Smythe's Theory of Everything Read online

  But I only played about three games. One Saturday on a cold muddy field I found myself on the mark of a boy who was lining up for a goal. Somehow I’d given away a free kick. I jumped and waved my skinny arms and the ball slid off the boy’s boot and hit me square in the face. Blood streamed but at least I stopped that goal. Where was my father then!

  The day after Debbie cried, Kitty was walking the streets, asking about work in every restaurant and cafe in the neighbourhood - she’d turned sixteen by then and I’d be eighteen in October. Kitty made little leaflets and stuck them up: Able and willing girl to do any kind of job. Good worker. I never knew she had it in her. In no time she had a job in an Indian restaurant. That left me.

  Just back from ‘church service’ in the common room. I had no intention of going but at the last minute, in came Nurse Stinson to round up the ones who were sitting it out. She’s a size, that Nurse Stinson. If she sat on the likes of me it would be the end of it - you could fold me up like a newspaper. It’s not healthy all that weight, her heart would be no bigger than mine but dealing with a 50 per cent higher workload, 40 per cent at least.

  ‘Come on Mr Smythe,’ she says. ‘Join the group.’

  ‘I’m not religious,’ I tell her. ‘And I have no intention singing holy praises to some imaginary bloke in the sky.’

  ‘Come on, hurry up,’ she says again, as though I haven’t spoken. ‘Come join the others.’

  I go, more out of curiosity than anything else, and to give my skills with the wheelchair a bit of practice. I do not want to use the frame, and certainly not my unaided legs. It’s the same wheelchair that Lisa hired after the gall bladder op. When the hire term ran out they offered the chair for sale as a second-hand item so I got a good deal. Not that I intend using it much longer. One look at the other chair-bound inmates and you can see the curtains are drawn on what might have been a very interesting life. I’m not saying my life is interesting or even worth preserving, but once they get you permanently in the chair you’re theirs for keeps. Shove you all up against one another in the common room, lock up your wheels and leave you parked for the duration. You are easy to manage then, controlled in the same way that the furniture and flowers are. All neat and organised.

  I parked near the back for the ‘Church Service’ and, as I was forced to be a part of it, I thought I might as well use it as an opportunity to learn something. There had to be something there to do. And sure enough, 112 greeting cards strung along the left wall, all made by the inmates. Three rows, containing thirty-six, thirty-two and forty-four cards, though the row of forty-four did not look any more crowded than the others. Predominant colour used was red and easily outclassed the second main colour, a royal blue. That could mean several things. 1. Red catches the eye first. 2. Choosing red requires the least amount of imagination. 3. There is more red paint and paper available. 4. The craft nurse directs the senile to red paint and paper. I’m favouring 2.

  The attendees: nineteen women in total, seven men, eleven wheelchairs. Of the nineteen women about four seem very lucid, another four reasonably so, the rest far away in the land of the oblivious. Dooley was there, poised to bellow out whatever hymn they selected. Old Clem in the chair was staring straight at me. What was he looking at? I’m sure he knows something. Treated like he’s gone just like the others but I don’t believe it. Nothing I can do about it. Also ‘Skeleton Joe’ staring at his lap. Couldn’t look at the ceiling if you said there was a nude picture up there of Jacqueline Bisset. Two new men I haven’t seen. One is a young fellow probably in his early forties stretched out in a bed-cum-chair arrangement. He has some serious intellectual disability, unable to control his movements and a loud but incoherent voice. Nurse stuck him in the front where he couldn’t see anyone else - as far as he knew he might have been the only one in the room. The other new bloke is ancient but he seems to have his marbles. In a wheelchair but sitting very upright and alert and taking as little interest in the proceedings as I was.

  Sat through What a friend we have in Jesus and other equally absurd rubbish, Dooley booming like a foghorn with not an ounce of decency. Apparently in an uncommon gesture, we were blessed by the presence of a Church of England Minister which all the carers seem to feel is a great honour. Should have heard the man rave - I looked around thinking that perhaps God was sitting with us in the audience. The word unctuous suddenly came to mind. Later I checked on my remembered use of the word and I was right. As per Oxford Dictionary p. 936 - Full of ‘unction’ i.e. affected gush or enthusiasm. Glad to be back in my room where I can have a quiet smoke and get on with my story.

