No More Boats Read online

  Jesús smiled and nodded. But Francis knew his mother was not really speaking to Jesús. She was speaking to him. She wanted him to be more like Jesús. To have dreams of offices too. Never going to happen. Francis smiled at her. He knew his mother well enough. He knew that she’d had just the right amount of sherry and was enjoying herself just enough to smile back at him eventually, if he kept on smiling.

  She turned her back on him, began pulling plates out of the fridge, removed plastic wrapping, and revealed tiny sandwiches and small swirls of purple and green. She did all this without looking at Francis. He was late to his father’s party and he did not want to work in an office and therefore he would be punished.

  ‘Right.’ She put a plate of food in Jesús’ hands almost before he could get his arms out to support it. She poked the rim of another plate into Francis’ chest. ‘Go and serve your father and his friends.’

  ‘Yep.’ Francis stood there and smiled and waited until his mother cracked it. She treated him like a guest who had overstayed his welcome. She smiled a kind of lopsided smile he knew was an attempt to stay looking angry at him, ‘Go.’

  And so Francis and Jesús did what they’d done at their parents’ parties since they could walk. They were the servants. They served. They were polite and sometimes even charming. They sneaked shots of the cognac his father’s friends brought, and they got drunk without anyone even noticing. They knew all the moves. A man who might have been Greek, or possibly Italian or French (who knew? Francis could never tell the difference) grabbed his mother by the hand and insisted that they dance as Farnham worked his way up to the crescendo of ‘The Voice.’

  His mother’s friend Lucy put her arm around his shoulder and said. ‘The man of the house.’ Her slight Polish accent sometimes turned her ‘th’ sounds into ‘d’ sounds after too much drink so that she sounded like some aging white gangster when she said it, da man of de house.

  This was Lucy at her best, more like the older sister you wished you had than your mum’s best friend.

  ‘Now you should go and introduce yourself to Mrs Muscas over there. She has a beautiful daughter. Not too much younger than yourself.’ Lucy raised her eyebrows at him like she was letting him in on some great secret. She still had the kind of bright blue eyes and fine skin most people would consider beautiful. Even at her age. There was something that Francis had always found so attractive about her but it wasn’t necessarily about her looks. It was more about the way she talked to his father, like underneath whatever words came out of her mouth she was really always saying, I won’t take shit from you so don’t even try it. His father had always hated her. Francis could never understand where that conflict had begun.

  He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Maybe I should ask her for a photo then.’ He was sure the daughter would be fat.

  He worked his way across the living room with the plate and the serviettes and the toothpicks his mother had given him so that people could spear the little swirly things he was carrying. The house was getting louder. Lucy had changed the CD to Julio Iglesias. More people dancing now.

  Bob from across the road yelled, ‘Aye, Francis bring that over here.’ He was a big man. He nodded his meaty head and listened to what the other four men were saying.

  Francis broke into their circle with his plate of food. They were talking Tampa. Suddenly everyone is an expert on boat people. Everyone. Pass the plate. Of course we came by boats too. Can I have one of those toothpicks? But it was a different kind of boat. A serviette? On account of what they did to John Newman we shouldn’t let any more in. But they’re not Asian anymore. They’re Arabs. Can you go get me a beer son? They’re Muslim this time. Like the ones on the news who raped the white girl, just like them.

  Jesús walked up to the circle from the other side. ‘Last one,’ he said holding up a plate with a single sausage roll on it. Bob grabbed for it and stuck it in his mouth in one bite.

  Then Francis and Jesús were in the kitchen and no one at the party was paying attention to them anymore and someone had left a half-open bottle of bourbon next to the sink. Francis poured them each half a plastic cup.

  They knocked their plastic cups against each other and drank it straight. Jesús put his cup out and waited for Francis to pour another. Francis watched as his hand swayed. This time they sipped their drinks. Takin’ it easy. They pulled themselves up onto the kitchen bench and sat on top of it the same way his mum had been telling them not to since they were little kids.

