Whiskey & Charlie (5 page)

“Thar she blows,” Balzarelli said with visible relief, and he stood up to shake their mother's hand.

x x x

“Mum gave Balls-of-Jelly a hard time, didn't she?” Whiskey asked when they caught up after the first two classes.

“What?”

“The principal, Balzarelli.”

Charlie laughed.

“What was your homeroom like?” Whiskey asked.

“It was okay,” Charlie said. He had always gone to a school where he knew at least half the students in his grade, and he had felt awkward and self-conscious through every minute of his first two hours at this new school.

“How was yours?” he asked Whiskey.

“The usual crap,” Whiskey said, as though he started new schools all the time, as though he were some hardened serial expellee. “They made me stand up and introduce myself.”

“Did they ask you why you moved to Australia?”

“Yep.” Whiskey laughed. “I told them it was because my dad was having an affair.”

“You're such a dick, Whiskey. Why did you say that?”

“What did you want me to say?
My
dad
got
offered
a
great
job; it was a momentous step in his thrilling career as a boilermaker and an exciting opportunity for our whole family.
I'm sure no one wants to hear that crap. So who's your homeroom teacher?” he asked, changing the subject.

“Mrs. Blighty,” Charlie said sullenly.

“What does she teach?”

“She's the librarian. Why? Who's yours?”

“Miss Kemp. She's the phys ed teacher.”

Charlie noticed he said
phys
ed
, not PE, which was what they'd always called it before. Charlie made a mental note to add to his collection: elastic bands were
lackies
, sunglasses were
sunnies
, phys ed was
PE
.

“Apparently she's a lemon,” Whiskey added.

“What's a lemon?” Charlie asked.

“A lezzo, a dyke—that's what they call it.”

“Who told you that?”

“A guy in my homeroom. Asked if I wanted to go up to the football field at lunchtime, kick a footy around with his mates.”

“They play soccer?” Charlie asked hopefully.

“Aussie Rules.”

“But we don't know how to play Aussie Rules.”

Whiskey shrugged again. “Soon find out. Are you in?”

“Okay,” Charlie said. He hadn't had any better offers.

x x x

The lessons were easy enough. The hard part was knowing what to say, when to say it, and who to say it to. The hard part was thinking you spoke the same language and finding out you didn't. The bell was a
siren
, break time was
recess
, when you went swimming you did not wear trunks but long shorts called
boardies
. People had different names. The girls were called Narelle and Charlene and Kerrilee, names Charlie had never heard of. And the boys—who were not called boys but guys—had names from American soap operas: Brett and Todd and Shane. Even the food was different. There were no lunch ladies serving greasy cafeteria food and mashed potatoes. There was an outdoor cafeteria where you chose your own lunch and ate it where you pleased—standing up, sitting down, lying on the football field if it took your fancy—no one cared. There were bread rolls smothered in melted cheese and deep-fried sausages coated in breadcrumbs affectionately known as
crumbed
dicks
. There were licorice straps, which you bought less to eat than to attract the attention of the girls, by using the straps to whip the backs of their legs.

After the first few days, Whiskey and Charlie no longer spent recess or lunch together. Whiskey had made friends with the football players and the kids who smoked cigarettes—
smokes
—in the bushes on the far side of the football field. Charlie stayed in the quadrangle, hanging around with a guy from his homeroom called Marco and a gang of Marco's friends. Charlie did not feel that he had anything in common with Marco's friends particularly, but he felt more at ease with them than he did on the field with Whiskey's mates. And if Marco's friends didn't go out of their way to make him welcome, neither did they do anything to indicate they wanted to get rid of him, which was a good enough reason to stick around, Charlie supposed.

By the end of their third week at the school, people Charlie didn't recognize were greeting him between classes, shouting
yo, dude
and
hey, man
at him and occasionally offering him high fives in the corridors, which he declined to accept. They had been at the school for four weeks when one of the prefects accosted Charlie in the bathroom, saying, “Whoa, man, Whiskey never told me he had a little brother. Shit, you are the spitting image. What grade are you in?”

“I'm in tenth grade, same as him,” Charlie said. “We're twins,” he added through gritted teeth. And there it was. The part of his life he thought he had discarded in the depths of the Indian Ocean, echoing back at him from the seabed.

Charlie had been kidding himself, thinking things could be different in Australia. Whiskey was a character. He possessed a quality Charlie had missed out on, a quality that made people want to be around him. He was Whiskey Ferns, fresh off the boat, and Charlie bet there wasn't a single student in the school who didn't know his name.

x x x

One story went like this: aged twelve, Whiskey had stolen a bottle of scotch from his parents' liquor cabinet, slugged at it through math and biology, and then in final period, while his classmates were conjugating Latin verbs, Whiskey had gone to the bathroom and vomited his guts up, passed out right there on the stall floor, come around hours later to find himself alone in the dark, locked in the school overnight. Another version had Whiskey drinking the booze at home while his parents were out, stealing his mother's car and driving it into a tree.

