Smythe's Theory of Everything Read online

  This is lunch: Ivan stealing other people’s bread and also peaches from dessert bowls. Even speared a sausage off Dooley’s plate! Created quite an uproar. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ says Nurse Stinson. ‘You’ll get used to him.’ It was he who stole my little side table for me - now I can see it’s in his blood. The highlight of the meal? Watching old Clem trying to get his fork into a chocolate biscuit. I was just getting over that when an old lady on another table coughed so hard I thought it was the end of her. Then she spat up a slimy gob, caught it in her hand and wiped it on the side of her wheelchair. Looking forward to dinner.

  Now I sit by my little window and try to see the logic in the rule that denies me a quiet fag in my room. I open the window and blow the smoke into the courtyard which is exactly where they want me to go in the first place. But for me to push my chair right around to the other side of this same window would take more effort than I can afford. I have a little washbasin in my room and I put the butts down the plughole. A tip: flush each time otherwise they swell up and block the sink.

  Kitty and I took off again. We caught the tram out to the last stop in Fawkner with exactly one pound in our pocket, two ten shilling notes. One was given to us by the Social Services man who drove us home - out of his own pocket - and the other came from our mother. She told us to go down to the shop and get some food in the house. We figured we were going to eat the food anyway so why not save the ten bob for when we got hungry? At home we packed a canvas bag, took some coins from a saucer in the kitchen to pay for the tram to the end of the line, and off we went on the road to Sydney.

  Out on the highway we waited no more than twenty minutes before we had our first ride. This was 1959 and people would pick you up straight away. They remembered the War years and the Depression and they still thought it was a good idea to give each other a hand. Today it’s the reverse; rather than help you up they use you as a rung on their own ladder.

  The trip was uneventful so no use repeating it. Except that we slept on the banks of the Murray River at Wodonga. It was March and hot as hell. There’d been a big bushfire somewhere to the east and you could smell the smoke, a faintly acrid scent that caught in the nostrils and though I’ve never seen a fire it gave me the jitters. We knew nothing of the bush and Kit and I lay side by side as close as we could get. Above us in the total blackness a million stars blinked. It made me think of poor dead Milo and the missing theory. The breeze picked up and the leaves and branches rustled and Kitty said the trees were talking about us. Maybe so - how would I know? Then she said she was feeling frightened again, the way she sometimes did in the dark at the Daco. I told her to sleep; I put my arms around her and reminded her of her magic sleigh, something to take her somewhere else.

  When we woke the grass was wet even though it was going to be a hot day. We had a loaf of sliced bread and block of cheddar and we gnawed off bits of cheese and drank some of the river water. No restaurant meal could have tasted better.

  Two days later we walked up Aunty Deb’s street in Cronulla. She was our mother’s sister and from what we’d been told, the two hated each other. I knew a lot about Aunty Deb from our mother - all of it bad and punctuated with swears and curses. From that bit of information we could tell she was nothing like Mum so we figured she might be alright. Kit rang the doorbell. We waited quietly and just stared at the mat. Welcome, it said. We knew exactly what we were going to say; we’d had four days to figure it out. We’re sorry to land on you like this but we’re desperate. We left home because we need a fresh start, we want a new life and we want to make something of ourselves. We guessed that’s what she’d want to hear.

  No-one came to the door. We walked around the house peering in windows. It was a decent-sized home, at least two bedrooms - and neat; she had to be doing alright. Then we sat on the step and waited. I glanced at Kit and realised it was very timely that we should be looking for a bath and a comb and a bit of ordinary food. She rolled up her jeans and looked at the mass of mosquito bites; some were serious sores. She put a dob of spit on each one to relieve the itch, a trick I’d shown her.

  Then around six, a woman pulled up in a large blue convertible American car, got some stuff out of the back and walked towards us. At first I thought it was someone coming to visit, she was so far removed from the look of our mother. She must have been about thirty-five and she had on skin tight pink slacks, a roll-neck sweater and a red leather jacket. Her bright blonde hair was piled up like a movie star.