  One hot day I was wandering down Arthurton Street thinking of nothing in particular when I saw an old man painting signs on a shop window. He was standing on a wooden stool close to the pane. He wore dark sunglasses beneath a battered peaked cap from which bushy white sideboards extended to well below his earlobes. His white overalls were streaked with different colours and his paint-spattered boots had long lost their shine. His old hands held a pot of paint, a long knobbed stick and a brush and all three were in motion as he flowed on the white paint.

  I stood and watched the big cursive sweeps and I was transfixed - it was all freehand but it had a sense of precision that I knew could easily be calculated. I must have stood there a full ten minutes and the old man eventually stepped back from the stool and lit a smoke. I saw him glance at me but he never said a word. He had parallel lines marked right across the two windows of the shopfront and now he stepped forward and sketched ‘Manchester’ very roughly between them, sat down and started painting the letters. That’s when I stepped up.

  ‘It won’t fit,’ I said.

  He looked at me through his dark lenses and then continued painting.

  ‘There’s not enough room on the glass.’

  ‘You must be an expert,’ he said, gruffly. Flies buzzed around our heads and I wanted to stand in the shade.

  ‘Not really, but unless you’re going to start using smaller letters, it won’t fit in.’

  But he was not going to get up and check; there was no chance he would let that young, skinny eighteen-year-old with the Elvis hairstyle tell him how to write a sign. That was the year The Beatles came to Australia, their one and only visit, but I was a rocker and as Deb and I both knew, this new fad wouldn’t last.

  The old bloke just kept right on going with his sign until he got to ‘S’ and it was then that my prediction was roundly confirmed. He got around it by doing a ‘T’ apostrophe ‘R’ - that is MANCHEST’R. He looked at me through his plastic paint-specked sunglasses.

  ‘Don’t have a bad eye, kid. You should put that to something useful.’

  I didn’t think there was anything in it at all.

  ‘I didn’t use my eye,’ I said, ‘I just calculated it.’

  ‘How’s that work?’

  ‘Letters are 9 inches wide plus the gap between averages out to 9 inches because some letters are a bit narrower, which equals 90 inches or 7‘6” long. Two windows four feet each, allow a bit each side and also allow for the frame in the middle equals less than 7 actual running feet for the wording.’

  He just stared at me though I couldn’t see his eyes.

  ‘Help me put this stuff in the truck,’ he said.

  We put his plank and ladders on the roof rack and then he gave me a lift back to Cronulla. His name was Jeff Burgess and in that truck he gave me a smoke. Up until then I’d only had about three in my life; couldn’t afford it. He told me he was going to see the year out and then he’d retire. At the lights he put the truck out of gear and looked at me. ‘Want a job?’

  ‘I’m in the market,’ I said.

  ‘Dirty work, this signing business. Not all flicking paint on shiny windows.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘What if I asked you to sand down five real estate boards and prime ‘em up again, three coats, wash out all the brushes, rollers, trays, clean out the shed, then sand down another five boards before knockoff
?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Can’t say what I think until I give it a go. Painted my Aunty’s picket fence, though, two coats.’

  In a month he had me signed up to do a ticket-writing course and a painters’ night class. Without even realising it I’d been conscripted to signwriting - which was a whole lot better than being conscripted to the National Service, which started right about then. I managed to miss it on account of the day on which I was born. Random. Chance. Two key factors in my theory of the universe.

  Yet I never made a great signwriter, nothing like Jeff. But there’s more to working on signs than just the writing. Quoting was one of my specialties. Jeff would send me down to some new supermarket or other and I’d measure up, calculate the gear needed and the time it would take, work out our hourly charge. Then all Jeff had to do was show up with gear. I’d help set it up, organise the prep work, strike the chalk-lines, do the fill-ins, the second coating, buy the smokes, vanilla slices and coffee and pack up at the end. Do it standing on my ear.

