The Time I had a Beer with Kiera’s Dad
I didn’t like Kiera’s dad very much at first. He was a tall and very
broad Irishman who still spoke with an accent and who was a devout catholic.
When he wasn’t in Canberra or in his office on Orrong Road, he was doing
ambassadorial stuff for the biggest anti-abortion organisation in Australia. He
wore suits with pencil-thin ties on the weekends – at least on the weekends I
saw him – and his aftershave was too young for him, probably something with
‘ocean’ or ‘sport’ in its name.
There was a lupine aspect to his face – the big toothy mouth and
pale, beautiful eyes – that, in combination with the sheer mass of the man, unnerved
me. Also, his hair was thick and anchored to his forehead in an immoveable, angular
line, like a weave. It was all black too, but not in a coloured kind of way. Was it even possible for a fifty year-old man
not to have a single grey hair? Even on the sides?
Then there was the fact that Kiera’s dad had the same eyes as she
did. I mean exactly the same. That
unbelievable likeness niggled at me every time I looked at – in my considered
opinion – her most attractive feature and I resented him for it, despite the
facts that they were his eyes first and that it shouldn’t have mattered anyway
because I had never been able to stare into Kiera’s the way I wanted.
But when you got right down to it, Kiera’s dad was difficult to like
because he couldn’t stand me. When she had first moved into the Errol Street apartment
we share and was hauling her bed through the corridor, he, holding onto the
other side of the bed, muttered something which is still kind of on reverb in
my mind whenever I see him, even now that he and I have had a beer – or twenty
– together.
-He’s a painter, dad, I heard Kiera say. A really good one.
-So he paints houses then?
-Dad, he’s an artist.
-I’m just taking the mickey, Kiera, I knew he was an artist just by
looking at him. If a young, middle class Melbournian man looks like he’s a
Pirate of Penzance, then he’s probably an artist. And a vegetarian. Is he a
vegetarian?
I couldn’t hear what Kiera said next – maybe she nodded. Because her
dad said hmm and then something about
which way the bed was going to face.
Even though it was amusing to hear an Irishman actually say taking the mickey, I became
self-conscious and thought later that two people who were different ages and
whose political and religious views sharply diverged, and who hated what the
other wore and who thought what the other said was funny when it wasn’t supposed
to be, that two people like that could never get along. We would never have spent that night at the Fitzroy Pinnacle, it has to be said, were it not for the spider I set on fire.
*
The Huntsman was bigger than average, the size you can exaggerate with
an outstretched hand and not feel like a liar. It scuttled across my bed. I was
reading A Discovery of Strangers and
a John Serrie album, his collaboration with Gary Stroutos, was sort of whipping
softly in the background like a cat’s tail. I liked to listen to Serrie while I
read; his arrangements were sparse, seemed incommensurate with the speed at
which I absorbed each page, slowing down time and also supercharging it, as if
I were surfing a wave as well as watching it from the beach, building.
My white blinds were drawn but backlit brightly enough to show that
it was still the afternoon. Now and then I could hear Kiera and her boyfriend
Daniel making food, which usually made me hungry and lonely because Daniel was
a chef and I was in love with Kiera but the window of opportunity had been
steamed over by our living arrangements and the fact that she didn’t love me
back. My cupboard was always glumly quarter-full. Something else interesting is
that our house was a double-storey but the kitchen was the only room upstairs.
The sight of the spider
almost gave me a heart attack. In that moment I was reminded of the time when I
was a kid that I had gone for a swim and taken a bunched up towel off our table
tennis table to dry myself and then felt something in my hair, felt the tickle
of it coming down my front, saw it on my chest in the reflection of the
backdoor, woke in the night at the slightest odd sensation for weeks
afterwards. It was a memory I had forgotten and at the shock of it I sprang up.
I eventually managed to track the spider to behind the bed-head, which I had covered
in cutout pages of Hesse’s Siddhartha.
