‘How about here?’
There were cafés everywhere, but this one had plenty of free tables outside. The waitresses were young and friendly. Not Chinese, maybe Malaysian. But I guess they were all Australian really. They’d just started off as Chinese and Malaysian once, and now they were Australian, same as the one-time British and Irish and Greek and Scottish were. It was a broad church, you might say.
We sat at a table and a waitress brought a menu over.
‘Can you light one of those gas burners?’ Louis asked. ‘I’m cold.’
‘You want to sit inside?’ I asked him.
‘No. But I’d like the burner.’
‘Sure,’ the waitress said. ‘No worries.’
And she opened a valve and pressed some button to light the burner up.
When she’d gone I said to Louis, ‘How come no one here has any worries?’ He looked at me, puzzled. ‘Everyone says “No worries”,’ I told him. ‘I can’t believe they don’t have any.’
He didn’t respond. He kind of looked right through me. But that was nothing new. He’d always done that, since we were kids.
He was staring at the menu but couldn’t make sense of it, so I read it out.
‘I’ll have that,’ he said. But then he wanted to know the price, and when I told him, he almost changed his mind.
‘I’ll pay,’ I told him.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘But it’s expensive.’
‘It’s the cost of living, Louis,’ I said.
And what else did he have to spend it on anyway? And how long left did he have to spend it? The world was full of people with money worries, but there were also people with no money worries at all, yet they were still worried – they were worried that something might happen and their money wouldn’t be able to fix it.
I sometimes think that if you started listing all the things that money can’t fix, it would be even longer than the list of things it can.
Sometimes money is as much use as rocks in the desert, when what you need is a glass of cold water.
Terri has two stories – or, rather, she has one story, but there are two versions of it, with contradictory endings, and this is permutation number one.
The first time I heard about Terri was when Louis rang me one morning. It was always morning when he rang – morning my time, late evening his. He’d have got back home from whatever particularly crummy job he was doing that day. Louis had a good brain and he had a degree and a masters and an engineering diploma, but for all that he worked in low-skilled, low-paid employment, for, like the character of Biff Loman in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, it was as though he couldn’t ‘get a hold on life’.
He told me once that he didn’t work in the field he was qualified for as he ‘didn’t like the politics’. The problem with that, as far as I was concerned, is that there are politics everywhere. You could have the dirtiest, least-respected, lowest-paid job going, but there’s still politics in it; there’s still a boss, still co-workers. You can’t get away from politics any more than you can get away from other people. It can be done, but it’s not easy. You’d need to be a hermit.
But, in common with many people who don’t fit into the world as it is, Louis just had to do things right. No slacking, idling or cutting corners. The bummest job had to be done just so, and he was always complaining about bad management and employees who didn’t care, even when he was working as a maintenance man on the minimum wage, or in a factory somewhere, on the assembly line. Louis always appeared to know what needed to be done to run a business properly, he just couldn’t seem to do it for himself. He tried setting up on his own a couple of times, but lost money on both occasions. Yet, for all that he was so well qualified and educated, he believed that working with your hands was superior to working with your mind for some reason. Maybe he thought it was more genuine, more authentic. And the irony of that was that all our parents had ever wanted for both of us was an education and an escape from the drudgery of factory labour and manual toil.
Anyway, he called up and I answered the phone. There had been a time when calls were rare, just Christmas and birthdays and emergency measures. But the cost of international calls had come down and we spoke frequently, maybe once a week or a fortnight.
‘Hey!’ he said.
‘Hi, Louis,’ I said, a little annoyed at being interrupted at what I was doing but trying to conceal it. You can’t blame people for ringing at inconvenient times. When you call them it’s probably the same. ‘How’s it going?’
‘You won’t believe what happened,’ he said. And then, as usual, having said that, he fell silent, like he wanted me to extract the information, like he was the winkle and I had a pin.
‘What happened, Louis?’
‘I went round to see Terri this afternoon,’ he said.
I felt I ought to know who Terri was, but I’d forgotten.
‘Terri? Who’s she again?’
‘Terri, you know, who was married to Frank.’
‘Ah, Frank. Right.’
I should have known who Frank was too.
‘That I used to work with. The roofing.’
‘Right, yeah.’
I recollected now. Louis had been in business a while with Frank and they fixed roofs together. It all went wrong when Frank acquired a dog and brought it along with him to the sites. It was a traumatised rescue dog and it barked incessantly. The barking drove Louis mad and he threw a spanner at the dog one day, which got Frank mad, and the working partnership didn’t last much longer after that.
Terri had had enough of Frank too, as his drinking had moved from heavy to alcoholic levels. So she divorced him and she bought a small bungalow in a retirement village. She wasn’t so young any more, but who was? And she was still attractive and had the proverbial heart of gold.
‘So why’d you go round to see Terri? Just visiting?’
‘No, she called me about her guttering, asked me if I could fix it. It had come loose. There’s supposed to be some maintenance guy round there for all that, but he’s up to his eyeballs. So I took a ladder and went over with the ute after work.’
Louis had a ute – a utility vehicle, a battered old Nissan van with a flat-bed trailer and a silver aluminium box screwed to the flat-bed, in which you could keep tools, and which you could secure with a padlock.
‘So was that okay?’
Long pause.
‘Yeah. I fixed the gutter and she asked if I’d like to have a cup of tea, so we had some tea and we were sitting there talking, you know, about Frank and what have you—’
‘How is Frank?’
‘He’s in hospital. He’s got diabetes now and something wrong with his liver. He kept coming round and wanting me to go drinking. I’d just have a couple of beers, but that wasn’t enough for him. He’d bring Scotch as well, and when I refused to drink any more, the last time he came round, he lost his temper and we had a row. And I haven’t seen him since.’
‘Ah.’