Peter Carey - Collected Stories

It had made him soft, he reflected, reliant on the company of others, left him ill-equipped to handle life on his own, made him place all his weight on a dog so the death of a dog was like the death of a lover or a parent. He could see the craziness of it. He had seen it this morning whilst he dug the grave and placed the body of the little fox terrier in it. But seeing the craziness did not stop the pain.

He needed a drink. He caught the waitress’s eye but she turned the other way. He didn’t feel up to this meeting. He didn’t feel he could be the Turk Kershaw they wanted him to be.

Turk Kershaw had been a rough old bastard and had been loved for it. He had taken thousands of boys through the junior school and changed them from pampered little rich boys into something a little better. He had been obsessed with teaching them the skills of survival. He had taught them how to exist in the bush for a week without fire or prepared foods. He had shown them how to build shelter from the shed bark of giant trees. He had forced the weak to become strong and the strong to become disciplined.

And today, he knew, his success with these boys would frighten him as it had sometimes frightened him on other such meetings. They would appear to him as iron men who control companies and countries. The sons of the rich, the rulers, whom he had equipped so skilfully to defend what they had. He had misunderstood the realities of power and had taught them as he would have taught himself. It would have been better to soften them, to teach them to touch each other gently, to show compassion to the weak, to weep shamelessly over losses. Sometimes it occurred to him that he had been a Frankenstein, obsessively creating the very beings who had the power to crush him totally. For he had not been honest with them. He had tried to remake them so that they wouldn’t suffer what he had suffered when there was no likelihood they ever would.

They would not shed tears over the death of dogs. He had taught them how to despise anyone who did.

3.

Sangster found the drink that Turk couldn’t. He attracted the waitress with one careless wave of his arm, ordered a Scotch for Turk and a bourbon for himself and, after a few polite inquiries about Turk’s retirement, proceeded to chronicle his success as a husband, father, and newspaper proprietor.

The newspaper had, of course, been his father’s and had become his with his father’s death. Turk hardly listened. He had read it all in the papers. The boardroom battles. The takeover bids. The fierce sackings throughout the company after the younger Sangster took the chair.

He was busy trying to defeat waves of sadness and loss with his third Scotch. He tried to remember Sangster before dark whiskers and expensive lunches had forced their attention on his slender, olive-skinned face. Turk recalled the early battles they had had, when Sangster, who was fast and skilful in using his mind and his body, had refused to try. Sangster had wanted to be liked and had feared excellence. Turk had taught him, painfully, to ignore that fear. He had pushed him and bullied him until fear of Turk was a more serious motivating force than fear of his friends’ envy.

Looking at the new Sangster, he missed the old one, who was languid and lazy and imbued with an easy grace.

4.

Davis and McGregor arrived together. They shook hands eagerly and laughed too much. Turk sensed their disappointment in him. He was different from how they’d remembered him. He was not what they wanted to meet. He remembered the dandruff and brushed his shoulder. McGregor saw him do it. Their eyes met for a second and McGregor got him another Scotch.

McGregor, stocky, red-haired, no longer blushed as he had when his name was mentioned in class. He still had his bullish awkwardness but it was now combined with a drawling aggressiveness that Turk found almost unpleasant.

McGregor, now the marketing director of a large company, had no idea what to say to Turk Kershaw. He was shocked by the seediness of the man, his sloppiness, his age, the strange puffy eyes. There was also something funny, almost effeminate, about the way he held his cigarette. And those bloody Lifesavers. He turned to Sangster and began to question him about a case that was being heard by the Trade Practices Commission. It had some relevance to the way advertising space would be bought in newspapers.

Turk Kershaw had no interest in the subject. He felt vaguely contemptuous of McGregor and wished the meeting to be over soon.

Davis, short and meticulous, seemed the one who was most as he had been. His good looks had not become overripe as had Sangster’s. Neither had success made him as disdainful of Turk as it had McGregor. Whilst Sangster and McGregor continued their conversation with earnest exclusiveness, Davis talked quietly and modestly to Turk about his hospital work. And it was Davis, pointedly ignoring the other conversation, who asked Turk about his dog, a different dog who had been less important to him.

The question almost brought Turk undone.

He had another swallow of Scotch before he answered.

“It died,” he said.

Davis nodded, sensing the pain, but not understanding it. “How long ago?”

“Ten years,” Turk said. “You would have been at university by then.” He remembered a story that Davis had written in first form. It came to him then. The ten-year-old boy standing beside his desk reading aloud a work that verged on the erotic. He had read it to a tittering class without embarrassment. Turk had said nothing about the story. He had given it an average mark, yet it had touched him, it had been a strange eruption from a sea of mediocrity. Why had he given it an average mark? Had he been embarrassed too? Why had he wished to discourage him?

McGregor was talking about some ideas he had to stop the problem of dole cheats. Sangster was obviously bored with the conversation. He was staring intently at a Malaysian air hostess who was drinking alone at the next table.

“Did you get another one?” Davis asked.

“Another what… I’m sorry.” Turk had been watching the air hostess smile at Sangster and had been pleased to note McGregor’s annoyance when he saw the same thing.

“Another dog.”

The word cut into him. He thought, I must not think of the metal dish. And then immediately he thought of it, and the chipped water bowl and the small grave, and the shed hair on the bedclothes, and the weight of the dog when it came to lie on his bed after the fire had gone cold at night.

He swallowed and sucked in his breath. “It died too, I’m afraid.” He looked at Davis. He wondered if Davis understood anything. He had a sensitive face. It was a face his patients would have trusted. Davis listened to Turk, and his dark-brown eyes never left his face. “This morning … I… had to bury him.” Turk tried to smile, but he was too distressed and didn’t trust himself to say more. He could handle it. He would handle it. He had drunk too much, but he would handle it because there was no way not to handle it. Turk Kershaw did not weep.

He blew his nose and caught Sangster looking at him warily. The air hostess had left. McGregor was talking to the waitress.

Then Davis did something which he had not expected. He put his hand on Turk’s shoulder and said, “I’m sorry.”

It was because of the concern, the kindness, the surgeon’s understanding of the total emptiness that he now felt that his defences crumbled. It was because of this that he now cried, very quietly, holding his snot-wet handkerchief to his eyes.

It did not last long. But when he had put his handkerchief back in his pocket the table had new drinks on it, there was a clean ashtray, and everyone seemed uncomfortable.

The awkwardness of the situation summoned up reserves in Turk that he had thought long gone. With red eyes and a blocked nose he fought his way out of his sentimentality, his loneliness, his empty house, and began to ease the conversation back to normality by helping them talk about what they wanted to talk about: the school, its characters, the people they had all once known.