  Her perfume arrived first, and then she got right up the path before she saw us. We both stood up and faced her. She stared for a second and then she said, ‘Gail’s kids.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You’re … Aunty Deb? We’re sorry to land on you like this but …’

  ‘You look like crap, worse than your picture. I told Gail I couldn’t help.’

  ‘You … you’ve spoken to our mother?’

  ‘She sent a letter in ‘56. She sent your class photos as well, as if that might encourage me to take you off her hands. I told her it was time she got on with the job herself. Not a good listener, your mother. So she’s packed you off anyway, eh?’

  ‘No, we quit,’ I said. ‘We just took off. We got your address out of the phone book. We knew you lived …’

  ‘Gail doesn’t know where you are?’

  I had to think what to say. Would she prefer one answer or another? We were still standing on the veranda and Aunty Deb was still looking up at us. I noted her bright red lips, her sparkly handbag slipping off her shoulder and the shopping bags hanging heavily. I couldn’t get over her piled up bottle-blonde hair.

  ‘We just took off,’ I said. ‘We didn’t say we were going. We didn’t tell her where we’d go.’

  ‘We left once before,’ Kit said. ‘In Melbourne. We went into the city so she probably thinks we’ve gone there again.’

  I didn’t want Kit to say that. I didn’t want her to say anything. Too much information doesn’t always help your cause. Aunty Deb gave me a shopping bag, walked past us and put her key in the door. I was aware again of her powerful fragrance; God knows what we must have smelled like. Aunty Deb sighed.

  ‘Well, it’s not like I wasn’t expecting you.’

  ‘You … you were expecting us?’

  ‘The Moon arcana. I pulled that card two days running. The second time right next to the Sun. Twos: twos everywhere, and two figures like Adam and Eve reaching out to each other and the twin protective towers right next door.’

  Kitty and I must have stared a long time. What could we say? I assumed she was a little touched like so many others of her generation.

  ‘You better come in and clean up,’ she said. ‘Make you look a bit more like those school photos. And don’t call me Aunty Deb. Debbie will do.’

  I have just entered ‘the bad books’. I had a terrible night last night. I awoke to hear noises in the passage, first a low moaning, then a soft wail or crying, and in the light coming under my door I could see a figure walking up and down. It scared the shit out of me - for some reason I got it in my head that it might be one of the long-dead inmates returning to haunt us.

  We’re only allowed to shut our doors after bedtime, but locks are banned. So I got up in the dark and found my walking stick. It has a ‘T’ handle on it and I jammed it firmly under the doorhandle. I tried to sleep. The luminous hands on my little traveller’s clock said it was half past two. I distracted myself by closing my eyes for a long while, then opening them to observe the new position of the luminous hands. I tried to concentrate on those hands. Why is luminous paint luminescent? It’s because it’s made with phosphorescent sulphide and when exposed to light it absorbs UV black light and in return, gives off white light.

  Eventually I dozed off but somewhere in the very early hours there came a knock, knock, knock and I could hear the doorknob turning. I shit myself again and pulled the pillow round me. Then I thought I heard a voice - it sounded as if my name was being called. I pretended to sleep.
<
br />   All of a sudden there came an almighty crash and my door burst open, sending my cane flying. I’m pretty sure I yelled. Then the lights came on and there was Nurse Osborne and a male assistant standing over my bed. Osborne looked furious and immediately started into me. ‘What’s the idea of locking your door? We’ve had suicides in here, you know!’

  Forget suicide - if only they knew how close I came to a heart attack.

  When they left, my stomach turned and I felt like vomiting again. Can’t do it in my hand basin though. Since my gall bladder op I don’t digest food properly and the big bits won’t go down the plug hole.

  This morning I am just starting to feel better when in comes Nurse Osborne again. At least I was dressed and I was sitting on the bed reading through my notes.

  ‘What was that all about?’ she demands. What can you say to that?

  ‘I was sleeping, the situation only escalated when …’

  ‘We don’t have situations around here, Mr Smythe - at least not on my shift. You’ll learn to behave like everyone else - there are no exceptions. And on my shift you’re my responsibility.’

