In the Neighbourhood of Fame Read online

  And, on the very last night, there was the eeling – the over-excited kids, the barking grandfather eel, somebody (Vince, was it?) using it to terrorise others, a boy, a sooky boy, running off into the night. Sobs carried on the wind. A rush to pull up the hooks. Dads taking the lanterns and the other kids off to rescue him. Me and Jed left there with our lines tangled. The two of us lagging behind in the shadows. Jed gloomily reciting the list of things he was required to pack for his exit to boarding school the next morning – ‘Eight pairs of white underpants with my initials sewn into them.’ Then, the others moving too far ahead. Just us two, sitting down on a fallen log to wait. Running out of things to talk about. Jed saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you stand up here?’ Not asking why. Climbing up on to the log and turning around to find that, for once, our faces were exactly level. Putting a hand on his shoulder to keep balance, and then him leaning forward. I remember thinking Don’t die in the moment just before our lips touched. And that feeling of achiness that was close to hunger as his experimental tongue found its way into my mouth. Even as it was happening I was thinking that it would always mean a lot more to me than it would to him.

  Oh, so long ago, and such an immaterial thing to have on your mind on the way to your father’s funeral.

  I’d never had much reason to want to like Jed’s wife, but it was after the funeral that my active dislike came about. It’s not completely logical, I admit. It’s possibly not even fair. But there you are. These things happen.

  First, I suppose you could say the formal part of the funeral went as well as any funeral can go. Aunt Iris got up and told some tales about when they were children, allowing herself to come off as a playfully petulant brat saved from folly by the endearingly plodding common sense of her older brother.

  Roma took her turn too, standing in front of us all with that lovely soft face and with her pregnancy beginning to show in her very slightly distended belly, and talked about how her fidgety Uncle Gerry always liked to be doing something with his hands. In the last few years, she said, he would often get us to take off our shoes so he could give them a quick polish. It became a running joke in their family, she said, that they’d remind each other to put on their most worn-out shoes before popping down the road to Uncle Gerry’s to be sure to give him some satisfaction.

  I laughed along with everybody else, but at the same time I found it excruciatingly sad. If only I’d thought to tell some sort of anecdote about him. But once I was sitting in the church I felt unprepared to do anything but the reading my aunt had suggested, and even then I wasn’t sure I could get through it. Perhaps I could have mentioned the story about the eeling? But it was hard to frame that, as he wasn’t normally given to adventures of that kind. Looking through the family album for a photo for the front cover of his memorial book, I’d been struck by how many were taken on completion of a project. Here he was in his stubbies, shirt off, cracking open the first beer on the newly finished deck. Here he was concreting the driveway. Here he was filling the new Para up with water. Here he was with Uncle Simon, sitting in the just-finished two-car garage, bottles of DB at their feet and the barbecue smoking away in the corner. That was mostly what he did for pleasure – indulging his work ethic.

  A woman I’d never met before asked for permission to speak, and gave an earnest speech about how valued my father’s work had been in Home Sweet Home, a charitable trust helping local elderly people manage their lives in their own homes. His skills at doing everything from fixing dripping taps to putting in cat doors would be dearly missed, she said. The woman spoke of him so warmly that I wondered if there might have been something between them. My mother died eleven years ago, so it’s possible he’d had some flirtations, dalliances. There were certainly a lot of other candidates – the pews were packed with dewy-eyed widows.

  I’d known many intimate details about my father – had heard him padding down to the toilet three times a night, sat across from him as he dipped his freshly peeled boiled egg into a little pool of salt at breakfast, knew the tunes that he whistled as he weeded his vegetables, and I’d heard the jokes he told when he was a bit pissed at Christmas. But I’d not lived in the same city as him for many years and I didn’t know if he’d lately had love in his life. Sitting in that pew, the largeness of previously unknown layers emerged at what felt like high velocity, in the way an avalanche suddenly exposes a new rock face, but it was far too late for the unsought truth.

