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He had always called her that, from before he even started primary school. At five years of age: Dorrie and Ed. Never mother, father; certainly not mum and dad. It was as though even then he knew something they didn’t. And they had been too apprehensive, too apologetic, to protest. They had never even asked why.
“Philippa.”
“Good on ya, mate.” We hugged, old puzzle parts locking together. “You were bloody amazing. I’m speechless, I’m dazzled. What the hell’s an ootheca?”
“What’s a what?”
“An oo-ith-ee-ka.” I pronounced all four syllables carefully, the way he had, the stress on the third, treating each sound like glass. “The ootheca of the praying mantis.”
“Jesus, Philippa!” Brian laughed. “Typical. Absolutely peripheral to the lecture. Trust you to focus on a fucking word.”
“What does it mean?”
“It’s the ovum sac,” he said.
“The ovum sac. Hmm. So the breakthrough was dependent on female biology.”
“Oh, fuck off.” He made a fist and shadow-boxed, stopping an eighth of an inch from my nose. “Listen, Dorrie …” — turning toward her. He had a message of great urgency and import.
“Brian,” she rushed in eagerly, tripping over her nerves. “I remember about the crystal set, you and your Dad, how you used to hear foreign languages.”
Brian frowned, at sea. He just stared at her, disoriented, and then looked around nervously. (“You actually blushed, for God’s sake,” I told him later. “As though anyone would give a damn, even if they’d heard.”)
“Now, Dorrie,” he said gently. “There’s this ghastly reception that Philippa and I have to go to, it’s a stupid boring thing, and there’s no sense in the world making you put up with … So listen, I’m going to call a cab for you, all right? And we’ll come on later for dinner, just like you wanted. All right?”
“All right,” she said, parrot-like, meekly, looking somewhere else. And then afterwards there’s a reception, she’d told the saleswoman, seeing white linen and cake and champagne, and I think this little one, the saleswoman had said, adjusting a wisp of feather at her brow, this little number will be perfect. Just the thing for mother of the famous man. Just the thing for the scientist’s mum.
It’s because I wore a hat, she thought.
“Look,” Brian said, raising his arm, waving. “Here’s a Black and White.” He hugged her again. “Take care of yourself now, Dorrie. Go and put your feet up on the verandah for a while. We’ll see you later, okay?”
He said something to the driver, gave him money, and we both waved. We kept on waving till the taxi disappeared.
“Don’t look at me like that, Philippa.”
“Like what?”
“Just cut it out, okay?”
“Don’t try and dump your guilt onto me.”
“She would have hated it. She’s terrified of social stuff, always has been. They never went anywhere. I was being kind, if it’s any of your business.”
“Jesus, Brian. That was brutal. And so totally unnecessary. I would have kept her under my wing.”
“She would have hated it,” he insisted. “Anyway, I’m not even going myself. I’m off to the Regatta. Let’s go.”
“What? But it’s in your honour!”
“I don’t give a stuff and nor do they. No one’ll even notice I’m not there. It’s the free booze and free food they’re after, that’s all. C’mon, let’s go. You got your car here?”
“You think it’s because I’m ashamed of her,” Brian said moodily on the verandah at the Regatta. “But you’re wrong. It’s not that.”
I sipped my beer and stared across Coronation Drive at the river. Two small pleasure craft, motorboats with bright anodised hulls, were whizzing upstream, and a great ugly industrial barge from Darra Cement was gliding down, shuddering a bit, moving its hips in a slow, slatternly wallow. The sight of it filled me with happiness. Good on you, you game old duck, I thought fondly, and raised my glass to it. “Probably the same rusty tub we used to see when we were riding the buses out to uni,” I said.
“Probably,” Brian said lugubriously, slumped over his beer. “Everything’s stuck in a bloody time warp, it’s like a swamp” — he waved his arms about to take in the verandah, the Regatta, the river, the whole city — “it’s like a swamp that sucks everything under, swallows it, stifles it, and gives back noxious …” His energy petered out and he slumped again. “There was this funny little man in the front row who used to sit in on lectures when I was in first year. Flat-earth freak, or something, he used to buttonhole people in the cloisters. We all used to duck when we saw him coming. Must be ninety now, if he’s a day, and there he was in the very same seat. It gave me the shivers.”