  I put away my writings. Osborne stands there un-blinking, hands on hips. She sighs dramatically.

  ‘Unfortunately I’m going to have to submit a report.’

  Suddenly I see a way to get on her better side.

  ‘You don’t need to,’ I say. ‘I’m sure I’ll get over it and I can see no good reason to put yourself on report.’

  Her mouth falls open.

  ‘Not me!’ she yells. ‘I’m reporting you and your ob-structive behaviour!’ She stares hard, then huffs and stomps out. No point arguing. But the upshot is that now I have a serious blot against my good name, and all because of a ghost in the passageway.

  Debbie was a ‘rocker’; she told us so herself. We used to sit in her lounge and she’d play all the new songs on a little turntable. She had a big stack of singles - 45s they were called. On the first day I told her we’d heard Bill Haley and the Comets on the wireless.

  ‘You heard of Elvis Presley?’ she said.

  ‘Course,’ we chimed. ‘We like him, don’t we Kitty?’

  ‘Yeah he’s great,’ Kitty said.

  ‘What about Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard?’

  ‘They’re great,’ I said.

  ‘Pat Boone?’

  ‘Yeah, we like him too.’

  ‘Pat Boone? He’s crap. Booney swoonie. That awful crap is in the past! That’s exactly the kind of crap we want to get away from.’

  ‘Oh yeah, sorry,’ I said. ‘I thought you meant someone else.’

  Debbie was always saying crap. I think it might have been a new word then. Today it’s bullshit.

  That aunt of ours was a dynamo, taught us all the music, how to rock ‘n’ roll, how to cook, how to swear. She called a spade a spade, cut through all the nonsense and just got on with the essentials in life. She worked as a tax accountant’s secretary over in Oyster Bay, a job she hated like the living Jesus. ‘It’s a crap job in a crap shop,’ she said. I went there with her once and she was right. I couldn’t imagine anything worse. The office used to be a corner milkbar, stuck on the end of a line of old shops, glass-fronted with brown-coloured venetians down and closed in the window. She said the accountant was hardly ever there so three days a week she used to sit in that little room on her own, doing the books and answering the phone.

  ‘At least it pays the bills,’ she said, ‘and Alex doesn’t mind me doing my readings at the office - in my own time of course.’

  Debbie’s big thing, her preoccupation, the main thrust of her life, revolved around her devotion to the Tarot. Nothing - absolutely nothing - ever got done without first consulting the cards. The day we arrived we’d hardly put the groceries down before Debbie took out the cards and laid them on a square of black cloth edged with embroidered stars. She needed to know what to do with us, she said, and I watched with fascination as she pored over each pulled arcana, our future hanging on the order in which they appeared. Her nimble fingers flicked them out; her long painted nails tapped them flat. She had jewels on several fingers set in gold and I noted the scattered freckles on her long-boned hands. As she pulled the cards I watched her brow furrow then brighten, only to crease again. Her mouth was set and she breathed low throaty sounds; some seemed positive, others less so.

  Finally she said, ‘Nothing too surprising here - but I don’t like this one.’ She pointed a pink nail at a card with an angel on it draped in blue and red. I saw a name but it was upside down.

  ‘Wrong position,’ she said. ‘But I suppose we can’t expect everything.’

  And so she let us stay.

  ‘I only have the one spare room though.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ we said. ‘We’ve shared the same room since we were born. We prefer it that way.’

  I don’t think Debbie particularly liked the arrangement but there was no choice. At first we just lived there free of charge. Well, sort of. We were put to work almost immediately: the garden, the cleaning, repair work, even did some painting and put new flywire on the doors and windows. We actually liked it. We had something to do and as long as we could do it together and then rock ‘n’ roll in the lounge at night it was all OK by us. I think we must have played Blue Suede Shoes a thousand times.

