Whiskey & Charlie (16 page)

“It was really Oscar who cheered me up,” Charlie said, “isn't that right, Oscar?”

Oscar beamed.

x x x

“You'd make a great dad, Charlie,” Juliet said on the way home.

“I think one day a fortnight's enough for me at the moment,” Charlie said lightly.

“That's true. But still. Don't you think about having kids of your own one day?”

“I can't really think about that right now, Juliet.”

“I know you're thinking about Whiskey. And I am too. But for some reason, the accident's made me think about other things, kids and stuff. Have you found that?”

“I'm still trying to take it in.”

“Has it made you wonder though,” she said carefully, “about what Whiskey and Rosa asked us, about the decision we made?”

“We said we wouldn't talk about that.”

“I know. But it feels different now. I've been thinking about it, haven't you?”

“No, Juliet,” Charlie said. “I haven't and I don't want to. What's done is done.”

But Charlie was lying when he said he hadn't been thinking about the decision they'd made. Since Whiskey's accident, it had been one of the things he had thought about most. Two years before, when Rosa broached the topic with them, things had seemed simpler, clearer. Rosa had told Charlie the facts. They had started trying to have children as soon as they were married. When nothing had happened after six months, they had gone for testing, which was how they had found out Whiskey was, as Rosa put it, shooting blanks.

Rosa said Whiskey's infertility was probably due to an accident he'd had when he was twelve. Charlie knew immediately which accident Rosa was referring to. Whiskey and his friend Joel had built a makeshift bike ramp up against an ancient piece of farm machinery in the abandoned yard behind their house. On the first run, the ramp had collapsed under Whiskey's weight, and he had ripped open his groin on the rough edge of the rusty old machine. Charlie hadn't seen Whiskey cry since they were very young boys. Whenever he fell out of something or crashed into something, when he broke something or cut something open, he staved off the pain by swearing, muttering every foul word he could think of until their mother or father loaded him into the car for the hospital. This time he didn't swear. He lay on his back groaning, and Charlie could see tears sliding across his face and running down the back of his collar. Seeing the mess and blood down below, Charlie had felt the pain in his own groin. Even Joel, who never knew when to shut up, was momentarily silenced. After they had stitched him up, the doctor said the accident might affect Whiskey's ability to have children. Charlie had hardly understood what he meant. They were still children themselves.

The details came later, via Juliet. Trying for children straightaway had been one of the conditions on which Rosa agreed to marry Whiskey. Already twenty-nine when they met, she had been thinking about having children for some time, and now that she had met Whiskey, she didn't want to wait.

This detail was one of the things that had bothered Charlie. Until he met Rosa, Whiskey had shown no interest in children. Charlie had thought he was too selfish for it, that he would be afraid it would cramp his style. It did not seem right to Charlie that Whiskey could have changed his mind so quickly.

To get married after two weeks' acquaintance was one thing. If it didn't work, Whiskey and Rosa could separate, never had to see each other again if they didn't want to. Financially speaking, Rosa would be slightly richer, Whiskey slightly poorer; emotionally speaking, they might both be more cynical, less likely to jump so quickly the next time, but otherwise intact. But children were something else. To have them or not to have them did not seem to Charlie to be a decision you should make in the throes of a whirlwind romance. It wasn't a choice you could make to please someone else. It was a decision that needed a lot of time and thought, that you had to make slowly and carefully, that you had to be sure of. Certainly this was how Charlie viewed the decision when it came to having children of his own.

Because Whiskey and Rosa had started trying for children so quickly, by the time they asked Charlie to be a sperm donor, they hadn't even been married for a year. True, this was longer than any of Whiskey's previous relationships had lasted, and from the little he saw of them, Whiskey did seem different with Rosa than he had been with girls in the past. But Charlie wasn't convinced the changes in Whiskey were permanent. Nine or ten months was no time at all. It didn't mean they would last the distance. It seemed far more likely to Charlie that within a few months, the luster would wear off Whiskey's relationship with Rosa, and he would revert to type, cheating on her with a cutout doll who would be impressed by his salary, his car.

The first thing Charlie did was have his own sperm tested. Even though he was almost certain it was the accident that had caused Whiskey's infertility, there was a tiny chance that something else had affected Whiskey, something that might also have affected Charlie. Getting the all clear felt complicated. It meant Charlie could have children of his own someday, when he wanted…if he wanted. But it also meant he had to make a decision about donating sperm to Whiskey and Rosa.

