”

“Temporary discomfort, sir,” Rosemary sighed.

“Right. So, you will wear the goggles.” And then he went back to walking around the room, lighting the burners, and reciting the safety chant.

When he was out of sight Rosemary flashed a toothy grin. We both started laughing.

“Oh my god, when he said the ‘f’ sound in ‘comfort’, he totally spat on me,” Rosemary said.

“That’s assault,” I said, smiling, “Mr. Farrell just assaulted a student.”

“Hm. I wish Mr. Kingsley would assault me,” she said, leaning in close, sharing a conspiracy. “He’s the new English teacher. He’s hot.”

“I haven’t seen him.”

“He’s teaching Grade Nine classes. I can’t wait for next year.”

Rosemary and I burnt different compounds on the Bunsen burner and recorded the reaction in our data sheets. When the class was told we’d be doing these experiments, there’d been a murmur of excitement, as all us kids envisioned aimless pyrotechnics and explosions. In reality, most compounds burned exactly the same - boringly.   

“Sit with me at lunch. If you want,” Rosemary said, not looking at me. “Everyone’s asking where you went.”

I pretended I didn’t hear her, busy recording data.

“Thom?”

I looked up. “I wouldn’t want to make you unsafe.”

Rosemary rolled her eyes. “Oh, Thom…come on. You gotta stand up for yourself sometimes.”

“If Scott Porter said any of that shit to you, I wouldn’t just sit there,” I hissed. “I’d do something.”

“The difference is, Thom, he wouldn’t say those things to me.”

I looked up at her. She was frowning, and then turned away. She spoke to Mr. Farrell briefly and he handed her a bathroom pass. She disappeared out the door and I didn’t see her the rest of class.

I found Rosemary walking from the science block between periods. She tried to dart in the opposite direction, but I called her after and she turned towards me. She held her books and her bag tightly in front of her, like she was afraid I’d try to snatch them. “What?”

“What’d you mean, Rose, in Chem? About Scott Porter?”

She sighed. She was good at sighing. “He wouldn’t say it to me because it’s your thing, Thom,” she said. “He’s just the only kid in school who’s enough of a dick to tease you about it, but everyone knows that shit about your dad, dude.”

I felt eyes on me as other students between periods passed us, going in each direction. For some reason I’d considered Scott Porter an anomaly, the only non-adult in town who knew this stuff about Dad, and that because he was the moron saying it no one took it seriously. 

“Everyone knows?”

Rosemary nodded. “But it doesn’t matter. Who cares? It’s just small-town bullshit.”

“You knew the whole time?”

“I figured you would tell me eventually.”

I nodded. I was concerned that I’d suddenly gone very pale, like a ghost. 

“Please, just sit with me at lunch again. I don’t care. I miss you,” said Rosemary.

I turned away from her. I couldn't stand her eyes on me any longer. I walked towards a space between buildings. “I have English in G Block.”

I headed to Mr. Larkin’s office, in the demountable building behind administration. I knocked on his door and he swung it open. He smiled, which he’d done very rarely in the past, and gestured for me to sit. The chair was under a motivational poster that had yellowed with age. 

“Thom on a Tuesday. That’s new,” he said. “Haven’t seen you in a few weeks.”

“Hm.”

“So, what’s the diagnosis today, Thom?”

“Mr. Larkin, Do you know my Dad?”

He paused. I felt Mr. Larkin’s good-spiritedness drain from the room.

“Your dad?”

“Yeah, do you know him?”

“I do, Thom, yes.”

“But do you know him? Know everything?”

Mr. Larkin straightened papers on his desk and pushed his glasses back. He licked his lips. “It’s a very small town, Thom. Yes, I’ve heard what happened.”

I nodded. I started packing up my bag and books to leave.

“Wait, Thom – what’s the matter?”

“I just wanted to ask you that.”

“That can’t be all.”

I stood before his desk, in that liminal space between staying and leaving. “Why won’t my mum let him live with us?” It all came out quickly, like one very long word.

Mr. Larkin sighed. I could see him running his tongue along the front of his teeth, and I thought of reptiles again. “I don’t know, Thom. I could ring her and ask for you?”

“Absolutely do not do that. Please.”

“Okay. I won’t.”

“She wouldn’t say anything, anyway.”

He nodded. I resumed collecting my bag and stood up to leave. I caught a glimpse of something framed on the wall that I hadn’t noticed previously – a master’s degree from some regional university in 1975.

“I’m so sorry, Thom,” Mr. Larkin said in a mournful tone. “I wish I could help you more.”

The degree said Mr. Larkin held a Master of Social Work. I left his office without speaking.

At lunch, I sat at a table on the fence-line, next to the road, and Rosemary kept glancing at me. At one point she made a gesture with her hands to say come sit here but I turned away and pretended not to see.

On the road, a brand-new car passed by. It was rare to see such new models in town back then, unless they were tourists on the way to the beach. The speed-limit outside the school was only forty, so the car seemed to pass me in slow-motion.

The driver was having a phone conversation on speaker, and I could hear the other person on the line through the car’s stereo. One side of a phone conversation, so crisply, carried through the air toward me --

“I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”

“That doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“Okay, well, I don’t think we can talk about this fruitfully –”

And then the car was gone.

I really wanted to know what they’d been arguing about. I liked hearing adults argue. They were good at it and could handle it better than me. I’d never been in a real argument that didn’t leave me in tears or wanting to hurt myself. I figured it comes with adulthood.

I stole a glance at Rosemary. She was laughing at something. I told myself that if she invited me to join them again during lunch that day, I would do it.

But she didn’t.