Alex Shearer - This is the Life

But that had been Louis. That had been part of who he was.

‘You know, Louis, don’t you? The guy with the beard and the kettle.’

Now he only had the beard left and that had been to the barber’s.

I felt bad, like a tyrant, like one who had taken advantage of vulnerabilities. But I couldn’t bring the kettle back. It had gone to the dump and even if I searched I would never find it. It was there with all the other long-gone and inadequate domestic appliances. True, I had bought him a new one, but what use was new when it wasn’t what you loved?

I don’t have much advice to give anyone; I’ve learned very little in my life; but here’s my gem of wisdom. Don’t take a dying man’s kettle away. You won’t be doing him any favours. Nor yourself either.

Louis had a friend called Halley who was one of the bohemian types and who lived up in the hills forty minutes from the city, with trees for company and scrub turkeys and wallabies, and what sounded like perpetual wind chimes but which turned out to be bell birds – a kind of myna bird with a piercing call which would drive the overly sensitive to insanity in under a week.

Halley made a living from picture frames and he lived in a shed that he had built himself on some land he had bought. This wasn’t like a European shed, it was an Australian shed, a far larger and more substantial thing. Louis had put the roof on it. Close to the shed stood a barn, which Louis had also put the roof on, and which contained timber of all sorts – at least all sorts suitable for the making of picture frames. The frames were fine and artistic things, skilfully crafted. But it was a hand-to-mouth game. Halley said his profits were small and his hours were long. He too drove a ute, but it only had a fifth of a million miles on the clock, so it was almost in showroom condition.

The track he lived up was so steep and lacking in bite on a wet day that you would need someone to sit in the back of your truck to put weight over the rear axle, otherwise you’d be skidding back down again in a hurry or ending up in the ditch.

Like Louis, Halley was also a man of some education, interesting CV, and of varied and floundered relationships. He was also one to whom the odour of the nine to five smelt unpleasant, and he would work eight to six or even longer to avoid getting tangled up in it.

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