  Somehow the party had really got going. Francis could feel the vibrations of the music on the benchtop under their arses. Now Olivia Newton John and John Farnham were singing together. His mother had the worst taste in music. The worst. His father could never tell the difference between one singer and another. In the next room someone was yelling above the music, ‘Dance! Come on, dance!’

  Francis realised suddenly there was someone moving around in the walk-in pantry. He looked through the space in-between the wooden slats and saw his father stranded there between the boxes of cereal and the canned vegetables. He was looking at a crumpled piece of paper and muttering something silently to himself.

  ‘What are you doing, Dad?’ He watched his father look up and smash his head against the naked light bulb in the pantry.

  He opened the door. His father stared at him like a kid who had been caught doing something wrong. He fixed the collar of his shirt and said, ‘How are you enjoying the party?’

  ‘It’s pumpin’, Dad. What are you doing in the pantry?’

  ‘I was just trying to get away from everyone, so I could, you know, practise my speech.’

  His father prided himself on these kinds of speeches. He was always the one in the family who gave the speeches. Weddings. Christenings. Birthdays. It was strange how these moments made him appear both more vulnerable and stronger at the same time. When he would eventually get up to speak you could see how he fed off the attention of everyone listening to him, how it made him stand in a way that said, I am here and I am significant. But before he got up to speak his father turned into some kind of nervous child who was scared of presenting to his class.

  Francis swallowed hard and looked at his father slightly hunched over in the closet so his head wouldn’t hit the light bulb above. ‘You want to practise on me?’

  ‘No, no. Just, it’s alright. I’m almost done. Just wanted to look over my notes and all.’ Francis relaxed. He didn’t really want to share this kind of intimate moment with his father anyway.

  ‘Right then. We’ll leave you to it.’ Francis had never been close enough to his father for these kinds of moments not to be awkward. ‘Do you want me to tell Mum to turn the music down and get ready for your speech?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. I think that would be good.’ His father walked out to the kitchen and filled up a glass of water in the sink. Francis watched as Jesús jumped off the countertop.

  ‘Mr Martone.’

  ‘Jesús. Thanks for helping this evening.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’ Jesús shook his father’s hand and smiled like the good ethnic son Francis knew his father had always wanted.

  Someone started screaming ‘Dance! Dance!’ as Francis and Jesús walked back out into the living room. His sister Clare was standing against the back wall telling one of his mum’s friends about the kids she was teaching this year. His father’s friends had drunk-red faces. His mother sat on a chair in the corner beside Lucy. They crossed their legs tighter, looked at the men and laughed.

  Francis pulled aside the empty bottles of beer sitting in front of the stereo and switched off whatever crap was playing. There was a bit of a lull in the noise but mostly people just kept talking. Great-uncle Mark was dancing alone after everyone had left the dance floor.

  His father emerged from the kitchen and appeared in the corner of the living room. No notes in his hand. More people stopped talking. Francis got up on a chair at the front of the room and clicked two empty beer bottles together.

  ‘T
he man himself would like to make a speech. Excuse me everybody.’

  He watched his father approach the front of the room. He nodded at everyone as he walked past them, like he was a king or something. People were too drunk to shut up quickly. Everyone started nudging each other and quiet fell from the front to the back of the room.

  ‘Yeah,’ one of his father’s workmates was saying to another in the back corner, ‘The man was too fat and too old to be climbing up scaffolds, couldn’t compete.’ The words could just be heard above everything else. Everyone had gone quiet.

  It was said just at the point when his father reached the front of the room. Francis watched as he turned slowly and faced everyone. His face was turning red from the neck upwards. He just stood there breathing. Francis couldn’t help but feel nervous at these times. Whatever bad was between them, Francis knew he would always feel this way, tied up in all the anxieties of the man who had raised him. Mostly because he felt like he was the only one who could see them. Even if he chose to ignore them, even if he couldn’t talk about them out loud.