I squinted, and lined up the top of my glass with the white stripe on the broad backside of Darra Cement. “I saw in the paper that home-owners in Fig Tree Pocket and Jindalee and those newer suburbs are trying to get the dredging stopped. One of these days we’ll come back and the river won’t be brown anymore, it’ll be crystal clear. I suppose that’ll be a good thing, but it’s funny how I get pissed off when anyone tampers with Brisbane behind my back. God, I love being back, don’t you?”
“I hate it,” Brian said. He’d thrown his jacket across a spare chair. Now he undid a couple of buttons on his shirt and rolled up his sleeves. “Look,” he said with disgust, raising his arms one by one, inspecting the moons of stain at the armpits. “A bloody steam bath.”
“That’s what I love. This languid feeling of life underwater.”
Between us and the river, the traffic rushed by in beetling lines but the noise was muffled, a droning damped-down buzz. Everything was fluid at the edges. Cars seemed to float slightly above the road and to move the way they do in old silent movies. Even the surface of Coronation Drive was unfixed, a band of shimmer. A drunk man was shambling along the bike path giving off mirages; I could see three of him. I could see the gigantic bamboo canes at the water’s edge doubling, tripling, tippling themselves into the haze. I could see wavy curtains of air flapping lazily, easily, settling on us with sleep in their folds. “The only reason I don’t come back to stay,” I said drowsily, “is that if I did, I would never do another blessed thing for the rest of my life. I’d turn into a blissed-out vegetable.”
“It makes me panic, being back,” Brian said. “I feel as though I’m suffocating, drowning. I can’t breathe. I can’t get away fast enough. I get terrified I’ll never get out again.”
“Go back to Bleak City then,” I said. “Stop whingeing. You sound like a prissy Melburnian.”
“I am a Melburnian.”
“Bullshit. You’ll be buried here.”
“Over my dead body. I can never quite believe I got out,” he said. “I’ve forgotten the trick. How did I manage it?”
I shrugged, giving up on him, and let my eyes swim in Coronation Drive with the cars. An amazing old dorsal-finned shark of a Thunderbird, early sixties vintage, hove into view and I followed it with wonder. “Who was that friend of your brother’s? The one with the Alfa Romeo. Remember that time we came burning out here and the cops —”
“You’ve got a mind like the bottom of a birdcage, Philippa,” Brian said irritably. “All over the shop.”
“Polyphasic,” I offered primly. “Highly valued by some people in your field. I read an essay on it by Stephen Jay Gould. Or maybe it was Lewis Thomas. Multi-track minds, all tracks playing simultaneously. Whatever happened to him, I wonder?”
“To Stephen Jay Gould or Lewis Thomas?”
“Neither, dummy. To that friend of your brother’s. How’s your brother, by the way?”
“He’s fine.”
“Still in Adelaide?”
“Mm.”
“Did he stay married?”
“Knock it off, Philippa.”
‘You stay in touch with her?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry, Brian. I’m really sorry about all that. Are you, you know, okay?”
“Yeah, well.” Brian shrugged. “It’s easier this way. No high drama, no interruptions. I practically live at the lab.”
“I read a glowing article about you in Scientific American. It was an old one, I picked it up in the waiting room at my dentist’s.”
Brian laughed. “There’s achievement for you.”
We lapsed into silence and drank another round of beer and stared at the river.
“Your mother said she ran into Richard’s mum.”
“Don’t get started, Philippa,” Brian warned.
“I miss them, I miss them. I miss our old gang. Don’t you?”
“No.”
“Liar.”
“I never miss anyone,” he said vehemently.
“Your mother said —”
“Okay, get it over with.”
“Get what over with?”
“The lecture on how I treat Dorrie.”