  In March Debbie took us to see Love Me Tender and from that day we were Elvis fans. I greased my hair and slicked it back with a ducktail in the front. It wasn’t even 1960 yet at that time, for the average person, life was as ordinary as a brown paper bag and most adults were as straight as the Queen’s flagpole. Women wore short perms and tidy skirts that covered their knees, men wore cardigans, ties and hats. The most original thing for a man was a pink check shirt worn on the outside of his pleated trousers. But me and Kitty and Aunty Deb wore white skin-tight ‘dacks’ and thought of ourselves as right out there on the edge of a brand new scene.

  One morning Debbie spread her cards as usual - always before leaving the house - and I saw her body jerk as though she’d been stabbed.

  ‘I knew it,’ she murmured, ‘I just knew it.’

  ‘What is it, Deb?’ Kitty asked. Kit had become fascinated with Deb’s devotion to Tarot ever since the day she tried to pick up the pack herself. That day Deb screamed.

  ‘Don’t touch them! You do not touch my Tarot! Those cards have never experienced any other energy since the day they were made.’ She gasped as though choking and quickly closed the doors of the cabinet. ‘They’ve been magnetised, Kitty, you understand? With my persona. If you touch them you’ll mix in your own energy vibrations’ - a crime it seemed, that might cause a blood-flow from the ears. Kitty was aghast and from that day on made a wide berth around the cupboard that housed Debbie’s persona.

  But this day our aunt had seen something in the reading that had alarmed her far more than usual. Kitty and I drew closer.

  ‘What … what is it Deb?’ I ventured.

  ‘The Judgment,’ she said. ‘And look where it is!’

  We tried to appreciate the precarious position of the card, lying flatly among the others. A card next to it was called The Fool and The Hanged Man lurked nearby.

  ‘Is someone going to die?’ I said.

  ‘Of course they are!’ She looked at both of us. ‘Not literally, but I tell you now, I might as well be dead.’

  ‘Maybe it means someone else,’ Kitty volunteered.

  ‘Oh, if only. If only that were true!’ She slumped in the chair. ‘I’ll just have to weather it. I’ve got to ride it out.’

  That night she came home dark and brooding. We knew that the week before she’d broken up with her boy-friend and no doubt the Tarot reflected some of that, but this was something else.

  ‘A man came to read the water meter today,’ I said casually, ‘but he couldn’t find the meter.’

  Debbie just looked at me as if I’d struck her.

  ‘Do you intend to bludge around here your whole fucking life? … Do you? Because if
that’s the plan I want you to go back to Victoria!’

  We stared at her. The Reading: was the death impending?

  ‘I thought you liked us doing things around here and …’

  ‘I’m not here to look after you, Jack. I’m not your mother!’

  ‘Course not. You’re nothing like our mother,’ I said.

  ‘That’s not the point. I don’t want to … I’m not … why don’t the pair of you just go and get a fucking job!’

  She stormed out to the kitchen. I looked at Kitty. I tried to absorb her words. A job? Yeah, why not? Why not get a job? We could earn our own money. We went into the kitchen. There was Deb holding the fridge door open and she was sobbing like a child.

  ‘OK,’ I said, ‘I get it, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh Jack, it’s not you, it’s me,’ she said. ‘Those crap cards this morning showed just where I am in life. Look at me, thirty-seven in a dead end job and turning into an old maid. Mutton dressed as lamb. I don’t mind being your mother, God knows I’ll never be a real one.’

  What could I say: Yes you will or, it doesn’t matter?

  I said, ‘Maybe the cards will … Maybe the Tarot … You know, if you tried again …’ But I wasn’t sure what to add and Debbie wasn’t listening.

  As usual, Kitty jumped right in; she knew exactly what to do. She just went over and put her arms around her. I just stood there and with nothing to offer I had the disturbing feeling that somehow I was the root of the problem. Why didn’t I do something? But what? Suddenly I was five years old and I heard my father saying, No intestinal fortitude son, that’s your problem: no intestinal fortitude. I was in my teens before I finally learned what those words meant. A teacher at school used the phrase on the class. ‘In other words,’ he shouted, ‘you all lack guts!’ The rev-elation hit me like a time-bomb. Immediately I joined the football team. My father was wrong and I knew it.