The Best Australian Stories (44 page)

‘Is that you?' my mother said. She had not yet accepted that a mobile phone as distinct from all other phones is answered only by the owner – at least, in the best of all relationships. I suppose in the case of suicide or murder (as we sometimes see in TV police dramas) the detective at the crime scene would answer having taken the mobile phone from our dead body.

‘Yes Mum, it's me,' I said, pulling a can from the shelf.

‘I have something to tell you which I should've told you many years ago but your father and I think that now is as good a time as any,' she said. ‘I suggest you sit down.'

It was one of
those
telephone calls; ‘sit down' is a euphemism for ‘someone has terminal cancer.'

I looked about me. I supposed I could hunch down in an alcove near the cleaning products.

‘We are both OK – this is about you.'

‘Have I won the Nobel Prize?' Maybe the rumour was about again.

It would not surprise me if the Nobel Prize committee called your mother and father first. Swedish old-world courtesy.

‘It's not anything like that. Sit down!'

And the other thing the telephone call did, apart from
rebadging
my life, was that it caused me, for the first time in my life, to sit down in a supermarket aisle.

I slid down onto my backside, tucking in my legs gracefully together sideways – should boys sit that way? – was it a coded sit? – out of the way, one hand holding my trolley although there is no point in anyone stealing a trolley inside the supermarket – unless, I suppose, they wanted to be relieved of the burden of choice. I have considered doing that myself, taking one of those huge, overfilled, abundant, family-provisioned trolleys, paying for it at the checkout, and high-tailing it. When you got the load home there would be surprises, things you would never have thought of trying, treats. Or maybe I could sit myself on the child seat and go home to that abundant household. Note that down for my next therapy session.

My mother said, ‘I would tell you to get a drink if I believed in drink, which you know I don't which reminds me, are you eating three meals a day?'

‘I eat very well, I eat at the Rockpool most days.'

‘A rock pool?'

‘It's a restaurant, Mum. A very decent restaurant.'

‘I know it's a restaurant. But you said “at a rock pool.” That must be expensive.'

I meant it as a joke but it was overrun by the conversation before I could explain it. ‘It is but at least I get a square meal …' but as I thought about it this was not what my mother would call a ‘square meal' although I have noticed that square plates are appearing in upmarket restaurants. ‘But tell me the news which has required me to sit down in a supermarket.'

‘You're in a supermarket?'

‘It's Saturday morning, Mum, every inner-city Playboy of the Western world is in the supermarket.' Buying the ingredients for a fabulous dinner party which will end in tears and screaming about foreign policy. Yeah, right.

A passing shopper asked me if I was OK. I smiled and nodded and waved him on. Maybe he'd cracked the code of the bunch of bananas in the trolley and maybe, by sitting, I was becoming (in code)
rather
obvious
. At least I had the mobile phone to my ear, having a mobile phone to your ear is an excuse for stationary standing or sitting anywhere at any time in public with your back to people. Perhaps sitting in a supermarket with your mobile to your ear is also
code
? Say, code for:
I-am-waiting-for-your-call, honey
?

She then asked, ‘Maybe I should call you later at a more convenient time?'

I let out a very impatient, ‘
Tell me now
– if the news is so BIG tell me now, I'm seated.'

I wondered if at eighty she was pregnant. Anything now seemed medically possible in that area. Or were they splitting up? Or were they adopting a Bosnian child? Or had they rented my childhood room – mothballed from my last year at high school – to a Cambodian family of twelve?

‘The news is this: I will give it to you as clearly as I can: your father and I are not your real parents.'

My eyes, obviously confounded by hearing what the ears were hearing, now became absorbed by the label of a cleaning agent for bathroom tile joints. Who worries so much about tile joints? ‘You are not my parents?' My voice was calm. She will need palliative care, my brothers and I will need to get them into a home.

‘We never have been.'

‘Who, then, are my parents?' The milkman? I try to treat her statement as meriting of rational conversation. ‘You mean my father did not father me with you?'