“I wasn’t going to say a word,” I protested. “But since you mention it, I don’t understand why you feel embarrassed. You were actually blushing, for God’s sake. As though anyone minds.”
“You think I’m ashamed of her.”
“Well?”
“It’s not that. I’m not. I’m protecting her. I can’t bear it when other kids smirk at her. At them. I can’t bear it.”
“Other kids?”
“There’s a lot you don’t know, Philippa.”
“I don’t know why you think they were any different from anyone else’s parents.”
He signalled for another jug, and we waited until it came, and then Brian filled both our glasses.
“They were,” he said. “That’s all.”
“They weren’t. I spent enough time at your place, for God’s sake.”
“God, I’m depressed,” Brian said.
“I spent time at Richard’s and Julie’s and Elaine’s. They weren’t any different from anyone else’s mum and dad.” Brian said nothing. With his index finger, he played in a spill of beer. We were both, I knew, thinking of Elaine.
“Sorry,” I said, “I shouldn’t have … That’s something that happens when I come back. Every so often, you know, maybe once or twice a year, I still have nightmares about Elaine. But not when I’m back here. When I’m here, we all still seem to be around. In the air or something. I can feel us.” I stared into my glass, down the long amber stretch of the past. “How long is it since you’ve been back, anyway?”
“Five years.”
“That’s your average? Once every five years?”
“It’s not that I want to come that often,” he said. “Necessity.”
I laughed. Brian did not. “You’re not usually this negative about Brisbane,” I protested. “When was the last time I saw you? Two years ago, wasn’t it? In Melbourne. No, wait. I forgot. London. June before last in London when you were there for that conference — Yes, and we got all nostalgic and tried to phone Julie, tried to track her down … that was hilarious, remember? We got onto that party line somewhere south of Mt Isa.”
“It’s different when I’m somewhere else,” Brian said. “I get depressed as hell when I’m back.”
“Boy, you can say that again.”
“Last time ever, that’s a promise to me,” he said. “Except for Dorrie’s funeral.”
“God, Brian.” I had to fortify myself with Cooper’s comfort. “You’re getting me depressed. Anyway, speaking of your mother, we’d better get going. What time’s she expecting us?”
“Oh shit.” Brian folded his arms tightly across his stomach and pleated himself over them.
“What’s the matter?”
“I can’t go.”
“What?”
“I can’t go, Philippa. I can’t go. I just can’t. Can you call her for me? Make up some excuse?”
I stared at him.
“Look,” he said. “I meant to. I thought I could manage it. But I can’t. Tell her I’m tied up. You’ll do it better than I could.”
“What the hell is the matter with you?”
“Look, tell her—” He seemed to cast about wildly for possible bribes. “Tell her we’ll take her out for lunch tomorrow, before my afternoon flight. I’m staying at the Hilton, we’ll take her there.”
“I won’t do it. I’m not going to do your dirty work for you. This is crazy, Brian. It’s cruel. You’ll break her heart.”
Brian stood abruptly, knocking over his chair and blundered inside to the pay phone near the bar. I watched him dial. “Listen, Dorrie,” I heard him say, in his warm, charming, famous-public-person voice. “Look, something’s come up, it’s a terrible nuisance.”
“You bloody fake!” I yelled. There were notes of rush and pressure in his voice, with an undertone of concern. It wasn’t Brian at all. It was someone else speaking, someone I’d never even met, someone who couldn’t hear a thing I was saying, someone who didn’t even know I was there.
“They’ve got something arranged at uni,” he said smoothly, unctuously. “I didn’t know about it, and the thing is, I can’t get out of it. I’ll tell you what though. Philippa and I will take you out to lunch tomorrow. She’ll pick you up at twelve o’clock, okay? and we’ll all have lunch at the Hilton. Look, I’ve got to rush, I’m terribly sorry. Look after yourself, Dorrie. See you tomorrow, all right? Bye now.”
“I’m going,” I said as he lurched back. “I’m taking a cab right now to your mother’s. I won’t be part of this.”