The spider was sitting as motionless as if it had never moved in its
life. Its legs were curled up, like a dead crab’s. Its body – or sac, or
whatever you call it – looked like a bulb of nutmeg and the thought of putting
it in a nutcracker made me grit my teeth. As calmly as possible I pulled the
rest of the bed away from the bed-head, revealing a sliver of dusty
floorboards, a pen and a couple of odd socks. Now the spider had nowhere to go.
One of the dusty socks was thick, an Explorer I think they call
them, and I put it over my hand like a puppet of death. The dust made me want
to cough but I held it down. My dad, who had died that summer, had always used
a jam jar and a paper towel to trap spiders, or cockroaches for that matter,
putting them out in the yard or, to make my sister and I laugh, over our
neighbour’s fence. But I was panicked and didn’t have any empty jars or paper
towels. All I had was a sock. For a split second though I took my eyes off the
spider and looked around, maybe to see if anyone was watching. It was then that
I noticed the cigarette lighter on my windowsill, sitting in the bonsai pot. I used it to light candles for my
incense burner. There was also a can of shoe waterproofer I had happened to be
using that morning in preparation for the trip I was making to Mount Bogong.
*
When I doused it for the first time, the shocked spider darted
halfway up the wall in a flash before staggering back to the floor, poisoned,
already half-dead.
Never before had I done anything like what I’d just done, but by
now, except for the nervous start I gave when it reacted to the water-proofer,
a kind of trance had come over me. I still can’t really explain the feeling,
except to say that I was looking at the spider the way I looked at the last
page of a book just prior to sleep.
Certain that it had no more escape attempts left in it, I sprayed
the spider a second time. While it was glistening wet I swooped the lighter in
close and sparked. There was a crackle, and a very high-pitched, beetle-like
squeal, and the smell of burning rubbish, all of which I took in with the focus
of a scientist conducting an experiment. I was deathly quiet and could feel
that my eyes were open wider than normal. I sprayed the spider some more and
the flames turned greenish and almost sucked back up into the can, terrifying
me. So I raised the can higher and pressed the trigger as softly as I could;
the occasional droplet of combustant would fall and stoke the flaming spider on
its pyre of smoking dust.
There was a lot of fire and smoke. There was a lot of waterproofer
on my fingers. And even after the spider had devolved to a shapeless piece of
charcoal I continued to dapple it with waterproofer, relight the flames if they
went out, unthinking and so unmoved, transfixed and so not really watching.
Then when there was nothing at all left to fuel the fire I swept the remnants
into a dustpan and threw them out my window. I pushed my mattress back into
place. I realised I was still wearing the sock on my hand and took it off,
dazedly put it in the bin.
I opened my bedroom door and the smell of whatever it was that Kiera
and Daniel were cooking rushed at me, enveloped me. It smelt sweet.
*
I had to work at Art After Dark that night and so I didn’t think
much about having murdered the spider until later. I scanned tickets at the
National Gallery. When I had first gotten the job – the outgoing ticket scanner
was a friend of mine whose glasses were especially thick and whose R.M Williams
boots were at least third or fourth-hand, who painted large pictures of pool
tables and sold them to regional hospitals and nursing homes – I thought I was
living the dream. But a month or so in, I realised that my job was just a job
and that I could just as well have been scanning tickets for illegal cockfights
or dinner theatre shows. I also realised I didn’t like my coworkers very much
because they didn’t see it like that, or pretended they didn’t.
On the other hand, I guess I could easily have come to resent my
passion for painting because I disliked the crappy job that that passion had afforded
me, but I didn’t. I didn’t do that
because I was more prepared to scan a million tickets to the Napoleon
Exhibition than to start painting pictures of pool tables or men standing
around on a golfing green, waiting for the last man to putt in.
When I came home I was tired and, as always, a little bummed out. So
that I could go straight to bed, I immediately brushed my teeth and washed my
face, and pissed. I also sprayed the foul-smelling antibacterial spray onto the
eyebrow ring I had gotten a few days earlier. Then I entered my bedroom and saw
that Kiera had left a chocolate muffin on the little antique sideboard next to
my bed. She’d moved some books (The Cloud
Forest and The Famished Road, my
lullabies) to one side and put the muffin on the other side. The muffin was
huge and had a pecan and a piece of candied orange on top and it was in my
favourite bowl, an old Rice Bubbles one with pictures of Snap, Crackle and Pop
in their American clothes, which my mum, who had also died that summer, had
given me when I was little.
