Davey darling, p.1
Davey Darling, page 1
About the author
PAUL SHANNON WAS born in Ashburton in 1961 and spent his childhood in the big towns of Canterbury and Southland. After graduating from Otago University he lived in Wellington and now lives in Auckland with his partner Leanne and two sons Hunter and Lewis. Davey Darling is his first novel.
Davey Darling
Paul Shannon
For my father Peter Shannon 1934–2003
one
WHEN THE SWOLLEN gales took the rain away, the Old Man turned up. He stood there filling the door frame, bulging through the wood, rippling gut and leather boots. He’d come back over the Lewis. He stopped in the hall, tapped the barometer glass and scoffed, ‘More bloody rain.’ He kissed Mum hello, slapped me on the head and said, ‘Hey boy. How’re ya going?’
He was right in my face.
‘All right.’
‘All right! Is that all I get?’
‘Yeah, I’m all right. And you?’
‘Don’t be facetious.’
I was only trying to be civil. The Old Man usually mistook this for being facetious. He loved that word. FA-SEA-SCHIS. Meant I was talking shit.
‘Come on, leave the boy alone and sit down now,’ said Mum from the corner.
The Old Man shrugged and slumped in his seat, expelling the stench of the yard and the pub he’d visited on the way home with a great rippling snort.
He sat there braced with his huge hams of arms holding himself up, staring the way of the door when our neighbour, old Jack McLennan, appeared.
The Old Man got up to him; shaking like a leaf Jack was, like he’d seen Audrey Hepburn coming out of Cy Thorpes’s dairy.
‘Shit thanks, Tiny,’ Jack said. ‘Bloody heart’s been going like the clappers.’
The Old Man sat down too and opened the jar he had parked on the floor beside him.
‘Davey, boy,’ he said, ‘isn’t there something good on TV?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What?’ he said, snorting into his glass. ‘Nothing?’
I gawked at him to shut up. He shot back this look to me like he didn’t care. And he didn’t, it didn’t matter because he had his jar, his half-G, his flagon – that was all that mattered.
Jack sank back with the beer clutched to his chest, sitting very still like any sudden movements might upset him. Just as well we didn’t have a cat. He sipped at the beer with small rolling licks by lowering his head as he talked. He’d gone down to the chemist that afternoon to pick up his normal packet of angina pills. He got the pills home where he threw back a couple but discovered, on inspection, he’d been dished the prescription of an eighty-year-old haemophiliac called George McLennan. G instead of J.
‘Silly bastards,’ said the Old Man.
‘Yeah, I thought I was buggered, Tiny,’ said Jack. ‘Clots the blood, that bloody stuff. Right mind to sue the pricks. I can tell you. I’m bloody lucky to be alive. Phoned up emergency and got some of my normal lot sent over but I got these shudders about twenty minutes ago and was bloody glad to see you show up. You know, didn’t want to bother Thelma and the boy.’
‘Oh shit, Jack, they wouldn’t mind. Would you lad, eh?’
He grabbed me and started into me around the guts with his huge pudgy fingers. I told him to cut it out but it was like he was about to put me over his knee and give me a walloping. The sort I used to get when I was eight. The Old Man’s always like that when he’s had a few. Wanting to put ya over his knee.
WHEN JACK WENT back to his place after they’d cut the flagon, I came dawdling back into the kitchen, wanting something to eat. And the Old Man grabbed me around the guts again, saying, ‘Get me a beer there, son.’
I know from the look of Mum that I shouldn’t be being a party to conveying any more booze near him. They exchanged looks, looks like scorn, brief pieces of heat flying off each other.
‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough?’ asked Mum. She at least tried to be polite when talking about drinking to the Old Man.
‘Had hardly any. Couple of glasses with Jack. What are you talking about, woman?’
He lit a fag and puffed a big stream of smoke out into the kitchen.
‘I’m talking about the fact that your dinner’s nearly ready and that you’ve had quite sufficient beer for now.’
‘Oh yeah. Quite sufficient, have I?’