It would be, genetically speaking, exactly the same as Whiskey's sperm. The child would be like Whiskey. No one would ever need to know it had grown out of Charlie's cells. And that was the way Whiskey wanted it. He told Rosa he didn't want other people speculating about his ability to father children. He wouldn't even consider adoption. Which meant Charlie was their only hope.

Charlie had tried not to let that cloud his decision. He had tried to be unemotional about it, to keep his head clear of his heart. He had questioned whether Whiskey would make a good father. He had wondered if Whiskey could ever put someone else's needs before his own. He had asked himself if there was much chance of Whiskey's marriage to Rosa lasting. To each question, the answer had been no. And so in the end, no was the answer Charlie had given Rosa.

To Rosa's credit, she had not asked Charlie to justify his decision. It had never again been discussed, and Charlie had tried to forget about it. In the two years since, he had mostly been successful. But since Whiskey's accident, it had been on his mind again. Now Charlie felt that everything about the decision he made had been wrong. He was ashamed of the high moral ground he had taken, ashamed of the opportunity he had taken away from Whiskey, from Rosa.

Now he wondered what had given him the right to decide if Whiskey and Rosa were equipped to be parents, to judge them and their relationship. What arrogance he'd had, to think he might do any better at it himself. He had failed in the role of brother. It was not unreasonable to suppose he would do just as badly in the role of father. At the time, it had seemed to Charlie that he was doing everyone—Whiskey, Rosa, the child—a favor by preventing the advent of something that was doomed to failure.

But Whiskey and Rosa had not asked him to make a decision for them. They had asked for his help, for a gift only he could give. And he had refused.

* * *

Ever since the G-tube operation, Charlie has been avoiding the hospital. Initially he told himself that all the time he'd spent at the hospital had worn him out, that he needed a few days to regroup, recover his strength. But he finds that the longer he stays away, the less he wants to go back.

“It's awful, isn't it,” Juliet says, “just waiting for something else to go wrong?”

But in fact, it is not the feeling that something might go wrong at any moment that frightens Charlie—it is the absence of that feeling.

In the first couple of weeks after the accident, when everything had been a matter of life and death, Charlie had been able to occupy himself with learning about coma, understanding the particulars of Whiskey's condition, finding his way around the hospital, getting to know the staff. There had been the surgical procedures required to stabilize Whiskey's condition, the endless testing, the medical emergencies—a constant flurry of activity, which had left Charlie with neither the time nor the energy to think beyond the immediate problems they were facing.

But the insertion of the G-tube seems to have marked a turning point. Charlie gets the impression that the medical staff are no longer expecting that Whiskey might die at any moment, but they are no longer expecting that he might wake from the coma either. Whiskey is still monitored constantly by the nurses in the intensive care unit; the therapists still come daily. But the sense of anticipation that surrounded Whiskey seems to have ebbed away, leaving a gap. And it is into this gap that Charlie's thoughts flood, the thoughts he has, until then, managed to keep at bay.

And that is the real reason why he can no longer bear to be at the hospital, and, more importantly, why he can't bear to be left alone with Whiskey, not even for the five or ten minutes it takes Rosa or his mother to get a coffee or freshen up in the bathroom. Because Charlie can't stand to sit there beside Whiskey, asking himself the same question over and over again: Why didn't he accept Whiskey's apology when he had the chance?

Charlie never thought of calling his brother anything other than Whiskey. But it had been a long time since he called his father Papa. After his father moved back to England, Charlie couldn't even bring himself to say Dad. If he had to speak about him to others, he referred to him as
my
father
; otherwise, he called him Bill.

Charlie was twenty-five when his parents split up. At that stage, in his own relationship history, he'd never once made it past the one-year mark. He didn't know the first thing about commitment, about what it took to make a marriage work. But he had thought he understood his parents' peculiar dynamic. Even from a young age, it had been clear to Charlie that his father was more in love with his mother than she was with him. Over the years, Charlie had often thought his mother might one day leave his father. It had never crossed his mind that it might go the other way.

True, it had seemed slightly odd that Bill's two-week trip to England for his father's funeral had ended up lasting two months. But when Charlie's father said the will was not as straightforward as it had seemed, that his sister's husband was making things difficult, that he wanted to stay until the sale of the house went through, Charlie had no reason to disbelieve him. And as it turned out, the reasons he gave for staying were far less preposterous than the truth, which was that he had extended his trip because he had fallen in love.

“Your father's had a rush of shit to the brain,” Charlie's mother had said when she told him and Whiskey.