  At one stage I looked across and saw Dylan blinking hard. At last there was some dissolution in the world of cool he had been wearing around himself like an impenetrable, protecting skin. Perhaps the funeral was broadening for him. Maybe it was forcing him to feel some new respect for his grandfather, some sense of loss at least. I wondered if it was occurring to him that he had nothing much left to hold on to now, in the patriarchal sense.

  Afterwards, in the Atrium, I was reaching for an asparagus roll, not sure if I could actually get it down, when my eye caught on a small group of men, clumped together, looking awkward. They were approaching forty now, all those boys from school. They could have been in their prime, but not these ones – the ones who had seldom travelled south of the bridge. I’d seen a few of them before on my trips back home. Jonty who’d taken over his father’s real-estate franchise down the road. And Peter from the chippy, who everyone could see liked his product a bit too much. And Terry who married his girlfriend from high school, and did his plumbing apprenticeship with his father-in-law, and once kindly came around to Dad’s on Boxing Day when the sewerage system gave out and the toilet was backing up to the rim. One of them (Jamie, was it?) had lost a few fingers. It was good of them to come. They were that kind of community-minded men now.

  I took a breath and forced myself to go over. They were bent towards each other – Christ, you should’ve seen the arse on it, one of them was telling the others – but they widened their circle to welcome me in. ‘Sorry for your loss,’ they muttered. Things like that. Terry, who had scabby knuckles and whose suit gave off the sweet odour of mould, was blushing at the strain of coming up with the correct social nicety. ‘Haven’t seen you for ages,’ he tried. They, like me, were holding cups of tea but looked as if they were desperate for an open bar. It had been my aunt’s idea to hold the gathering in the church’s new Atrium straight after the funeral. ‘Your dad was a really good bloke,’ one of them said. There was a lull then, an awkwardness, as a suitable topic of conversation was reached for.

  Jamie cleared his throat. ‘Keeping the house?’

  ‘Um. Bit too soon to know,’ I said. ‘Probably not.’

  ‘So you’ll be going back to … Aussie, is it?’

  ‘Good time to sell at the moment,’ Jonty offered. ‘Probably won’t take long. But you might be best to rent it out. Hang on to it. You never know when you might want to come back.’ He’d become the sort of man who was used to dispensing advice.

  I shrugged. Any thoughts about what needed to be done were instantly exhausting, like standing before a muddy bog you were expected to chug your way through.

  Jonty said, ‘Your dad’s house is near Jed’s, isn’t it? Ever see him around?’

  ‘Yes. He popped in this morning,’ I told them, and they all looked at me with interest and mild surprise. ‘That was the first time I’d seen him for years, though,’ I added. They nodded, and I had the feeling they were almost relieved.

  ‘Did he talk about his new album?’ Jonty asked.

  ‘No. Has he got a new one coming out?’

  ‘Rumour has it.’

  ‘Concrete rumour? Or speculative, do you think?’

  ‘Pretty concrete. My sister’s boyfriend reckons he did some horn-playing on it.’

  ‘And next-door’s son sometimes helps out in the glasshouses and reckons Jed’s got a studio all set up in one of his sheds,’ Terry said.

  Ah, I understood now where that sense of relief had come from. This lot had stuck around but hadn’t been able to maintain a pers
onal friendship with Jed, and it was threatening to think somebody from the original gang had somehow managed it from all the way over in Australia. It had always been slightly humiliating that Jed’s celebrity had pushed all of us, his earliest and we’d like to think sincerest of friends, towards a degree of unimportance in his life.

  ‘Bout time he did something new,’ Terry said.

  ‘Yeah, it’s been a waste,’ Peter agreed.

  I wanted to ask them more about Jed, but I also itched to move away. In the midst of their company it felt like we were collectively nothing more than the sad, bedraggled little crew who had long ago lost their captain and never sailed again. I glanced back around the room, and a woman I didn’t know caught my eye and motioned me into a corner.