His face started filling with blood, I could see it starting from the neck; it was like a plastic bag with this rich liquid paint that gradually reached his eyes.
‘Oh come on, Tiny, you’ve had enough for now.’
‘No, I’ll show you sufficient.’
He nodded towards me. The rain started up, banging on the windows again. It was a sour omen.
‘Get the jar, Davey, out of the fridge thanks.’
I looked at him and at Mum. I had no choice. He’d be quite prepared to drain the whole jar just to show Mum how much sufficient was. How big sufficient could be. How much beer he could fit in his guts.
I turned around and pulled open the fridge. The old bugger was certainly not going to go dry. He had a couple of jars in there, reclining ready to launch like torpedoes. In the door there were four more bottles and of course there was the dusty emergency dozen he always kept in the shed.
I grabbed a jar around its metal screw cap and pulled it forward, catching its heavy arse, then swung it up into my arms to cradle it to the table like a fat little baby.
‘Good boy … right,’ said the Old Man, shooting this glance over at Mum that told her, You can say what you want but it won’t make me change my mind.
And he said to her, ‘What about a glass, eh?’
Mum was just standing there with her arms folded tight across her chest. She looked away. She didn’t want to see. She went back to mashing the spuds. I got the Old Man a glass and plonked it down in front of him and then took a seat opposite. It was going to be good seeing how much sufficient was. How large sufficient could be.
The Old Man unscrewed the jar and filled his glass and Mum told him again the dinner was ready but he didn’t want to hear because he hadn’t had sufficient yet. He hadn’t even started.
‘Well, move into the other room instead of blowing your smoke all over us while we’re eating,’ she said, carrying over the dinner plates.
‘Not on your life, woman. I’m going to sit here and enjoy my beer until I’ve had enough and then I’m going to have my tea. Isn’t that right, Davey?’
‘Guess so, Dad, whatever you say.’
‘Why don’t you have a glass?’ he said not to me but to Mum.
‘Not your stinking beer, no thanks.’
‘Oh, OK,’ he said and mumbled away some more to himself with the fag clinging to his lip by a few strands of loose tobacco and a smear of paper, as he poured himself a perfectly judged tumbler. He liked the tumblers with the smoky glass colour that made the beer look browner. I thought his insides couldn’t be pink any more, they must be all brown, because if it wasn’t beer and cigarettes he was sucking down, it was pies and chops.
He started fair throwing them back like he was in a panic, an emergency that could only be addressed by more beer delivered quicker each time than the one before. As the tumbler filled he lifted it to his mouth, gulped down a good half of it, took a long drag of his Capstan, and then finished the remainder with a small glug. Each time the same, without any room for much talking. He was like an athlete in an endurance race, handily enjoying tasting the sufficiency of his jar.
Mum though was just taking her time with her meal and looking at the Old Man with this intense sneer. Like she hated him. Or she was just freezing him out.
‘Got to be going away again next week,’ he said, gulping through another mouthful. ‘Up north with a load of furniture and whiteware and then doing a pick-up of a full load of some big cookers and freezers. Shipping fucked up. Supposed to be going by train.
‘Big job, Thelma, this one. It’s a four-night trip. Get us through the next month, easy.’
‘Oh, do you think so?’ said Mum. ‘I wonder why it is we’re always just getting by, just getting through. Why is that, Merrin?’
The Old Man stiffened. He hated being called by his real name. He never used it. No one ever used it.
‘That’s a name best forgotten,’ he said. ‘And we’re doing all right. Christ, woman, what do you want?’
‘I’d like a husband who could stop drinking and eat with his family when he’s asked to but not you, oh no, you have to sit there and smugly drink yourself blind.’
‘You’d be best not to tell me when I’ve had sufficient. I’m just thirsty.’
‘Oh, thirsty are you, after troughing through about two or more jars? Do you think your thirst is going to be slaked by the time you’ve finished this one?’
‘I don’t know, we’ll have to wait and see.’
