The Full Ridiculous (17 page)

…Is that even a word?

You peel out of the line and run back to your car. Pad and pen are not on the seat or in the compartment between the front seats. You check the glove box and feel around on the floor. You open the back door and grope under the seats. Nothing.

You must have left them at home.
Shit
.

Out of breath, you sit in the driver’s seat, cursing yourself. It does not occur to you that the proprietor of the cinema could lend you a pen and paper. It does not occur to you that you are parked in a shopping centre where any number of shops would happily sell you a pen and paper. It does not occur to you that either of these arrangements could be made well before your movie commences, while the ads and trailers are running.

So you drive home thinking you’ll go to an evening session instead, congratulating yourself on another day wasted. When you pull into the driveway mid-afternoon, Wendy’s car is there.

Ugly hot panic flushes through you.
Why is she home in the middle of the day? What’s gone wrong now?

Declan comes to the door not wearing his school uniform.
Oh God, he’s been expelled.

‘What’s happened? Why aren’t you at school?’

He narrows his eyes and looks at you as if you are utterly insane. ‘It’s Saturday,’ he answers.

You go inside and there they are—the culprits—the special pen and paper just
sitting there
on the kitchen table in barefaced defiance;
not a care in the world, not a single thought to the trauma they have put you through or the time they have wasted by not being where you thought you had put them.

Wendy is in the back garden, watering the wilting herb garden that you promised not to neglect but did. She motions for you to come outside, which you do. It’s an unusually hot spring day (hence the watering) and Rosie and Juan are splashing around in the pool.

Somewhere in the outer orbits of your consciousness this gives you pleasure because you always suspected that you installed the pool too late for the kids to get proper use out of it.

You grew up with a swimming pool in the days when they were not a common addition to middle-class gardens. You remember your pool as pivotal to your childhood, the centrepiece of long happy summers splashing around with the neighbourhood kids. You loved it until your dad died and money was scarce and the filter pump seemed to break down every second weekend of your adolescence. Then you hated the hours you spent trying to fix it while your mother wept quietly in the kitchen, appearing intermittently with cordial and cake to thank you for being such a good boy.

You didn’t want a pool because of these memories but Wendy pushed it and eventually you conceded when Declan was in his final year of primary school. You spent way too much on the construction and ended up having to do the landscaping yourself.

You’re particularly proud of the stand of Australian native ferns and palms you planted. They took a couple of years to establish but now provide a handsome screen from the surrounding houses.

Wendy says something with her mouth closed. It sounds like ‘rook’ but you realise it’s ‘look’. She cocks her head sideways towards the swimming pool.

You scan the pool area where Rosie and Juan splash each other, oblivious to your presence. You scan the palms to see if one has died. You try to peer beyond the palms into the yard next door.

You look back to Wendy and shrug.

She rolls her eyes and turns her back to the pool so she is directly facing you. The spray of the hose comes with her but she whips it away before it wets you. ‘Juan,’ she says very quietly. ‘Look at Juan.’

You look at Juan, laughing and splashing, and then you see it. You can’t quite believe you’re seeing it so you position yourself to get a better view. Sure enough, there it is.

You turn to Wendy, your mouth agape.

‘Holy shit,’ you say, then you both turn back to look at Juan.

Emblazoned across his chest—worse than emblazoned:
tattooed—
in ornate capital letters is the name ROSIE.

‘Is that a real tattoo?’

‘Apparently.’

‘How do you know?’

‘He told me.’

‘What did he say?’

‘I said, “Is that a tattoo?” and he said, “Yes.”’

‘What did Rosie say?’

‘Rosie thinks it’s cool.’

‘What do we do?’

‘What can we do? We’re not his parents.’

‘Yeah but…’

‘Yeah, I know.’

Declan starts his final exams in mid-October. First up is a three-hour English paper. You’re glad because English is one of his strong suits and hopefully it will give him the confidence boost he needs to get through the next six examinations, spread out over a gruelling three weeks.

You’re in the study when you hear a doof-doof outside and you look out the window to see Declan pour out of a green sedan packed with Mount Karver boys. It’s a hot day—summer has arrived prematurely—and the lads have shed their blazers and ties. There are shouts of farewell and some four-letter banter and the car doof-doofs away.

