This is the Life. Alex Shearer
area on site, where the bungalow dwellers could get together once a week if they so desired and eat dinner at trestle tables – all provided at minimal cost.
It was a barn of a place, full of noisy conversations. There were married and elderly couples there, along with divorcees, singles, and allegedly amorous widows on the lookout for spare men. I found Terri at a table with her friends. She’d saved a space for me, so I sat down and she introduced me, and we all exchanged small talk about the UK and what have you. After the first course, a woman Terri knew wandered over to say hello. Terri introduced us, and as they chatted, the woman remained standing next to where I sat. Next thing I knew she had her hand on my shoulder, then her fingers were in my hair, then she was playing with the lobe of my ear, which sent tingles along my arm. Then she asked me where I lived and when I said the UK, she gave up on me and walked off.
There was no coffee to be had so Terri invited me back to her bungalow. She had a small dog, but it was friendly and nice, and not much of a barker. We drank instant coffee and talked about Louis. We talked about his boiler, which had conked out a decade ago. It had taken him a full ten years to get round to fixing it, and he had lived without hot water all that time, taking invigorating cold showers, even in winter. His washing machine ran off cold water too.
‘And yet he was so good at fixing other people’s things,’ she said.
‘Isn’t there something about the shoemaker’s kids always being badly shod?’
‘I suppose,’ she said.
We talked some more about Louis and she said how good he had looked after the famous haircut, but that generally speaking he had allowed himself to turn into a wild man.
‘I’d look at those eyebrows,’ she said, ‘and think, Louis, if you’d just shave that beard off, you’d be quite a handsome man. He could scrub up really nice. But well, you know Louis …’
Louis was always covered in paint. If not him personally, then his clothes. Some people have good, going-out clothes and working clothes. All of Louis’ clothes were working clothes, because if a job needed doing, he’d do it, irrespective of what he had on. As a result almost everything he owned had paint or oil daubed on it, and he lived in shorts, even in winter, and his elbows poked out of his unravelled sweaters. He was a take-me-as-I-am kind of man. He was a love-me-or-leave-me guy.
Terri went on to say that he had asked her out to dinner once at Fried Fish, which was an upmarket kind of fish and chip place down near the harbour.
‘I thought he’d have got dressed up,’ she lamented. ‘And I went to a lot of trouble. But he turned up in his ute in his working clothes. I felt I was going out for a meal with the workman,’ she said. ‘I was so embarrassed.’ Then she sighed and said, ‘Though I did like your brother. And underneath that beard he could have been quite a handsome man.’
I sneaked a look at my watch and thought that maybe I ought to go. I didn’t want to outstay my welcome. They seemed to keep early hours in the bungalow city.
But then, as I was about to make excuses, Terri said, ‘You know, I maybe shouldn’t tell you this, but Louis came to see me once, oh, a year or two ago, and he was sitting right where you are now, in that very chair …’
We both looked at that very chair I was sitting in, as if it might speak, or somehow bear witness, or disclose its mysteries. But it stayed schtum.
‘Yes, he was sitting in that very chair – and I don’t know if I should tell you this, but quite out of the blue, I mean, I was so surprised – you know what Louis said to me?’
I did, but felt that I couldn’t admit to it.
‘He said, Terri, would you like to go to bed with me?’
‘Wow,’ I said, feeling I had to say something. ‘Well, that was Louis for you, always subtle.’
‘I was so surprised. So surprised.’
‘I bet.’
‘Because I’d never ever thought of Louis in that way. I’d always just thought of him as a friend of Frank’s. Not to say though that if he’d trimmed that beard and moustache off he wouldn’t have been quite a good-looking man.’
‘Well, Louis always had a beard,’ I said. ‘Since his twenties. He’d had that beard a long time.’
‘So anyway, I was that taken aback.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘I didn’t know where to look.’
‘A very difficult situation,’ I agreed. ‘To have come out with it like that. I mean, no preamble or anything.’
‘Not a word. No preliminaries. No what you’d call—’
‘Courtship rituals?’ I suggested.
‘No warning at all.’
‘Well, Louis always preferred the direct approach.’
But I was just stalling. I was just trying to keep things on a neutral footing so as not to put her off from telling me what had happened next.
‘Well, I did not know what to say,’ Terri said.
‘Quite an embarrassing situation,’ I nodded, ‘to be put on the spot like that.’
‘And he was looking at me with such sad eyes. He had such sad eyes sometimes, your brother.’
‘He had to put drops in them for his glaucoma,’ I said. ‘In fact I sometimes wondered if it wasn’t the roofing that caused it. You know Louis, he’d never wear sunglasses, and up there on those roofs in the Australian sunshine, and it reflecting off the surface. Surely that could damage your eyes.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘They were more like a labrador’s eyes. They’d look at you sort of sadly, but affectionately too. And Frank never got glaucoma, but then he drank a lot.’
‘I’m not so much of a dog person,’ I said. ‘Though I had a cat once when my girlfriend left. She went off with my best friend but she left the cat behind. Interestingly, Louis introduced that friend to us and then he went off to Australia. He ruined half the furniture – scratched it to pieces. Cats and sofas are a lethal combination. I think the cat resented me and he’d rather have gone with my ex, only she didn’t want him.’
‘But what a thing to come out with, I thought,’ Terri said. ‘Terri, would you like to go to bed with me? Just like that.’
I felt there was nothing I could say now that would have been appropriate. So I just waited.
‘Well, once I was over the surprise, I said, Louis – Louis, for us to do a thing like that would spoil a beautiful friendship.’
‘So you—’
‘I just couldn’t. I mean, if he’d dressed a little smarter maybe, or had had a shave more often. But you can’t expect to live without hot water for ten years and still—’
‘No, of course.’
‘Maintain normal standards,’ Terri said.
‘So how did Louis take that?’ I asked. ‘He was okay, I guess. Because you obviously remained friends.’
‘Oh yes,’ Terri said. ‘I really liked Louis. And so did Frank – until he got the drinking problem.’
I looked at my watch.
‘I’d better go,’ I said. ‘It’s late and I’m not so sure of the route in the dark.’
Terri gave me detailed directions for a short cut, but they were so complicated I couldn’t follow them, and I went back the way I had come. I was driving Louis’ ute, which was a noisy rattle trap with a falling-down window and a heater/cooler fan permanently stuck on high. It also had a quarter of a million miles on the clock. And that was Louis too, always buying old and high maintenance. Even when he could afford better.
I