Alex Shearer - This is the Life

What brought it all back to mind was when I first got to Louis’ place in Australia and walked in through the door and saw him in his beanie hat with a quarter of his mind gone and the next thing I saw was his kettle – which deserves a digression of its own at another time – and I clapped my eyes on his fridge.

There were things living in that fridge that even medical science didn’t know about. Its age was incalculable. They didn’t make fridges like that any more. Maybe they never had and Louis had constructed it himself out of old spare parts and tree bark.

But it wasn’t just the mould, the grime, the gone-off food, the brown grapefruit, the rust, the smell and all the rest. It was the fridge magnets. There were half a dozen of them, all of them rusty too, and they bore messages saying: Depression – you are not alone. And they had phone numbers on them of people you could call and could talk to. But whether Louis had ever called and spoken to anyone, I never asked. I just thought that well, the old black dog was back, or maybe it had never gone away. I knew that Louis had always had it snapping at his heels. But maybe it had got him by the throat lately, or even now was hiding in the house somewhere, under the bed in the deep, deep dust, or growling down in the basement. Or maybe that was it making noises up in the loft. Only when I later asked Louis about the loft noises that were keeping me awake, he said it was possums.

So I asked why he didn’t get rid of them, but he said they didn’t bother him too much, so maybe he liked their company. I asked him what they were doing up there that made so much noise.

‘They’re having a root,’ he said. ‘They’re rooting away, making more possums.’

‘Louis,’ I said. ‘What use are even more possums to you? You can’t even cope with the ones you already have.’

But he just shrugged and wouldn’t do anything about them. And I didn’t want to buy poison or anything, for I drew the line at poisoning possums, though had it been rats, I wouldn’t have thought twice. So we just had to put up with the racket, but it left you feeling tired in the mornings, and maybe it made the possums feel tired too.

‘Why can’t they have a root before they go to sleep, Louis?’

‘That’s how they are,’ he said.

‘But you know what it’s like when you wake up in the morning when there’s two of you.’

‘Farts and bad breath and stale alcohol,’ Louis said, for he was always one to cut to the chase and never mind the niceties. ‘But you do it anyway. Though in a possum’s case, there maybe isn’t the stale alcohol.’

‘Louis,’ I said. ‘Are you all right?’

And I meant regarding the fridge stickers. But some things, even when we reached out for them, we never really grabbed hold of. You know that famous painting, in the Sistine Chapel, called ‘The Creation’, with God and Man reaching out for each other but their hands don’t quite connect. That was how we communicated.

‘Let’s have a drink,’ Louis said.

‘What do you want?’

‘Cuppa tea,’ he said.

‘All right. Sit down and I’ll make us one.’

That was when I noticed the kettle.

‘Louis,’ I said. ‘What’s the deal with the kettle?’

‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

Louis lived inside but really he was camping out.

On his grease- and left-overs-encrusted gas stove stood a blackened kettle. It was one of the old-fashioned kind that you boil over a hob. Louis did have electricity, but it didn’t extend as far as his hot drink requirements.

‘Louis,’ I said. ‘This kettle has no handle.’

‘Broken off,’ he said.

‘Louis, when did the handle break off?’

He gave another of his shrugs. He had square, solid, powerful shoulders. If you’d been thinking of a fight with him, you’d think twice.

‘I don’t know. Few years ago.’

He went and sat in his Salvation Army armchair and opened up his blue cooler bag and fished out some eye drops for his glaucoma.

‘Louis, how do you pour the water out when the kettle has boiled?’

‘Tea towel,’ he said, with annoyance in his voice, as if I was being deliberately obtuse.

‘So let me get this right, Louis. You have lived for unspecified years with a kettle with no handle that you have to wrap a tea towel around to pour the water out of?’

‘I’m doing my eyes!’

‘Louis, how much is a kettle?’

‘I’ve been busy.’

‘I’m going to buy one tomorrow.’

‘Don’t waste your money.’

‘Louis, a kettle with a handle will make life easier, right? If you make your own life easier, you’re not wasting your money. You’re just spending it on improving your situation, right?’

‘We don’t need handles on our kettles, we’re—’

‘Louis, not having a handle on your kettle doesn’t make you tough. Being tough has nothing to do with kettle handles. Scott of the Antarctic went to the South Pole, Louis. Was he tough?’

‘You’d need to ask him.’

‘Louis, I’ve seen pictures of Scott of the Antarctic and his men in their hut at the South Pole and I swear to God, Louis, that they had a handle on their kettle. They might even have carried a spare handle, for all I know.’

‘Are you making the tea or aren’t you?’

So I made the tea. I had to scour the mugs first. They were stained a deep tannin brown inside.

‘There you go.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I’m buying a new kettle tomorrow, Louis. While you’re at the hospital, I’m buying a new kettle.’

‘Don’t waste your money.’

But I didn’t listen to him and I did what I wanted. Who did he think he was anyway? My father or someone?

We ended up with two new kettles. One electric, and one for the gas stove – with a handle. I edged the old one out of the house gradually. First I left it out on the veranda. Then, when Louis didn’t notice that, I carried it down the stairs and left it in the garden. After a week I moved it next to the bin. The following week I put it in the bin. Then, on the Tuesday, I put the bin out for collection.

On Wednesday, when Louis was back from his radiotherapy, he began mooching around the kitchen.

‘You lost something, Louis?’ I asked.

‘My kettle,’ he said. ‘Where’s my kettle?’

‘Right there,’ I said, pointing at the electric one plugged into the wall. ‘Or did you mean this one?’ And there was the new and shiny blue one on the gas hob.

‘No. My kettle. My kettle.’

‘You mean the old burnt black and crusty one with no handle?’

‘My kettle.’

‘Louis, I didn’t think you wanted it any more. I didn’t think we needed it. As we have these nice new kettles. So I’m afraid – it’s gone.’

‘You threw it out? You threw out my kettle?’

‘Louis, it was dangerous, you could have scalded yourself, or set fire to the place, you had to wrap a tea towel around it. It was a liability.’

He just looked at me through his milky eyes, now filled with infinite reproach, and I felt like some kind of murderer for what I had done.

‘Louis, I didn’t know it meant that much to you. I thought it was just an old kettle.’

Without another word, he turned his back on me, and he went to his room and lay down on his bed. The mix of chemo and radiotherapy was very tiring and he spent a lot of the day asleep.

I felt bad. I realised what I had done. It was part of Louis I had thrown away. For years Louis had been the man with the kettle with no handle. People had come round and he had made them a coffee or a tea or a herbal something. And he had poured out their drinks, first carefully wrapping the dirty, scorched old tea towel around the body of the kettle. And they’d watched him do so, and everyone knew that Louis was the man with the kettle without a handle. And so it had been for many years. There had been talk and conversation and many a long hour of putting the world to rights, there in that choked and cluttered kitchen that had seen neither floor cloth nor mop for a decade.