Declan strolls up the winding front path with a satchel slung over his shoulder, swinging his blazer. There is a lightness to him that might indicate relief that the exam is over or, better still, that he feels he has done well.

He kisses you hello at the door and brightly answers, ‘Good!’ when you ask him how it went.

Phew!

You follow him into the kitchen and are only a few minutes into the laborious process of trying to extract details from him before the opportunity vanishes, swept away by preparations for the next exam.

He’s telling you about the Shakespeare section, and how lucky it was he’d written an essay for Mel on exactly the same topic, when the doorbell rings. You don’t want to answer it while you have his attention but it rings again and he goes to see who is there.

Juan’s mother, Bernadette, is at your door.

Declan hasn’t met Bernadette so she introduces herself and he responds politely and warmly. He explains that Juan is not home but invites her in. She asks where Juan is. He tells her he doesn’t know. You can hear the disappointment in her voice and so can Declan so he invites her in again.

You’re relieved when you hear her decline. You don’t want to be mean but you want to finish this conversation with your son without interruption.

Then you realise you
are
being mean so you get up and go to the door. ‘Hello Bernadette!’ you say, with all the enthusiasm you can muster.

Bernadette Moffat sits at your kitchen table, watching Declan kick a soccer ball around the backyard while Egg tries to capture it in his mouth. You look too and register that the lawn needs mowing. Bernadette sips her tea. She tells you what a lovely little boy Juan was until adolescence struck. Her heartbreak is so palpable that you want to give her a hug only you know she’d think it was weird.

She tells you that her daughter Emilia is no trouble at all but Juan has trashed the house so many times that his father refuses to allow him back. He’s been in trouble with the police too.

Who hasn’t?

Bernadette supposes things would be different if he wasn’t adopted. You suggest that kids don’t necessarily go bad because they’ve been adopted. ‘Look at Emilia,’ you say. ‘You just said she was no trouble.’

‘Yes, but she’s a girl. Girls tend to be more placid.’

Not the ones you know.

You decide to tell Bernadette something you don’t tell many people. Not that you keep it a secret but it rarely seems relevant. Right now it is relevant.

‘I’m adopted,’ you say quietly.

She looks surprised. She asks you how old you were when you were adopted and you tell her the story: your parents had two natural children, your sisters, Tess and Ingrid. They wanted more but after a series of late-pregnancy miscarriages decided to adopt. You came to them when you were one day old and, even though you’ve always known you were adopted, your parents embraced you as their son and loved you fiercely. You’ve always felt like you belonged.

Your sisters never once raised the fact of your adoption, not in argument or even in the subtle devious ways that children can sometimes deploy when there are territorial tussles over toys or belongings or privacy. You never buy lottery tickets because you believe you used up all your luck being chosen by such an extraordinarily accepting family.

Bernadette says most people don’t appreciate their families. She tells you how she and her husband John tried and failed with IVF and finally adopted Juan and Emilia from an orphanage in Buenos Aires when he was fifteen months old and she was just over two. It’s easier to get them when they are a little bit older and you’re prepared to take siblings. She asks you if you know anything about your birth parents but instead of waiting for an answer she tells you that she knows nothing of Juan and Emilia’s father, except that he was ‘obviously the black one’, and little of his mother, except that she was a ‘native’ living in terrible poverty.

Bernadette doesn’t understand why Juan isn’t more grateful. He could be stuck in Argentina, starving and penniless. She tells you how they built part of their house as a kind of child’s wonderland especially for him and his sister. Emilia appreciates all the opportunities she has been given but Juan just doesn’t seem to care. As she begins to list all the things they have bought for him, from skateboards to trail bikes and beyond, you see that she and her husband expect Juan to express his gratitude by being compliant and well behaved.

You imagine his early years when he
was
compliant and well behaved but that wasn’t good enough. Back then he was probably supposed to express his gratitude by excelling at everything—best at spelling, best at kicking, best at singing—or by doing as well as Emilia. Emilia won the spelling bee, scored the winning goal, sang the solo. Why didn’t you?