Wait and see. That just made Mum’s blood boil. She was about to really lean into him and then the Old Man twitched about the head nervously and nearly swallowed his whole glass as he was gripped by this fearsome plague of hiccups.
‘My God, look at that,’ sneered Mum. ‘Nearly drained another half-gallon jar and will you stop that bloody hiccupping.’
‘Look woman. Will I?’ said the Old Man, holding his mouth. He drained the last glass of the jar, held it in his mouth and then put his thumbs on his ears and his longest fingers on each side of his nose. Then he swallowed. He took his hands down and let out this mighty hiccup that threatened to blow out the kitchen windows. The pong of flat beer and the mist of stale smoke cha sed me out of the room.
Neither of them seemed to notice that I’d left, and I stood by the door to the hall looking in on my father having drunk so much so quickly that his huge body was shaking with fits of wind.
‘I won’t be talked to like a kid in my own home. Just you remember that. And anyway,’ he said, pausing to get another burp out, ‘I don’t think I’ve had quite sufficient yet.’
He looked down at me crouched in the doorway.
‘Get us that other jar will ya, Davey boy?’
I looked at him thinking he was joking.
Mum stood up and went to the oven.
‘Stop it, you bloody pig. Have your dinner. You might want to try and get some food in somehow. I’m going to see Shirley.’
The Old Man looked up at her with this sad, drunk look on his face.
‘How the hell are you going to get there? You can’t drive.’
‘I’ll walk.’
‘Well, all right then, go. Christ, don’t let me stop you.’
He prodded me in the back.
‘Come on, Davey, get the jar.’
I didn’t want to be a party to this, but still I yanked the fridge door open and ripped that last jar out of its cradle. Suddenly it swung from under my hand, smack against the door, smashed the bottom to bits, the glass cracking on the floor and the foaming gush of cold beer all over my feet mingling with a stream of my own blood.
I leapt back. The beer floated in a foamy mass under the fridge like tide water washing back to sea. The Old Man jumped through the roof letting this huge squall of rain in to drench us until he brought himself down again to be leering over the top of me. And Mum too, she turned from the bench looking down on me with this withering look. More because I’d made a mess than anything else, I expect.
The Old Man grabbed me around the arm. His other was poised above his head.
‘Clumsy little bastard. What did ya do that for?’
‘Oh stop it, Tiny,’ screamed out Mum. ‘Look at his leg.’
I looked down, wiping the rain from my eyes. There was a good cut halfway down my shin towards my ankle. He was standing dripping over me with his fists clenched, shaking like he was a spring ready to explode and rip me apart.
‘It just jumped out, Dad, shit I didn’t know it was so heavy.’
‘Lord bugger me if you don’t know what a jar feels like boy. You’ve been around them since you were this big. You just want to be the smartarse, don’t cha?’
I couldn’t really talk. I muttered, ‘No,’ and squirmed back into the sea of fragmented glass and beer.
‘You shouldn’t be getting Davey to get your beer and besides, I know who’s trying to be the smartarse here. Come on …’
‘Shut up, woman. He’ll learn and it looks like he’s going to learn the hard way.’
Mum just shook her head and went back to the bench. He turned to me again, the rage building to a powder keg. He stood over me, fuming, like the beer was going to force him to explode but he just veered past me and muttered, ‘Clean this bloody mess up and get to bed, will ya?’
I nodded in my own stunned state, watching him go up the hall towards their bed to fall on it. We heard it from the kitchen. The giant flop and then the bed yielding with its own sighing creak. Welcome home, Dad.
two
SO THERE HE was. Home and then gone. Again. Not home for another weekend. These were the times when Mum got really tetchy. She moaned away about how nothing was getting done around the place and wibbled on about how tidy the Cuthberts’ place (the people with the birds) always was. I know what it was with Mum. She thought we were sliding downhill, going third world. Didn’t like her status in the neighbourhood slipping. She saw it fading before her very eyes. The general upkeep of the section was not happening. Dead things pointed out of the ground in the front of our house.