  His father got the notes he had out of his pocket. He put them back in. ‘Fuck you,’ he said at last to the entire crowd of people staring at him and walked straight out of the room and back to the kitchen.

  No one spoke. His mother left after his father. Clare switched the stereo back on to cover the silence.

  No one in his family ever thought that Francis knew anything. He knew they thought he was dumber than a piece of shit and too stoned and that he didn’t pay attention. But he knew stuff. He saw the deeper meanings of things. He knew, for example, that his father only got angry when he was ashamed. He knew that his father had always been too ashamed for any ordinary kind of anger.

  7.

  Going back to the city. Clare was relieved by the prospect of a journey that would probably take her close to an hour and a half in the middle of the day on a Sunday. She’d gone to the party. She’d fulfilled her duty. She’d stayed up until the late hours with her mother cleaning up after Francis had gone out with Jesús and her dad had disappeared. Her mother didn’t say anything about what had occurred. Her mother was like that. Pretend it didn’t happen and it would go away.

  It’s not that she didn’t love her family, it’s just that she didn’t care for the drama of them very much. She was sure that other families didn’t feel the way that hers did – all that pent up frustration sitting heavy between the walls until it broke out at the moment you had the least emotional energy for it. She wanted to get back to the city. She sat on the bench at Parramatta Station. The train was at least ten or fifteen minutes away. Teenagers threw hot chips onto the railroad tracks. A young mother in an oversized puff jacket pushed her child in a stroller. Clare was tired. It was the sort of day when she would spend the whole afternoon in some kind of internal fog.

  On the train she picked a seat close to the window. She was ready to sit and watch places shift by through the glass. She was ready for some quiet space but she only got it until the first stop. At Granville, Paul came down the stairs into her cabin. She looked at him and looked away but he’d already seen her seeing him. There was that awkward moment when he floated around in the aisle near her seat as if he was waiting for permission before sitting down. And then, that was it. She was stuck.

  Clare didn’t know where to look so she looked out the window. Still, she could feel his presence there beside her, the heat off his skin. He smelled like bread and butter pudding. She watched the industrial estates of Clyde as they appeared and disappeared through the train window. She picked at the dirt underneath her thumbnail. She noticed he was doing the same. He was the first one to speak.

  ‘So, did you have a nice weekend?’

  It took her too long to answer his question but eventually she got there. ‘Yeah, just family stuff you know. My dad had a retirement party. Everyone was there. Kind of got out of hand.’

  She looked out to the huge rectangles of lawns in the backyards of houses somewhere near Auburn. She liked these glimpses into the private lives of others; a man smoked, staring out at the sky, a woman hung her lingerie, a kid rode in circles on his tricycle, a horse – there was always a random horse hanging around unnoticed in someone’s backyard in these neighbourhoods. And what else? Brick ovens for bread-making that reminded her of crematoriums, small alleyways between houses you could only see from the train.

  ‘You on your way to work or you going home?’ Paul asked. He sat back in his chair, cracked his knuckles. There was an easiness to him, he had a more comfortable way of being in the world than she had originally thought. She had a tendency to get so uptight about things sometimes, she had to remind herself that it was a feeling beneath her own skin. It wasn’t shared by everyone else in her proximity.

  She realised she had forgotten to keep the conversation going. She should have asked a question in response to his question. This is the way that conversation worked. She knew that, but she frequently forgot. Outside the sky was overcast. Perhaps it would rain soon.

  ‘Sundays are my day off. I think I’ll go do some shopping, walk home from Central.’

  The truth is she imagined she just wanted to wander around the streets for a while to shake the Parramatta off her. Maybe she would see a movie on Oxford Street and buy salty liquorice to eat alone in the dark, or beg one of her teacher friends to come and have a beer with her in the afternoon.