Whiskey had ripped jeans, high-top Airwalk sneakers, which you couldn't even buy in Australia, a flattop like Ice out of
Top
Gun
. People wanted to hear stories about him, tell stories about him. He had come from England a month ago, without a past, without a history, and if there were no stories to tell, they would make them up themselves, pass them around until they became accepted truths. Whiskey never confirmed or denied any of the rumors that circulated about him, worked on the theory that any publicity was good publicity. So there was no one to verify the stories except Charlie. And Charlie didn't count.

It didn't matter that William had been called Whiskey since he was nine years old; it didn't matter that the stories couldn't be true because their mother didn't even have a car of her own in England and she always tipped down the sink any whiskey that came into the house because she said their father liked it too much and couldn't be trusted with it. If Charlie had said, “Whiskey's just his walkie-talkie name from when we were kids,” everyone would have thought it was Charlie who was lying.

* * *

Even after hours of sitting beside Whiskey, Charlie can't bring himself to really look at his brother. At first, he angles his chair to the foot of the bed so that Whiskey's bloody, bandaged head is out of his line of sight and all he can see is the pristine plaster cast on Whiskey's foot, which allows him to pretend that Whiskey's injuries are in the realm of the ordinary. Later, Charlie looks at the machinery keeping his brother alive. He watches with a certain fascination the IV bags hanging by Whiskey's bed. He does not know the exact contents of the bags, but the sight of those fluids making their journey through their transparent tubes and into Whiskey's body, the process of watching them emptied and eventually replaced, bring Charlie comfort, make him feel that somehow healing must be taking place.

In addition to the IV tubes, Whiskey is hooked to an array of wires that are monitoring his vital signs. All the information transmitted through these wires is displayed on a small screen next to Whiskey's bed. Charlie stares at this screen for a long time. He does not know what the lines and colors mean, but he finds them soothing, like watching television late at night with the sound turned down.

Whiskey's right arm is in a plaster cast to the elbow. On the left arm—taking its place between the tubes and wires—is a blood pressure cuff. Charlie remembers having his tonsils removed when he was eight or nine years old, needing to have his blood pressure taken again and again after he came around from the anesthetic. He remembers the nurses putting on the Velcro cuff, inflating it with the black pump that looked exactly like the one on his bicycle horn. He remembers the tightening sensation, like pins and needles, and then the feeling of release. Whiskey's cuff is left on permanently. Every so often, a machine kicks on and automatically inflates it, displaying the results on the monitor. Over and over, Charlie watches the cuff inflate and deflate again, but when the results appear on the screen, he looks away. He has never understood blood pressure, doesn't know what a normal reading is for a person in good health, let alone someone in Whiskey's condition. He would rather not know.

x x x

Charlie is relieved when Rosa returns that afternoon.

“Did you sleep?” he asks.

“Your mother made me to take a tablet.”

Charlie nods. He doesn't know what to say.

“What kind of music does he like?” he asks suddenly, in the yawning silence.

“You think we should play music in here? Do you think that would help?”

“I don't know, maybe. But it was more that I was wondering. I didn't know… I wanted to know.”

Rosa nods, thinking. “He likes a lot of old things. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones,” she says after a while. She pulls up a chair on the other side of the bed, holds on to Whiskey's good hand, the one without the cast. “He has some records, you know, original ones.” She thinks for a minute. “And he loves that guy with the big suit. What is his name?”

Charlie shakes his head.

“You would know him, Charlie; it makes me crazy, that electric music.”

“Electronic,” Charlie corrects out of habit.

“I'm too tired to speak perfect English today, Charlie.”

“Sorry, Rosa. I don't know why I said that.”

“Don't be sorry. Usually I like it, you know that; I want to get better. But today I'm too tired for it.” She looks at Whiskey then, and Charlie remembers himself, gets up to leave. He is at the door when Rosa looks up again.

“You want to look through the records?” she asks.

Charlie nods. “I'd like that.”

“You can play some, if you want. Go there now. I will be here all night anyway.” She rummages in her handbag for the keys. “Take Whiskey's car.”

Charlie hesitates.

“Come on, Charlie,” she says. “Whiskey knows you hate it. It does not suit you one bit. It will make him laugh to think of you driving it.”

Charlie takes the keys.

x x x

It's probably a good ten-minute drive from the hospital to Whiskey and Rosa's place, but that afternoon, Charlie makes it in six. It might be because there's not much traffic at that time of day, but it probably has more to do with the fact that Charlie breaks the speed limit all the way there, runs every yellow light into red. He would never drive his own car so recklessly, but sitting behind the wheel of Whiskey's car, he finds there is no other way to drive it. It has something to do with the position of the seat, the angle of the windshield. For the first time, Charlie has a sense of what made Whiskey buy a car like this. He has never understood it before; has been blinded by his embarrassment over the ridiculous price tag, the personalized license plate. If he had driven it himself, he might have seen it differently. But Whiskey had never offered, and Charlie had never asked.

x x x

It's too quiet at Whiskey and Rosa's. Charlie feels afraid to disturb things, as though Whiskey is already dead and his home, his belongings, have moved into the realm of the sacred. He shakes off the thought, goes into the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea. He has never been alone in this house before, has to rummage to find cups, tea bags, sugar.