Never in his life had Charlie heard his mother use such a crass expression. But when he heard the story, he couldn't blame her. Their father had confessed to the affair on the way back from the airport, explaining that he had wanted to be honest from the start but had thought it better to wait until they were face-to-face. Elaine had pulled into the emergency stopping lane on the Tullamarine Freeway, unloaded Bill's suitcase, and told him to get out of the car. As soon as she got home, she had arranged to have the locks changed, and then she had gone through the house, separating Bill's things from her own and throwing them into garbage bags, which she dumped on the front lawn.

Charlie's father had called him a few days later from his friend Neil's house where he was staying. He had said that Elaine had never really loved him and that he hadn't been happy for years. He'd said he didn't expect Charlie to understand but he felt he'd been given another chance with Terri, and if he didn't take it, he might regret it for the rest of his life. He had wanted to meet up with Charlie and Whiskey, to explain it properly, but they both felt the same—they didn't want to hear it. They were disgusted with their father, more disgusted still when the details filtered through from their father's sister in England, who was as appalled by the situation as they were.

It turned out that Terri had been their grandfather's home caregiver, whom Bill had met at his father's funeral and begun his affair with only days later. To make matters worse, Terri was years younger than Bill, only a year or two older than Whiskey and Charlie.

When Audrey heard about it, she'd said it was a midlife crisis, a response to the shock of his father's death, that Bill would never leave Elaine. But Audrey had been wrong. Charlie's father sorted out his belongings, packing those he wanted to take with him to England and getting rid of the rest. He had booked his ticket, closed his bank accounts, sold his car, and in a matter of weeks, he was gone.

Charlie's mother had said she should never have married him in the first place, and then that she wished she'd left him when she first thought about it, before they moved to Australia. It wasn't until Mike's letter came and Audrey told Charlie the story of how his parents' marriage began that his mother's comments made sense to Charlie.

Bill had been gone for years by then. He had sent a card every Christmas and on Charlie's birthday, and every once in a while, he had called Charlie. He was always drunk when he phoned—Charlie could hear it in his voice. Charlie didn't know if he called because he was drunk or if he got drunk in order to call. He didn't much care. He had nothing to say to his father. He answered Bill's questions in monosyllables, and when the silences became too long to bear, his father would make an excuse and hang up.

After the letter came from Mike, Charlie began to feel that he had been too hard on his father, that some of the things Bill had tried to tell him before he left for England might have been true. He thought about calling his father, making an effort to patch up their relationship. But then Whiskey had the accident, and everything changed.

x x x

“Does Bill know?” Charlie asked his mother when he saw her at the hospital the day after the accident.

“I rang him this morning.”

“When's he arriving?”

“He said he'll ‘sit tight' for a day or so until there's a clearer…diagnosis.”

“He said
what
?”

Elaine shook her head.

“Did you tell him how serious it was?”

She nodded.

“You told him Whiskey was in a coma?”

She nodded again.

“Does he know Whiskey might…?”

“I told him, Charlie. I told him everything we know.”

“And he isn't coming?”

“He didn't say he wouldn't come. He just said he wanted to wait a day or two, see what happened.”

“Jesus Christ,” Charlie said. “What's wrong with him? It might all be over in a day or two, doesn't he understand that? Whiskey's his son!”

“I don't understand it any better than you do, Charlie. But he's not my husband anymore. I can't tell him what to do. If he doesn't have the sense to know he should be on a plane right now, it's not my place to tell him.”

“Well, then I'll tell him,” Charlie said. “This is no time to wait and see. Any normal person would be on the first flight out. I'll tell him whether he likes it or not.”

x x x

Bill wasn't home when Charlie called, but Charlie was so fired up he couldn't wait to say his piece; he delivered it to the answering machine, expletives and all. Afterward, he could barely remember what he had said, but whatever it was, it had the desired effect: Bill left his own message for Charlie the next morning, giving details of a flight arriving the following day.
Neil's meeting me, so you don't need to worry about picking me up,
the message said. Charlie couldn't believe Bill had thought it might be an option for Charlie to pick him up after the blasting Charlie had given him. He tried not to let the message irritate him. He knew he should focus on the positive—at least his father was coming.

The following morning, Charlie called from the hospital to confirm that his father's flight had arrived on schedule. Taking into account the time needed to pass through customs, collect his luggage, and drive through the city to the hospital, Charlie estimated his father should be there within two hours.

By the time Bill finally arrived, almost five hours after his plane landed, Charlie was incensed.

“Where the hell have you been?” he asked when he saw his father dithering around at the nurses' station.