  ‘I was the one who found him, you know,’ she said.

  ‘Found him?’ I’d noticed this woman in the church earlier, with her triple-looped pearls, sitting with the Home Sweet Home lot. Even now she was wearing the expression of someone who considered herself to be an altruist.

  ‘On the street. Poor man. Like everyone else, I thought at first he was one of the homeless sleeping it off, but then I recognised those polished boots.’

  A vein pulsed on the side of my neck. ‘What do you mean, like everyone else?’

  The woman flushed. ‘Well, the others that had passed him that morning. It’s just he’d fallen in the doorway of a pub, and he’d … well, he’d …’ She hesitated, changed tack. ‘We were going to the same meeting. That’s how I knew him, you see, from the Home Sweet Home committee. He was the only man any of us ever knew who polished up his work boots and we—’

  ‘Wait. He’d what? What had happened? He’d what?’

  ‘Well, he’d … oh dear, I didn’t mean to say …’

  ‘But you’ve started now.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s best if I don’t …’

  ‘It’s best if you just tell me,’ I insisted, but I was scared now.

  ‘Well he’d … um … lost control of himself.’ She grimaced, hating now to be the one with this news.

  What did she mean? That he’d collapsed in some sort of untidy heap? Or did she mean he’d wet himself? Or worse?

  Suddenly it was as though the floor around my feet was moving. I thrust my cup and saucer into the woman’s hands and rushed blindly towards the ladies’ room. Safely inside the cubicle, I sat on the toilet and wondered why I hadn’t thought before to ask what had happened. They’d called me at the restaurant in Melbourne, and by the time I’d arranged a flight and arrived at the hospital, he’d already died. They told me simply that he’d collapsed on his way to a meeting and been collected in an ambulance. Why hadn’t I thought to ask more than that? Now the possibilities were just horrible. Had he lain incontinent and half alive in the street while people looked away, thinking he was just some drunk, nobody they had to care about?

  It took me some long minutes to pull myself together. I wanted to stay inside the toilet, with its grim odour of industrial cleaners and plastic perfume, until everybody had gone home, but I felt still a duty to try to endure the remainder of the afternoon. This was not the time to fall to pieces.

  The woman was waiting near the toilet door. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said urgently. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything. I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  ‘Did he speak? Did he say anything?’

  ‘Well, no, he made some noises but … well, not words. It was lucky I came along. I was late for the meeting and I had missed my bus and I nearly didn’t go at all.’

  ‘What time did you find him?’

  ‘I suppose it was about 9 a.m.’

  ‘And what time was the meeting supposed to be?’

  ‘Eight-thirty.’

  My father was seldom late for anything. Had he lain there for half an hour with all those morning commuters passing him by? Maybe stepping over the damp line that ran from his body to the gutter, thinking What a squalid disgrace?

  ‘And what pub?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The pub where he collapsed in the doorway?’

  The woman searched the room for support. ‘I don’t know the name, dear. It’s the one next door to the big BNZ bank.’

  ‘Right. Thanks then.’

  As I walked away, the woman called out, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  What had she expected, I wondered, when she’d urged me over with her wretched little half-smile? She’d used that veil of deep sincerity to deliver something that would haunt me forever. Had some cruel little part of her meant to do it, at the same time she was convincing herself that I would like to share in the profundity of her experience, her terrible presence during my father’s last minutes?

  The next morning I got up very early and drove into town. I was sitting in the doorway of The Dark Ale by 8.30 and then spent the next half hour, feeling near insane, staring at the parade of faces, thinking: Was it you? Was it you?

  Some people met my gaze, but not many. Mostly they just stared ahead of themselves, at where they were going. They hurried along, their shoes clicking on the footpath, a wave of careless humanity. I began to hate every single passing person.