  Clare remembered she was meant to ask a question. ‘Are you rostered on today?’

  Paul flicked the hair out of his face by jerking his head back slightly. Up close his skin was more uneven, there was the slight scarring of acne on his cheekbones.

  ‘No. Just going in to meet some friends.’

  She noticed for the first time that he was carrying an enormous backpack like the Year Sevens she used to teach would, bags so full they were bigger than the kids carrying them. He reached into the top of his backpack and pulled out a plastic bag full of the flat bacon-and-cheese pizza rolls you buy at bakeries.

  ‘Want one?’ He put the bag down on her lap and opened the top, grabbing one for himself and leaving the rest there. They sat awkwardly on her lap feeling damp and warm against her skirt and inched slowly forward towards the seat in front. It was exactly what she wanted in her semi-hungover fog. She took one and put the bag between them. Strathfield slid past the window.

  The pizza roll was just as good as it looked. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Welcome,’ he said biting into one of his own, ‘I made them this morning.’

  ‘You made them? You make your own bread?’

  ‘You don’t remember. When I was in school I used to bring you stuff from my parents’ shop in Granville. I brought you Vietnamese breakfast from their shop, hot sugared dough sticks, you remember? In the mornings. You said it was the best thing you’d ever had. I thought you would remember.’

  The train stalled at Redfern. He searched her face with the one eye that wasn’t covered in hair. ‘Yeah,’ she was starting to realise now why she looked at him and always thought – bread. ‘I do remember now. Sorry it’s just that those first few years of teaching, you know, they’re kind of a blur.’

  ‘Yeah. I know. You couldn’t really cope.’

  Clare wasn’t expecting that. He was right, but it was still unnerving to be handed such a declaration so quietly and without malice, just like that, a clear statement of fact that was so true but so unsaid before that she felt like he had just taken her clothes off. She looked away from him. The remnants of the pizza roll were still in her hand. She shoved a too-large chunk of it into her mouth to stop whatever words might come out without her thinking.

  The train pulled up at Central. It was her stop. She gathered her purse and her overnight bag up close to her chest and stood. Paul got up too, moved out into the aisle and paused a moment before walking to the front of the carriage and out through the door in front of her.

  Outside it had started to storm and although there weren’t so many people on the
platform everyone was crowded close together in the middle to avoid the rain that was now beginning to bypass the roof and come in horizontally from the sides. Paul stood next to Clare, not moving, with his giant backpack hiked up high on his back.

  ‘Was it that obvious?’ She needed to know.

  ‘To me it was.’

  8.

  So, maybe he should have stayed home after it all blew up, or maybe he should have gone home eventually, but there were better things to do and besides who ever wanted to be at home anyway?

  It was the morning after the party. A Sunday and Francis was at Burger King again. Outside there was the thump, thump of a car with its bass turned up. The pop and scuttle of tires accelerating too fast over concrete. The screeching of the train on the railway line and Britney Spears screaming I’m a slave for you over the loudspeakers. They came here for the quiet. Not the kind of quiet that comes with no sound. The kind of quiet you find in a place where you don’t need to impress anyone.

  Not too long ago Francis had seen Clare walk past the front windows on her way to the station. She’d be back home by now, probably, reading fat books or writing poetry or reciting Shakespeare or whatever. He couldn’t imagine it at all, really, what she did when she was alone.

  Inside Burger King was full of tweens with bags of crap they bought at Westfield and goths from the nightclub next door. Tall thin white men with dirty hair entered through the front doors and ran up the back stairs and didn’t come down again. It was a rundown version of a 1950s milk bar. The walls had been decorated with posters that advertised Pepsi and Lifebuoy Soap. Someone had drawn thick black texta tags over the faces of the smiling kids.

  Jesús and Charbel and Francis all had cans of VB between their legs under the table and burgers and chips up above. Charbel insisted that beer cured hangovers and Francis and Jesús just liked to drink.