I found this appalling. My mother is so correct, so upright. But maybe way back then she'd been a wild thing. A flapper. A beatnik. Whatever.

‘It's not like that – he was not the father and I was not the mother.'

‘Who then were the father and the mother? May I ask?'

‘Another couple.' This statement seemed to lack conviction but there was an inevitable logic to it.

‘Which couple, may I ask?'

My eyes were still off there, studying the labels on packets in great detail as if my eyes were going on with the shopping not wanting to know, as if it were just ‘ears' business.' I became aware, as my eyes did this reading, of how much of an agenda I had now with shopping – buy Australian first, no scented toilet-paper, no printed toilet-paper, low fat, which countries did I at present disapprove of, why
Italian
canned tomatoes? Careful about China. Which middle-eastern dates?

‘Surely the hospital where I was born has a record of my parents.'

‘Be that as it may, all that matters is that we're not your parents and you should write about that in one of the papers you write for – the
New Yorker
, maybe.

My mother: my agent. A little out of touch with my career.

‘Your father – although he's not your father – thinks there might be a film in it. He said you should call Cohn in L.A.'

Cohn? Who the hell is Cohn?

‘Now listen, Mum, before we get into the magazine and film deal, this is shattering news, this turns my world upside down, we are not simply talking about a good subject for a deeply reflective essay here.'

‘Your father and I think that you should get it into print as soon as possible. He's standing here with me. He says to say hullo.'

‘Hullo, Dad – sorry – hullo “not-dad” – but why?' I heard my mother say to my father off-phone, ‘He says hullo.'

‘Why this rush to print?'

My mother answered for them both, ‘He thinks it should go in the
New Yorker
but I said
Vanity Fair
because they've been good to you.'

I wondered tiredly whether this would mean more therapy work (when did therapy stop being self-knowledge and become ‘work'?) For a start, I would have to rearrange my genealogy; in truth, I would have to start from nothing. I would have to move a lot of mental furniture around.

‘You'll manage. I am sure there are many people who manage without a mother or father.'

‘Hold it – hold it – all that's really changed is that you're saying that you and he – were a
surrogate
mother and father. For all purposes you were my parents.'

‘I am sure there are books that will tell you how to go about it all and which word to use. Ask that therapist of yours.'

Her reference to the therapist was sarcastic, it carried the implication that my therapist was a know-all and in fact, she was the opposite, all she had was question-avoidance technique, endlessly returning the questions to me. I was always left panting and begging for answers.

I sat there in the supermarket waving away people who asked if I were OK and looked at the bananas and occasionally looked back at me with a lascivious movement of their eyebrows. Do I wish?

My mother put my father on the phone who said ‘hullo' again and then said he would pass me back to my mother. Despite a satisfied certainty and a slight urgency in their voices, they both seemed surprisingly unperturbed by it all. But it had been part of our family style
never to
panic
.

*

I told no one of this news over the weekend and on the Monday I went to the Office of Births, Deaths and Marriages and paid for my birth certificate which I would've expected – of all the government documents in my life – to be free, in fact, I would've thought I
owned
it and I was simply allowing them to hold it for me.

I suppose if you couldn't afford to pay for it you would be without any documentation of your existence and be released from life and all its legal obligations.

My birth certificate was quite adamant: my father was my father on the certificate and my mother my mother.

I rang them with this news. My mother said that they had rejected the certificate as null.

‘How could it be null?' Were lawyers already involved? Should I have a lawyer before I said anything more?

‘Your father and I discussed it. We rejected that certificate as null.'

I suppose when push came to shove,
they
would know. Or should know. I doubt, legally, that they could ‘null' it unilaterally.

‘You can't do that, you can't simply decide that an official document is
null
. This is a witnessed document, the matron of the hospital and the doctor present at the birth witnessed it.'

‘They must have been confused.'

‘Why would they be confused?'