I ate the muffin with a heavy heart. Kiera and I had lived together
for six months by then and the best way of measuring how comfortable she was
with someone seemed to be through the kindness, devoid of ulterior motives,
that coloured the stuff she said and did. That was how I knew she liked me,
maybe even loved me. It was also how I knew that she could never be mine and
why I almost wished she would suddenly become indifferent to my presence, to my
whole deal.
Then I took the bowl upstairs and washed it; the microwave clock
read 02:17. The apartment was quiet except for the fridge and for me. Oddly, the
first thing I noticed upon reentering my bedroom was the can of waterproofer on
the windowsill, as if it hadn’t been there before. At the sight of it I froze.
I turned to the mirror on my wardrobe and saw that I looked wrung out and
terrified. At last, I sat down on my bed, my knees weak, and remembered what I
had done and started to think about what I had done.
*
While the spider was burning I had compared the smell to garbage in
my mind and thought how terrible the smell was, but not for a second had I
considered what the smell was or, for
that matter, why there was even a
smell at all. The thought that maybe I was possessed at the time by the memory of
that spider in my towel, in the thrall of a temporary mania that knee-jerked the
murder of this spider into occurrence without my being able to stop it was cold
comfort because it was fucking absurd. All I knew for sure was that I was a
killer and my actions were as incomprehensible to me as they were messed up. But
the worst of it all was that Kiera’s dad had been wrong that day.
I wasn’t vegetarian – I was vegan. I refused to wear leather and attended
veganism seminars and led debates on bioethics at art school. I had every back
issue of the Friends of the Earth cookbooks. I scoured ingredients lists and
knew what was in every numbered food additive (E920, for example, is made of
from chicken feathers and sometimes human hair). I signed all the AVAAZ animal
rights petitions that entered my inbox. The only cleaning product I ever used
was organic vegetable soap, on my face, on my body, for my clothes, instead of
shampoo, everywhere. I took organic iron and B group supplements. I was proudly
– you might have said militantly – vegan. In response to the dizzying shit the room started to do, I
popped two Temtabs and was lights-out until midday.
*
In the month or so that followed before I had a beer with Kiera’s
dad, eating vegetables began to leave me with a strange taste in my mouth.
Acrid, as though I was eating the alter-egos nature slips in occasionally and
which poison people in the bush. Pretty soon all I could stomach were potatoes,
bananas and unripe eggplants. Still I
almost felt guiltier eating that stuff than meat because more than anything I
hated posers, and I’d become one. I no longer believed that deep down I really
believed in all the sacrifice and the scrutiny or the politics. I didn’t even
know if I cared about animals anymore. How could I? For five years, you
couldn’t have said Emilio without
thinking vegan. It had been a kind of
epithet, and now, because of the spider, it was bunk.
If that wasn’t enough, art turned its back on me. The sight of
paintbrushes made me scared and nauseous. When I held one I would break into
shivers. Any work I tried to do looked amateurish and the act of doing it was
the opposite of the catharsis painting was supposed to provide. I began to
doubt whether I actually liked to paint or whether my talent and the fact that
cool people respected me for it weren’t the real motivating factors in my
desire to be an artist. I second-guessed virtually every piece of considered
thought about art I had. I second-guessed impulses to paint that formerly I’d
been unable to control, skeptical of even my unconscious motives. The pictures
of mine that I’d hung on my walls were of idyllic, pristine nature; I took them
all down. I also decided that I hated, I mean misanthropically loathed, my coworkers at Art After Dark;
it was a level of vitriol of which I’d never thought myself capable and upset
me a lot.
My fate’s furrows, as Thomas Pyncheon might have called them, were
all over the place. They were zigzagged where before they weren’t zigzagged and
whole sections seemed to have been shaken clear, like a feature wall that’s
been paint-thinned down to the plaster in a few big, central patches. While the
term identity crisis was bandied
around a fair bit, I came to think of my own condition as a case of identity homicide.