“Charlie,” Bill said, moving toward him awkwardly, as if unsure about whether to hug him.

Charlie stood rigid, and his father dropped back.

“I was absolutely shattered,” Bill said apologetically. “I thought it would be better to have a few hours' shut-eye before I came down here.”

“Better for who?” Charlie felt like knocking his father to the ground.
Your
son
could
have
died
while
you
were
catching
up
on
sleep!
he wanted to shout, but he was so angry he couldn't speak.

“How's he doing?” Bill asked.

“What do you care?” Charlie asked. He hadn't seen his father for six years, and he walked away from him without even shaking his hand.

“Come on, Charlie,” his father called after him. “Don't be like that. I've come all this way. I need to talk to you. I've got something to tell you.”

But Charlie didn't look back. He didn't want to hear it.

He was angrier still when he learned from his mother that Bill had planned to stay only for a week.

“I don't believe it,” Charlie said. “He stays in England for eight weeks for someone who's already dead, but when his son's at death's door, he can't even spare eight days.”

“He implied that there was some reason why he couldn't stay, something important,” Charlie's mother said.

“Some reason like what?” Charlie demanded. “He's retired, isn't he? He probably just sits around on his ass all day. What's all the rush about?”

“I don't know,” Elaine said. “Something to do with Terri, I suppose. I didn't press him. It was obvious he didn't want to tell me. He seems to want to talk to you about something though, asked me when you'd be back.”

“Well, here I am,” Charlie said. “And where the hell's he? Catching up on sleep, I guess. Or maybe having a round of golf with Neil. Is he here to see Whiskey or not? What does he think this is, some kind of holiday, a chance to catch up with his old mates?”

Charlie's mother sighed. “It's none of my business, Charlie. We've been separated for six years. I'm not responsible for his behavior.”

“But doesn't it make you angry?”

“I don't want to waste my energy being angry. Your father's the one who's going to have to live with the decisions he's made. Leave him to it. Being angry won't help William. That's what we've got to focus on right now.”

Charlie knew his mother was right. But there was a relief in feeling angry, in having someone or something to rail against. And it took his mind off other things, off the endless, shifting calculation of Whiskey's chances of survival.

He held out on his father for two days. On the third day, he agreed to have a coffee with him at the hospital cafeteria.

“I'm glad we've got a chance to talk,” Bill said gratefully as they sat down. “I was starting to think I wasn't going to catch up with you at all.”

“It's not my fault you're only staying for a week,” Charlie said.

Bill put his hands up, as if to defend himself. “I know you're angry about that, Charlie, but there's a reason for it, believe me. That's why I've been wanting to talk to you.”

“It better be good.”

“I hope you'll think it's good.”

Charlie waited.

Bill cleared his throat. “I didn't want to tell you this on the phone. But Terri and I have been wanting to have a child. We've been, well…trying, for some time—a few years actually—and it's finally…well, it's finally happened.”

Charlie thought he must have misinterpreted his father's speech.

“That's right, we've had a baby—a little girl, I should say. You and Whiskey have a half sister,” his father said, smiling uneasily.

Charlie found this news utterly ridiculous. He felt vaguely disgusted, embarrassed for his father, a man in his fifties behaving like some young newlywed. He wouldn't even entertain the thought that his father's new daughter was related to him. He could not think of any suitable response to his father's news.

“Jessica. Her name's Jessica. Three weeks old. That's why I can't stay, Charlie boy. Terri needs me.”

“What about Whiskey?” Charlie asked. “What if he needs you?”

Bill swallowed. “That's why I'm here. But I need to think about Jessica now too.”

“Well, I feel sorry for her,” Charlie said. “I feel sorry for her and sorry for Whiskey and sorry for myself. Because you're a fucking pathetic excuse for a father. I don't even know why you bothered to come.”

Charlie stood up. As far as he was concerned, the conversation was over. But his father had other ideas.

“Well, that's rich coming from you, Charlie,” he said. “Jesus. Maybe I could have been a better dad. But you haven't exactly been the world's best brother, have you? This sounds to me like the pot calling the kettle black.”

“You don't know what you're talking about,” Charlie said. “You've got no idea what's been going on here. I've been with Whiskey night and day.”

“So I've heard. And we all know what's behind that—your guilty conscience. Your mother told me you and Whiskey hadn't patched things up before the accident. I imagine you're feeling pretty bad about that. But don't take it out on me.”

“Fuck you,” Charlie said. “Fuck you, Bill.”