I was sad for the fact not just that the Old Man didn’t do it; it was the fact that Mum sat around chastising him for not doing it. But it was like he’d never shown any interest in doing it before so why should he do it now? He’s never going to make a great job of the blob of hydrangeas and the couple of surviving shrubs.
‘Why don’t you do the garden then, Mum?’ I asked her as she instructed me to get to the table for lunch. It was set just for me and Mum.
‘Oh no, I can’t do that. That’s your father’s business.’
‘But he doesn’t do it,’ I reminded her.
‘He does sometimes. He will when things settle down a bit.’
‘No, he won’t,’ I said.
She headed back to the bench and came over with my plate of frying saucers, last night’s mashed spuds and some eggs. On Sundays we usually had a big roast lunch but seeing as the Old Man was away again, and there wouldn’t be any beer required I might have added, Mum had to cook something. All she could manage was a fry-up. Not that I was complaining.
‘Well, he will when he has time. Now shush and eat your lunch. The things we do. The things your father and I have given up for you, you just would not believe.’
She was pointing at me all the time. It was the usual act – sitting there supping on strong tea, fagging away and flicking through her ‘books’. She calls them that, but they’re only the Woman’s Weekly.
‘Look at your poor father. Worked his guts out. He’ll be bloody lucky he doesn’t end up like Mr Kirk himself.’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know,’ I said. I knew I only had to agree with her to shut her up. Big Norm, Mr Kirk, our greatest prime minister, was in and out of hospital lately. He’d been down for some stomach complaint and the latest we’d heard was that he was going in for an ingrown toenail. A toenail so bad you had to go to hospital?
‘It beggars belief,’ said Mum. She was just about waving her cigarette under my nose. A clump of ash hit my plate.
‘Jesus, Mum! Get your bloody smoke out of my face, will ya?’ I said, my mouth half full of chewed-up frying saucer and egg yolk.
‘Look, it’s nothing,’ she said sweeping it away. ‘And how many times have I told you? Don’t talk with your mouth full.’
She was really septic. Flicking ash on my food like that. I flared my eyes out.
‘What’s wrong? No harm done, eh Davey?’
‘You spilled ash on my food. I don’t know if I can eat it.’
‘Eat up. It’s all right. Enjoy your lunch.’
I stared at the half-eaten tomato sauce smeared mess.
‘You’re still sullen, aren’t you?’ she said.
‘No I’m not.’
This is getting to be a joke.
‘After your father went to all that trouble getting you a present.’
She wasn’t going to nail me with that shit.
‘Trouble! He didn’t go to any bloody trouble at all. A new bike pump! Jesus, Mum …’
‘Stop that language! I won’t have that language in my house, especially from you. Why don’t you go over and see what Blair’s up to?’
She meant Blair Fitzroy – the little shrimp and yet my one true friend, united in our distaste of the scum around here like the Gruflams. They lived down the road a bit. A couple of them were my age. Trouble was, they stunk. The most putrid weird smell came off Eric Gruflam, who I had to sit next to in maths. The thing that got me was the smell was so obvious, and it was always there. Like a pile of old sweaty socks that had festered in the corner of a room for about a week and he didn’t seem to have a clue. He just sailed on unaware but with the real sullenness that came from knowing people don’t like you.
‘I don’t know, I think Blair is probably at his gran’s house today. They usually go there on Sunday.’
‘Oh,’ said Mum, with a knowing roll of her eyes. I only saw mine at Christmas time. Like it was the only time we were allowed to see them. And then when we did go down there and visit, there was always lots of sitting around and drinking tea and it wasn’t really that great anyway. I wondered if the Gruflams had grandparents and whether they smelled as well. It could be a hereditary condition. It surely wasn’t normal.
three
FOUR NIGHTS BECAME six, the week gave way to Friday, and the Old Man returned. He was home when I got back from school, announcing that he’d organised a party and I could invite a mate over if I wanted. All his mates and their wives, mostly blokes from down at Springfield & Sons, would be coming over to cure their Christmas hams. I got Blair to come over.