  And those were the days when signwriting was really something. Everyone needed it. No inkjet printing or mass production stuff back then. Jeff didn’t quit at the end of the year like he said. And our very good rock ‘n roll Aunty Deb kept us both on at Reed Street. I’d never seen Kitty so happy and her troubled toss-and-turn nights seemed to fade as her confidence grew. Things were going so well we even sent a postcard home to our mother.

  Random: Done haphazardly, without aim, purpose or principle. Oxford p. 677.

  Chance: Absence of design or discoverable cause. Oxford p. 128.

  This morning the new inmate I saw at our ‘praise the Lord’ meeting was being moved in right across the corridor from me. Jim Southall. Dell Williams said he is an ex-parliamentarian. Very old and decrepit. When they were getting him out of the chair I saw the horrible scabs on his neck and cheek. Odd smell about him too. The smell of death? Hope he’s not going to be another zombie sleep walker.

  Two nights ago I’m lying in bed when I open my eyes to see what I thought was an apparition in my room. I snap to a sitting position, my heart knocking buttons off my pyjamas. And lo and behold, it’s one of the old ducks out for a walk in her nightie! I had to get up and ease her back into the passageway. I closed the door and put my foot against it. It might sound harsh but it’s not my responsibility to take care of these poor old souls.

  I have no intention of ‘engaging with others’, as Nurse Lohman puts it. I have nothing in common with these destitute people left helpless by old age. Most would have died if it wasn’t for the drugs. ‘Socialising’ in here is a little like life at the office - even though you have dozens of co-workers it doesn’t mean you have to like them. Anyway, I do not intend staying any longer than necessary.

  At dinner tonight I was put next to Jim the ex-parliamentarian, or at least that’s where I parked myself as it was the only spot left by the time I got there. As it is customary, I said hello to him and would have been pleased to leave it at that.

  ‘Neighbours,’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Neighbours, we live across the road.’ He meant he now has a room opposite mine.

  ‘Traffic’s bad up our street, don’t you think?’ he says.

  ‘Traffic?’

  ‘Yes, as thick as Bourke Street. Horns blasting, bumps and clatters and clangs. The thump of Jean’s footfalls enough to shake you out of your bed.’

  ‘Who’s Jean?’

  ‘Jean Stinson.’ He looks around the room. ‘The big one,’ he whispers. ‘The two-ton truck.’

  Then big bumbling Dooley on my left leans in. ‘You goin’ t’ eat that chop?’

  ‘Course I am and if I wasn’t I’d leave it on my plate.’

  ‘A waste. When I had the pub, anything come back to the kitchen would end up in someone’s guts. We knew the value of things in those days. A chop is a prize for some.’

  ‘Well, why don’t I let it go back to the kitchen then, eh?’

  ‘What’s your name?’ he says.

  ‘I told you last night,’ I say patiently. I can be very patient when needed.

  ‘What is it then?’ says Dooley.

  ‘You’ll think of it,’ I tell him. ‘It’ll come to you.’

  Sad old Clem looks over at Dooley, his serviette tucked into his collar. ‘What’s the thing you lift up your car with?’

  Dooley looks at him. ‘Never had no need for a car. Had a Triumph Trident once but when I got the pub I sold that as well. What’s wrong with public transport? Buses, trains, taxis …’

  ‘He’s trying to tell you that my name’s Jack, Mack. Got it? J. A. C. K.’

  ‘Jack Black from down the track, had a whip that he could crack,’ he booms with the look of a buffoon. Fucking idiot.

  Then Ivan on the end takes out his top teeth and licks the food off them. I’m ready to throw up. I look at Jim Southall and he gives an odd grin. The poor old bugger must have resigned to accept all this. He’s given in to the indignities and unnatural assaults on the sensibilities. He no longer expects normality. I do. I’m not eighty-five, I’m sixty-two! I’ve got quarter of a century before I end up like decrepit old MP Jim Southall with scabs on his face and water leaking out of his red, saggy eyelids.