While the kettle's boiling, he goes into the living room to look for Whiskey's records. But there are no records there, only CDs, mostly greatest hits albums—Santana, Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles—which must belong to Rosa. Charlie has an urge to lie on the voluminous couch, kick off his shoes, and go to sleep.

Instead he makes his tea and takes it into the other part of the house, the other wing, he supposes it would be called. He hasn't been here for so long—the last time must have been the cocktail party Whiskey organized for Rosa's thirtieth, almost two years earlier—he's forgotten how enormous the house is. It's far too big for the two of them, but as Charlie knows, when they bought it, they'd imagined they would fill it in no time.

At least three, Rosa had told Juliet in the beginning, maybe even four.

Since he made his decision, Charlie has tried not to think about these things. He and Juliet had talked about it endlessly at the time, and they had both felt the same: Whiskey and Rosa hadn't known each other long enough, and Whiskey was fickle; their marriage couldn't last. Charlie was doing them a favor by saying no. Charlie had communicated his decision not to Whiskey, but to Rosa, in a letter. He knew it was cowardly, but he was afraid that face-to-face, Rosa would work on him, wear him down, change his mind. After the letter was sent, the subject was never raised again. Neither Whiskey nor Rosa ever questioned Charlie about his reasons, and if his mother or father knew, they never spoke of it to him. As far as he knew, Rosa had never mentioned it to Juliet. Charlie and Juliet did not discuss it either; they had agreed on this, that they had to be resolute; there was no point rehashing it again and again, doubting themselves, wondering if they had done the right thing. They had made the decision that seemed best at the time, and they had to leave it behind them.

But there, in Whiskey and Rosa's house, Charlie is struck by the thought that though he and Juliet had tried to be objective, tried to look at it from every angle, he had never imagined how Whiskey and Rosa would feel, rattling around in their five bedrooms and two living rooms, every doorway a reminder of what they couldn't have.

Charlie takes his tea into the room that was to have been the kids' playroom. Whiskey jokingly calls it his “man room.” He had done it up a year or so earlier, had talked about it once at their mother's, but Charlie hadn't listened. Instead, he had created his own image of Whiskey's man room, furnished it with clichés—a corner bar, a pool table, a trophy cabinet, and a
Sports
Illustrated
calendar—and then joked with Juliet about it, mocked Whiskey for being so puerile.

Puerile. Charlie thinks about the word. His mother, who must be one of the only people in the world who still remembers the Latin she learned at school, has told him it comes from
puer
, the Latin word for
boy
. In English, it has a negative connotation, but all it really means is boyish.
And
what
is
so
wrong
with
Whiskey
being
boyish?
Charlie wonders now.
There
are
worse
things
a
person
could
be, self-righteous being one of them.

As it turns out, the room is nothing like Charlie has imagined. There is no sporting memorabilia, no rifles on the walls or high-backed leather chairs. There is a vast desk and a bookcase covering an entire wall, a big comfortable-looking armchair, and a record player—a brand-new Technics, Charlie notices—on top of a shelving unit built to hold records. Charlie immediately feels envious of this setup, thinking of his own meager record collection, his secondhand turntable.

He sits down on the floor and begins to flip through the records. Rosa's “guy with the big suit” turns out to be David Byrne; Whiskey has everything by Talking Heads, and some later, solo stuff Charlie has never heard. Awed by the size of the collection, Charlie drags the armchair over to face the shelves, sits down for a closer examination. Whiskey has hundreds of records, most of which are in pristine condition, all stored in plastic sleeves and alphabetized. Bob Dylan and Benny Goodman, Django Reinhardt and De La Soul, Stevie Wonder and the White Stripes. Looking through his brother's records for the first time in more than ten years, Charlie finds everything from the ultrahip (Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy) to the truly ridiculous (Hall & Oates), and within those circles of vinyl, Charlie learns things about Whiskey he has never known.

Listening to Sonic Youth's “Teenage Riot,” Charlie remembers Whiskey being in a band once, when they were about nineteen. The band was called Silent Revolution, a name they had thought brilliantly ironic and incisive at the time. Whiskey was the drummer. The guitarist and bass player were two brothers with Afros, Dominic and Will. Mostly when they got together, they smoked dope and drank cask wine out of old jars with the labels peeled off, while they speculated on what image should go on the cover of their first album, whether they should tour the United States or Japan first, etc. Once, when Charlie had gone to watch them jam, Will had suggested a “brother wrestle.”
Me
and
Dom
against
you
and
Whiskey
. Charlie had pretended he thought Will was joking. Now he wishes he had gone for the brother wrestle. Better to wrestle together against someone else than to wrestle against each other.