Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

“Can’t you just keep your head down and apply yourself to studying?” I pleaded.

“I’m studying, all right. A few of us, we got big plans when we get out of here,” he said, winking. “I’ve met a couple of blokes who are teaching me a thing or two.”

I left wringing my hands, thinking about detention centers, boys’ homes, prisons; it’s through these punishments that up-and-coming criminals get to do most of their schmoozing. The state is always going about the business of introducing dangerous criminals to each other; they plug them right into the network.

If my father had an idea of how to accelerate his own deterioration, taking a job at a pest extermination business was it. For the past few years he had become the town handyman, mowing lawns, fixing fences, doing a little brickwork, but now, finally, he’d found the perfect job for himself: exterminating vermin. He breathed toxic fumes all day, handling poisonous substances such as bug powder and lethal little blue pellets, and I got the impression he was delighted by his own toxicity. He’d come home, his hands out, and say, “Don’t touch me! Don’t come near me! I have poison on my hands! Quick! Someone run the taps!” Sometimes if he was feeling especially mischievous, he would run at us with his poisonous hands outstretched and threaten to touch our tongues. “I’m going for your tongue! You’re done for!”

“Why don’t you wear gloves?!” my mother screamed.

“Gloves are for proctologists!” he’d say back as he chased us around the house. I deduced that this was his bizarre way of dealing with my mother’s cancer, pretending she was a sick child and he was the clown called in to cheer her up. She’d finally told my father the bad news, and while he had become compassionate enough to stop hitting her when he was drunk, her cancer, treatment, remission, and relapse cycle had made him increasingly unstable. Now, as my father threatened us with his poisonous hands, my mother would stare at me long and hard, making me feel like a mirror that reflects death back on the dying.

That’s how it was in our house; with my mother fading, my father becoming a carrier of lethal toxins, and Terry going from mental hospital to prison, what had previously been a poisonous environment only metaphorically became one literally too.

When at last Terry was released from the detention center, for no good reason I had renewed hope he’d be rehabilitated, and might even want to come home and help with our dying mother. I went to an address he’d given me over the phone. To get there I had to travel the four hours to Sydney, then change buses to ride another hour to a suburb in the south. It was a quiet and leafy neighborhood; families were out walking dogs and washing cars, and a newspaper boy pulled a yellow cart up the street, casually tossing newspapers so they landed with admirable accuracy on the doormat of every home with the front-page headline facing up. The house where Terry was residing had a beige Volvo station wagon parked in the driveway. A sprinkler languidly watered an immaculately manicured lawn. A boy’s silver bicycle rested against the steps leading up to the front porch. Could this be right? Could Terry have been adopted by a lower-middle-class family by mistake?

A woman with rollers in her brown hair and a pink nightgown answered the door. “I’m Martin Dean,” I stammered with uncertainty, as though perhaps I wasn’t. Her kind smile disappeared so quickly, I wondered if I hadn’t imagined it. “They’re out the back,” she said. As the woman led me down a dark hallway, she threw off the rollers with the hair too- it was a wig. Her real hair, tied up in a tight bun and fastened with bobby pins, was flaming red. She dropped the pink nightgown too and revealed black lingerie hugging a curvy body that I wanted to take home as a pillow. When I followed her into the kitchen, I saw there were bullet holes in the walls, the cupboards, the curtains; sunlight streamed through the tiny perfect circles and stretched diagonally across the room in golden rods. A plump half-naked woman sat at the table with her head in her hands. I stepped past her and went out into the backyard. Terry was turning sausages on a barbecue. A shotgun was leaning against the wooden fence next to him. Two men with shaved heads lay on banana chairs drinking beers.

“Marty!” Terry screamed. He strode over and gave me a bear hug. With an arm over my shoulder, he made enthusiastic introductions. “Boys, this is my brother, Marty. He got all the brains. I got whatever was left. Marty, this is Jack, and this timid-looking bloke over here is Meat-ax.”

I smiled nervously at the powerfully built men, thinking an ax was rarely necessary when cutting meat. Looking at my vigorous, muscular brother, I automatically straightened my back. Sometime over the last few years I had become conscious that I’d developed a slight hunch, so I looked, from a distance, approximately seventy-three years old.

Terry said, “And now for the grand finale…”

He removed his shirt and I reeled in shock. Terry had gone tattoo mad! Head to toe, my brother was a maze of crazy artwork. From visiting days, I had already seen the tattoos crawling down his arms below the shirtsleeves, but I’d never before seen what he’d done to his body. Now I could make out, from his Adam’s apple to his belly button, a grinning Tasmanian tiger, a snarling platypus, an emu growling menacingly, a family of koalas brandishing knives in their clenched paws, a kangaroo dripping blood from its gums, with a machete in its pouch. All those Australian animals! I never realized that my brother was so horribly patriotic. Terry flexed his muscles, and it appeared as though the rabid animals were breathing; he’d learned to contort his body in particular ways to make the animals come alive. It had a frightening, magical effect. The swirling colors made me dizzy.

“It’s getting a bit crowded here in the old zoo, isn’t it?” Terry said, anticipating my disapproval. “Oh, guess who else is here!”

Before I could answer, a familiar voice cried out from somewhere above me. Harry was leaning out an upstairs window, smiling so widely, his mouth seemed to swallow his nose. A minute later he joined us in the yard. Harry had aged badly since I saw him last. Every hair had turned a gloomy gray, and the features on his tired, wrinkled face looked to have been pushed deeper into his skull. I noticed that his limp had gotten worse too: he dragged his leg behind him like a sack of bricks.

“We’re doing it, Marty!” Harry cried.

“Doing what?”

“The democratic cooperative of crime! It’s a historic moment! I’m glad you’re here. I know we can’t coerce you to join up, but you can be a witness, can’t you? God, it’s wonderful to have your brother out. I’d been having a shit of a time. Being a fugitive is lonely.” Harry explained how he eluded the police by phoning in anonymous sightings of himself. There were patrols conducting street-by-street searches in Brisbane and Tasmania. Harry exploded with laughter at the thought of it. “The police are so easy to throw off the scent. Anyway, I was just biding my time until Terry’s term was up. And now here we are! It’s like the Greek senate! We meet every afternoon at four by the swimming pool.”

I looked over at the pool. It was an aboveground number, the water a snaky green. A beer can floated in it. Democracy obviously had nothing to do with hygiene. The place was a sewer. The lawn was overgrown, there were empty pizza boxes strewn about and bullet holes in everything, and in the kitchen I could see the whore sitting at the table listlessly scratching herself.

Terry smiled at her through the window. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Can I have a word with you?”