  Then comes the ultimate insult. Big booming Dooley is going on about the day counter meals were 2/6 and pies were a shilling, waving his arms about like a gorilla and he knocks my arm, jolting a full cup of hot tea in my lap! I had just started to sip and it’s all over me - every drop of it down the front of my shirt and trousers. So now I’m in my room, but instead of watching Lost on TV, my favourite show, I’m spending the hour at the hand basin washing out my shirt and underpants.

  3

  Saturday and I am expecting a visit from my daughter. Feeling a little more ‘upbeat’ than last night. Gave trousers to Nurse Williams, the more decent one around here. Put my name inside the waist band with a biro and hope it doesn’t get dry-cleaned out. All my other clothes have already been ‘tagged’ so I don’t end up with some old geriatric’s underwear. The thought turns the stomach.

  This morning at breakfast Clem dropped a fart that would kill a Clydesdale. The sound alone put me right off my porridge. I attempted to take a cup of tea back to my room but was promptly turned around by Nurse Stinson. She grabbed my wheelchair and just spun it around.

  ‘You must eat with the others,’ she demands.

  ‘I’m through with eating anything,’ I tell her. But then I’m back at the table and you could cut the foul air with a blunt breadknife.

  From my TV notes: Beef cattle in Australia emit anywhere from 50 to 90 kilograms of methane per year - mostly through belching and not farting as many think. In polite circles this action is called ‘eructation’. Eructation: Belching (Of person or volcano). Oxford p. 278. Our breakfast ‘circle’ is neither polite nor free of eructations!

  More than one billion cows in the world equals approximately 70 million tonnes of methane per year.

  Two-thirds of all ammonia in the world comes from cows.

  Termites in mounds emit approximately two kilograms of methane per hectare per year.

  Still waiting for Lisa.

  Emissions from the human body occur in at least twenty different ways. Here are some of them:

  Bleeding, moulting, sweating, coughing, runny nose (i.e. nasal mucus)

  Flatulence, respiration, eructation.

  People can also -

  Defecate

  Urinate

  Regurgitate

  Ejaculate

  Menstruate

  Lactate

  Suppurate

  Exudate

  Exfoliate

  Expectorate

  It is now 2 p.m. Lisa arrived at three minutes after 11 a.m., no doubt so she could disappear as soon as the lunch bell went. She looked so much older. Roughly the same build as her mother, thin and a bit scrawny but long hair in a ponytail. She has her mother’s freckles as well.

  Fi
rst thing she says: ‘Hi Dad, you look fantastic!’ I have not looked ‘fantastic’ in a long while. ‘Great’ would be an overstatement, ‘good’ not very close, ‘OK’ might have been near it. I still have my upset stomach which I think is connected to my gall bladder removal. Also a rash has broken out on my right foot and ankle and there is another one on my inner arm but I do not think the two are related.

  ‘I’ve got you a present,’ she says. She passes me a small package. ‘A pair of woollen gloves,’ she says before I have a chance to open it. I thank her.

  ‘Should find some use for them,’ I say. ‘Never know when this place might freeze over.’ She doesn’t catch the drift.

  ‘Did you bring my other things?’ I ask.

  ‘What things, Dad?’

  ‘My box of photos, the digital clock radio, my fishing tackle …’

  ‘They must be still in the storage cupboard. Have you looked in your cartons?’

  ‘They’re not in those. All the things in there are listed on the lid. I marked them myself. Only winter clothes, some books, all my science journals …’

  ‘Soon as I get a chance I’ll have a look, Dad, OK? When I …’

  ‘You said you would on the phone. You said you’d bring over my box of photos - and my fishing gear as well.’

  ‘Oh come on, Dad. What on earth would you do with fishing gear in here? What use would it …’

  ‘Lisa, it’s my gear. They’re my rods, my reels and there’s a large creel full of expensive tackle …’

  ‘I’ll have a look, although I suspect the boys might have used your rods. Don’t you want to hand them on to your grandkids?’

  ‘Not yet I don’t, Lisa. I want to use them. I’ve got plans. I might see if Joe wants to go fishing.’

  ‘Joseph is too busy at the moment, sitting his HSC.’