  Amidst it all there was one face I thought I recognised. Lauren, from next door. I couldn’t be sure, though, because I’d only ever seen her in photos, and Lauren – or not Lauren – was one of the ones who never turned her head.

  Lauren

  A person can never predict, in this business, what the day ahead might deliver, so one initiative is simply parking a fair distance from work and making time in the morning to walk to the office. This provides some internal space for contemplation, to clear the head. You barely notice things around you as you take this time to adjust to the oblique persona that being a manager requires. Actors are not the only ones who take on roles. And you can’t be expected to take things in as you’re making this effort to separate from your domestic self.

  Less than an hour earlier you’d been standing at the kitchen bench, rinsing the breakfast dishes, when your husband came up beside you and some movement outside the window caused you both to look in its direction. Jaspar appeared around the side of the big shed, a stick in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other. For a quiet moment you stood at the sink together, watching the beaky, clumsy way your son bent down, putting the glass to his eye and poking hopelessly at the ground, looking for ants. Finding the nest and its queen in the name of scientific endeavour and concurrent household usefulness has become his latest obsession.

  ‘There goes Miss Marple,’ Jed commented.

  His little finger hooked itself around yours, and you had an idea that he might be thinking about the same thing as you, the birthday party a couple of weeks earlier which Jaspar had decided he wanted to have at Lasertag. You’d mustered up eight other boys, and Kylie from down on the corner, and the overly pierced instructor equipped them all with their helmets and their guns and their instructions, divided them up into teams, and sent them through the door. Later, they came out flushed and animated, and while they were handing back their gear Jaspar said in a high, uncomfortable voice, ‘I just want to make an announcement. I’d like to apologise to all those members of my own team that I accidentally shot.’ Two of the taller kids rolled their eyes behind him, and it became apparent, in that moment, that he had inherited too much of your social anxiety and not enough of his father’s cool detachment. You’d glimpsed Jed’s face and thought the same thing was occurring to him.

  Early on in your pregnancy, before you were even showing, a magazine had published a photograph taken at a release party with the caption: Gorgeous hook-up – Rock God Jed Jordan and his beautiful partner Lauren. It had its effect. You chose to believe that the implications of this had weight, and throughout the pregnancy you’d felt a nervous anticipation that the child you produced together would live up to its advantages. When you found out you were expecting a boy, you could only imagine him as some wondrous evolution of Jed, or at least the version yo
u used to believe in back then, with his tallness, his talent, a well-constructed face, and that strength of bearing – all amounting to the sort of magnetism that even animals were attracted to.

  This morning as you’d stood together at the window watching your awkward boy stooping in a vaguely incompetent way towards discovery, poking about with a stick like a half-blind peasant woman grubbing around for the season’s last potatoes, the tentacles of your heart flailed wildly towards what was in front of you. You didn’t think you could have loved that imagined child with quite this strength. That child wouldn’t need you as much, and might even have turned you into one of those awful mothers you used to see circling the school gates, speaking boorishly of achievements and conspicuously picking off the parents of other popular children on behalf of their prodigies. A strong, hot wave of belonging came to you right there at the kitchen sink – which is something when a person is mostly living in the damp mist of ennui.

  Floyd allows you only just enough time to settle behind your desk, fire up your computer and glance at the forward bookings before he is knocking at the door. ‘Lauren?’ he says, offering the morning’s paper folded open at the arts section, and it’s obvious from his extravagantly dire expression that it won’t be good.

  In the early days you’d been as avid as anybody else for printed reviews, but these days you’d avoid them if you could. Your hands used to tremble with anticipation as you turned the paper’s pages after an opening night. Nowadays you try to scan any reviews that do appear with a purely pragmatic eye. A good review gives you a sense of vindication that you’d made a set of sound decisions, and a bad one forces you to consider if there are any aspects of the failure you should take into account for booking new work in the future. Is it so drastic that you need to urge some practical improvement on the show right now?