*
I decided I had to bury the corpse and start afresh. Doing that,
however, necessitated a last skerrick of selfhood, a part of my identity that
was unchanged and even immutable that could be used as a base for the new one. And
when one day I found a zip-lock bag full of interesting old badges sitting on
my sideboard, I thought I’d found it. I went straight to the fridge and grabbed
the emergency numbers list from under a bunch of alphabet magnets. I called
Kiera’s dad and asked him to have a beer with me. I told him it was about Kiera
and that it was important. He asked me how six o’clock Thurday was for me and I
almost said it had to be sooner – I called him on a Monday – but then grew a pair
and said that Thursday at 6 was perfect.
*
The Pinnacle was hopping. It happened that there was a band playing
very masculine and very political Irish songs in the garden, but Kiera’s dad
didn’t seem interested.
-Not my thing, was all he said on the matter.
And so we sat inside at the last free table, the one closest to the
toilets. For our meeting I had tied my hair up and worn a prosaic white T-shirt
and blue jeans. He had come from work and was wearing a suit with a grey shirt
and black tie – pencil thin. It smelt quite a bit like shit at that table, shit
and urinal soap, and the air was more leaden. I was distracted by all the men
and women who were exiting the toilets. They would awkwardly adjust their
clothes and wipe their hands that the driers had only half dried before
straightening their backs proudly and reentering the fray. The silly walks they
all affected struck me and my newfound cynicism as the worst kind of artifice.
Kiera’s dad, who was probably the biggest human being in the joint, just sipped
his beer and divided his attention between his I-phone screen and me.
We finished our second jug. In line to buy the third, it hit me that
Kiera’s dad and I had only exchanged a few pleasantries and spoken ever so
briefly about Ireland - we might as well have been two strangers drinking at
the same table. There was something really unusual about it. Though I knew that
my reticence was due to wracked nerves, I couldn’t understand his. I couldn’t
work out why he hadn’t asked me why the fuck I’d summoned him here, a question
I guess I was waiting to use as a springboard. Nor did it seem to make sense
that he was willing to sit and sink beers with me instead of going home to his
Kooyong mansion and (probably) doting wife. Then I thought that perhaps he had
taken one look at me and understood the state I was in, that this was just
another example of his squeaky religious benevolence. I guess I’ll never know. Anyway,
as soon as I got back to the table and had poured him another pot, I put to
Kiera’s dad the question I’d been so desperate to ask.
*
Out in open air, my brain was finally able to take proper stock of
that question. While inside it had seemed so logical, so essential; now, ten
seconds later, it was almost unbelievable to me that it had come from my mouth
and from my reasoning faculties. I felt disastrously drunk and red in the face.
It was the low point of my life to date and, had it not been for Kiera’s dad’s
unexpected reaction, I would have left on the spot.
But there was no lecture, no tirade, no reality check. Instead the
enormous man looked at me in earnest for a time, before offering a meek smile.
He took the jug and filled up my glass with such delicacy that there was no
head at all.
-Emilio, I want to apologise for what I said about your art. Don’t
hold it against her, but Kiera told me I upset you quite a bit. I suppose,
being her dad, that I’ve grown accustomed to saying very shallow, ‘daddish’
things to her about the boys in her life. She knows I’m joking but sort of goes
along with it anyway – that’s her part, you see. The truth is that I love art.
I’m a patron of the National Gallery and even get drunk on Bloomsday from time
to time. Do you like James Joyce?
I told him that I did.
-Well, you’re a good lad then. Do you forgive me?
I told him that I did.
-I’m delighted to hear it, really I am. Let’s have another few
rounds and say no more about bygones.
The conversation waned again as we drank, and drank, but it was
okay. Then, when it, was time to leave, Kiera’s dad said:
-Oh and by the way, Emilio, I hope you liked your badges. Kiera told
me you were fond of badges. Consider them my formal token of apology.
I told him that I liked them very much, and thank you.