You imagine little Juan wilting under the pressure of it all, disappointing them with small failures at first until eventually he thinks,
fuck it I’m not going to play this game
. Then of course it’s a slippery slope to smashing up his room and telling his dad to shove his disapproval where the sun don’t shine.

It all plays out in front of you until it occurs to you that you do not have sufficient evidence to be so judgmental. Nonetheless, you do feel the burden of Juan’s responsibility to be grateful so you point out that Juan doesn’t know any different. He’s grown up in his luxurious surroundings—that’s his reality—not the grinding poverty of his birth mother’s world.

Bernadette supposes you’re right. And anyway, she adds, kids shouldn’t have to be grateful to their parents. It’s the parent’s job to provide them with everything they can. Right?

Right.

You sip your tea.

‘Of course, he was the product of a rape.’

‘Pardon?’

‘His mother was raped. By her husband but still it was a rape. That’s how she conceived him. Emilia was a different story but that’s how she conceived Juan.’

You’re taken aback. Why has she given you this information? What are you supposed to do with it?
Does she think her son is the bad seed of an evil action, destined to play out his fate as a bad man?
In some weird way it seems disloyal to have divulged this supposedly damning fact.

‘Do you think—?’ you begin to ask.

‘Well, is it nature or nurture? That’s all I’m saying.’

‘So you think he’s somehow programmed?’

‘I wouldn’t go that far. I just sometimes think that, no matter what I do, I’m up against it. That’s all.’

You’re not sure why but there’s something in this idea that you find deeply offensive. You feel a sudden well of protective affection for the kid living in the converted garage under your house. You know you have no right to judge this woman—God knows, you’re stumbling through parenthood pretty pitifully yourself—but you feel compelled to say, ‘Well, he’s always welcome here.’

‘You haven’t seen the horrible side of him. Not yet, anyway.’

You are suddenly reminded of your own mother asking you, aged fifteen, after a terrible fight about not being allowed out when all your friends were, why you were so nice to everybody else and so horrible to her. ‘But you’re my mother!’ you replied, as if that made her the natural repository of all your ills and woes. You recall the way she looked at you, still reeling from the crossfire of harsh words, but so deeply satisfied with your answer that you thought she might crow.

You look at Juan’s mother and wonder whether to tell her about her son’s new tattoo. You decide not to because:

(a) she’ll find out soon enough, and

(b) right now she’s filled to capacity with doom and gloom.

It wouldn’t be like adding another straw to break the camel’s back. It would be like dropping a steel girder on the camel from a great height.

24

You’ve come so often to the psychiatrist’s office that his receptionist calls you Mike and you call her Em. This must mean you are pretty close because even Wendy still calls you Michael. Em is in her early thirties and saving to go travelling in Europe with her boyfriend, Anton. Anton still lives at home with his parents and Em is trying to lever him out of his comfort zone.

Em tells you all this stuff and more, much more, while you are pretending to read the glossy magazines that are actually
in
-date in the waiting room. You know all about Em’s life, Anton’s life, her mum, Jen, her sister, Anna, her previous boss, Derek-the-dentist (she was a dental nurse until boredom struck and she decided to explore psychiatry, quote unquote) and a whole host of other friends and family. Sometimes you have to wait up to twenty minutes to see Doctor Maurice. You can learn a lot about a person in twenty minutes.

You don’t like to be rude and tell Em to shut up and download her shit on some other sucker because you don’t like to be rude.
Also because she might switch your prescription with a menopausal madwoman’s and suddenly you’ll be growing man-boobs.
You were almost fifteen kilos overweight at your most recent weigh-in. Man-boobs are the last thing you need.

This week Doctor Maurice wants to explore previous traumatic events in your life. He tried to do this before but you’ve always baulked at the idea, essentially because you feel your cup runneth over with current traumas. But Doctor Maurice persists, insisting that it is essential to your recovery. He thinks the trauma of the accident has triggered the memory of previous traumas, and because you have not resolved your feelings about them you are unable to move on and deal with this one. There’s a logic to it, you suppose, so you consent to go ‘exploring’ with him.