‘Maybe they were intoxicated. Maybe they were rushed. Maybe they plucked our names out of a hat. It was a small town.'

This was ridiculous. They made the town sound like a frontier gold-rush tent settlement. Deadwood. Maybe I'd been born in Deadwood.

Over the phone came the sound of rustling paper; she seemed to be reading from a list.

I heard my father's voice off-phone saying, ‘Tell him he could have a private detective search or put an advertisement in the paper which would be a good plot-move for the story.'

‘YOU MEAN …' I said to him, raising my voice to reach him off-phone ‘… that I should advertise for a mother and father?'

‘Yes,' he said off-phone, ‘a good plot-move – but remember that it'd be of no use. Waste of good coin. No one would want you at this point in time.'

‘The private detective could adopt me, I suppose,' I said in a sotto-voce voice rife both with black humour and with hysteria.

‘Now
that's
an idea, that would be a good development in the story,' my mother said, ‘if he were a nice man.'

I heard my father say off-phone, ‘Ask him if he has done anything about a film deal? Has he rung Cohn in L.A.?'

I heard them whisper, and she came back on the line. ‘It was a sort of false upbringing, a pretend upbringing.'

All the wind and meaning had now gone from what had passed as my upbringing.

I heard my father say off-phone, ‘It's null.'

During the conversation this time, I was seated in a comfortable chair with a strong drink, in fact the bottle of Jack Daniels was balanced on the arm of the chair, and I'd begun to think that I might never leave the chair.

‘Your father and I think it might be best if you gave your name back to us. Put that in the story.'

By some sort of barmy Family Logic, it followed that I should return my name. If, that is, we had a ‘family' logic anymore. I guess I was now outside the Family Logic. I was now part of the Family Illogic, if one were to get punctilious.

‘And where then am I supposed to get a name?'

‘Your father suggests that you buy one from a name shop.' I heard my father chuckling.

I heard my father say off-phone, ‘Tell him to ask his damned Soprano woman therapist for a name. Or take
her
name.' Again, he chuckled away at this.

If my therapist were Tony Soprano's therapist I could perhaps wheedle Tony's telephone number from her and talk to Tony about this ‘family matter,' Tony himself being big on Family and sorting things out. I am sure Tony would take my side and all that that would mean.

My mind left aside the barmyness of what was happening and actually took on board my father's idea. The idea had a sort of dark
therapy logic
to it. For a start, I wouldn't mind having Lorraine Bracco for a therapist. But taking the name of my own therapist was intriguing itself. It would certainly give the therapist and me a few more years of ‘work.' I wondered if that breached the therapist–client (formerly ‘patient') protocols, whether it had ever happened in the history of psychiatry? I knew that clients sometimes married therapists. Clients married prostitutes. I knew that the client (formerly patient) sometimes wants to become the therapist. Whether there was a damned thing she could do about it if I did take her name? Have me strapped to a bed, lock me away in a rural clinic with high stone walls, behind iron gates, with a gatehouse policed by uniformed guards, barred windows, and no visitors, might be one thing she could do about it.

‘What about my brothers? What do they think? Or are they fraud children too?'

‘Oh no, they're real enough.'

Oh good, good for them, bully for them. They made it into the inner circle of lifetime unconditional love and protection and support. And interest-free, non-recourse loans for holiday houses and yachts.

Three cheers for them.

I said, ‘I suppose Dad's right. I could take the name of my therapist.'

I heard my father say off-phone, ‘Now he's thinking –
for a change
.' I heard my mother say to him off-phone, ‘in all these years, he never introduced us.'

Sweet Jesus. She's right – not in four years had I ever taken my parents to meet my therapist or vice versa. Never had her for dinner at our home, never invited her to Christmas. Never had her around for a barbecue. How dreadfully rude of me. That would have been fun, she could've stayed overnight, observed us all, listened to our toilet habits. Experienced our Family Logic. Analysed my father's jokes.