Christos Tsiolkas - Barracuda

‘How was your mum tonight?’ Spiro asked Joanna.

‘She was Mum. She was everything you said she’d be.’

Spiro winked. ‘Sorry, Steph, sorry, Dan. Was it awful?’

‘It was no worse than it has ever been.’ Crestfallen, his mother turned to Dan. ‘I’m sorry, mate, that you had to see all that.’

He shrugged. ‘It’s alright.’ And it was. Now that Bettina had gone, his mother’s anxiety had disappeared.

Spiro winked at him next. ‘Bloody Joeys, eh, Danny?’

Dan hated that they thought that was an excuse. ‘I don’t get it,’ he snarled. ‘Why does she have to be so mean? What’s her problem with Mum being christened once?’

The outburst of laughter that greeted his question surprised him. Joanna had to wipe the tears from her eyes. ‘Oh Danny,’ she finally managed to say, ‘don’t ever use that word around my mum. Jehovahs don’t get christened — that’s what filthy heathens do. Your mum got baptised , she didn’t get christened.’

‘Same difference, isn’t it? So she got baptised.’ He spat out the word as if it were an obscenity. ‘So fucking what?’

The swearword worked. The laughter stopped.

Spiro threw back the last of his whiskey. ‘Come on, you,’ he said to his wife. ‘It’s bedtime.’

Then it was Dan and his mother alone. She poured herself another glass. This time Dan indicated that he wanted one as well.

He sat patiently, every now and then taking sips from his glass. His mother was quiet for the longest time. He didn’t mind. He knew silence, he understood it. He waited, listening to the sounds of his cousin and her husband preparing for bed.

His mother had knocked back her drink and poured herself another. She sighed and took his hand across the table. ‘I know it’s hard to understand all this, baby, but I kept it from the three of you because I wanted to protect my children from all this poisonous shit.’

‘I don’t get it. Isn’t Joanna a Jehovah’s Witness? Isn’t Spiro?’

‘Your cousin Joanna is no longer a Joey — she left it a long time ago. But she never got baptised. That was my sin, Danny:

I accepted God and then I renounced Him. Your aunt Bettina is making a great sacrifice even talking to me — even being in the same house as me.’ His mother tilted back her head and swallowed the last of her whiskey. ‘I’m damned, mate. I broke my promise to God. She couldn’t forgive me even if she wanted to. For her, for my parents, I am exiled from them forever.’

She indicated for him to refill her glass. He should have stopped her, he should have got her to bed. Her hand was still clasped tight around his, it was clammy, uncomfortable. He could feel her shame burning through her skin.

He wanted to tell her so much. About Carlo and prison, about what he knew of disgrace and shame, about what it took to emerge from out of the earth and be able to look up to the sky again. There was so much he wanted to tell her, but he was scared that he did not yet know how to. He needed the silence, he needed to learn how to use words, how to have faith in words again, so he could tell his truth without fumbling and without failing. But he couldn’t, not yet. He had to trust the silence between them and trust her patience.

‘I forgave my father,’ she said flatly, her face half in shadow, her profile severe and stark and old in the lamplight. ‘I forgave him before he died. But I can’t find it in me to forgive my mother. I can’t forgive her for staying silent, for never defending me, for being weak, for being so fucking weak. For never stopping him.’

So Dan was not the first to fail her, to betray her.

‘Don’t ever trust the righteous, Dan, no matter how convincing their words may seem. You’ll never be good enough, no matter how much you try. You’ll never be perfect and they’ll never forgive you for that.’

She was looking down the well of her glass, then she took another long draw from it, spilling some liquid down her chin, onto her white top. Her next words were lost, she spoke them into the whiskey, the sounds unintelligible.

‘What did you say, Mum?’

She held the glass away from her lip, and whispered like a child, ‘He scares me. Sometimes he scares me.’

‘Who?’

Her eyes were searching his. ‘Neal. Your father can be righteous — he frightens me when he’s like that.’ She dropped his hand, put her hand over her mouth. ‘Oh, Danny, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s OK.’

He rubbed his cold hand on his trouser leg, stretching his fingers to get the blood flowing again. He took the glass from her, ignoring the reproach in her eyes. ‘No more, Mum, you’re exhausted and upset. You need to get some sleep.’

She had closed her eyes. Had she fallen asleep?

He first mouthed, then whispered the words: ‘I understand.’

Her eyes flashed open. The look she gave him was pure gratitude.

He put his mother to bed, then located the room in which he was to sleep. There was a Finding Nemo mobile hanging from the ceiling, there were posters of Port Adelaide footballers on the wall. He stripped off and slid into the single bed. For a long time he lay there, his ears straining, trying to decipher the sounds of the unfamiliar house. There was a low rumble of traffic somewhere beyond the suburb, the scratching of branches against windows and beams. The house didn’t breathe, it didn’t welcome him — it evaded him. He switched on the bedside light, a toy model of Hogwarts, and grabbed the Graham Greene from his backpack. The first light was peeking through the slats of the blinds when he finished the novel, the first light touched his face as he fell asleep.

Spiro drove them to the hospital. Dan sat in the front passenger seat, the window slightly lowered. The air was crisp; the colours of Adelaide were the cyan of the clear sky, the steely bark on the eucalyptus trees, the weathered sandstone of the buildings. He had no memory of the city, yet the suburbs all seemed familiar, as did the roads, the parks, the office buildings, they all reminded him of the estates and neighbourhoods and malls of Melbourne. Maybe all cities were kin, he mused, maybe all cities shared the same DNA.

They parked and Spiro led them through reception, to the lifts and up to the second floor where they walked past a common room, the blinds raised to let in the sunlight. In the room there sat a circle of old people, a few of them in wheelchairs, a few slumped over in their seats. Past the nurses’ station, they walked through an empty dining room in which a small radio innocuously bleated out olden days cheap disco music. They turned down a corridor and Joanna knocked on the door numbered eighteen.

‘Yes?’ It was Bettina’s voice, gravelly, commanding.

Spiro opened the door and the family filed in. Dan and his mother were the last to enter, his hand on her shoulder.

Bettina was sitting by the head of the old woman’s bed; she didn’t acknowledge any of them, not even her daughter. His giagia was lying there, her mouth and eyes open in her skull-like head, but her eyes were unseeing — she was close to being a corpse. It nauseated him to look at her.

Two men in the room were introduced to him as his uncles; their wives were visiting as well. They were his mother’s brothers, his mother’s sisters-in-law, but they would not look at her. They nodded to Dan, said hello, but he made no attempt to be friendly. He shook the men’s hands because he knew that to do otherwise would have distressed his mother, but he held each hand limply, as they did his.

Dennis was sitting in a chair in the opposite corner, still wearing his AC/DC t-shirt, his head down as he picked at the fabric on the chair’s arm. Dan moved closer to his cousin, noticing the thick brush of hair covering the back of his neck, so dense it was like a coat of fur, disappearing into the t-shirt.