Love, Charlie Mike

  A MOVING STORY OF YOUNG — AND OLD — LOVE.

  He looks at me now, full face, and I can see how drawn, how much older that face is — dark pits under his eyes, lines of tiredness. He’s not the warrior king I fell for eight months ago.

  Christy is under siege. Her father is dangerously near losing it, her grandmother has lost it and Christy fears she has lost her boyfriend to a peacekeeping assignment in Bosnia.

  In an attempt to uncover an old family secret and sort out all her relationships, she plans a train journey to the West Coast …

  Contents

  Part One

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Kate De Goldi

  Follow Penguin Random House

  For Bruce, Luciana and Jack, love always

  Part One

  Prologue

  It’s not the same catching a train any more. I’m just old enough to remember that once there was a dull red monolith of a station building, its face grimy with urban effluent. ‘Your average metropolitan brick shithouse,’ Dad said not so long ago when we were standing in the Big Fresh carpark loading groceries into the car. Correction. I was loading groceries. Dad was standing by the boot, bags in both hands, staring across Moorhouse Avenue at the old station, a grumpy look on his face.

  ‘And your average wannabe architect,’ I said, taking the bags from him.

  ‘Hah!’ He dug his fists in his pockets.

  ‘I like it,’ I said. ‘It reminds me of the Coast, those old trips.’

  ‘Odd isn’t it,’ said Dad. ‘A classic symbol of industrialism, productiveness, now housing the trash culture.’

  ‘Oh absolutely.’

  What he meant was that now, instead of pulling on the heavy glass doors and walking across shiny lino to another set of doors, then out to a frosty morning, gleaming tracks, stationary coal trucks, a stretch of platform with clumps of waiting passengers and the smells of diesel, cigarette smoke, station coffee, the sweat and perfumes of strangers — instead of all that, now you pull on the doors and walk into eight separate movie theatres, a Cartoon Capers shop, forty-seven video games, a throng of teenagers and the overwhelming smell of toasting popcorn.

  Times change.

  ‘Times change,’ I say, half to Gran, half to myself, when we pull up in the taxi at the new station site, all stainless and glass, but sadly reduced — a small building, miles from the city action.

  ‘This is not the station, young man,’ says Gran, prodding the driver’s shoulder.

  ‘Yes it is, Gran,’ I say quickly. ‘It is, I promise you. They shifted it.’

  ‘What do you mean shifted? Don’t be ridiculous. I was there last week and it was not here. Moorhouse Avenue, young man, quick smart about it.’ She sits back in her seat, waiting.

  The driver raises a questioning eyebrow at me.

  ‘Gran,’ I say, patiently but firmly, tough but kind — my new resolve. ‘You couldn’t have been there last week. The station’s been here for four years, they moved it, it’s smaller. People don’t go by train much any more.’ She looks extremely suspicious. ‘Trust me, Gran,’ I say, leaning over, opening her door. ‘C’mon, we’ve got a train to catch.’

  ‘Fifteen fifty,’ says the driver when we’ve got Gran’s suitcases out on the path.

  ‘Daylight robbery,’ says Gran loudly. I beam at the driver, hand him a twenty. ‘Outrageous,’ says Gran as we pick up her cases, move off. ‘Charges like a wounded bull.’

  ‘And bats in ya frigging belfry,’ says the driver, just loud enough.

  The train is waiting. It’s very swish these days, sleek and grey and wearing a new name: TranzAlpine.

  ‘Railcar’s had a facelift,’ I say.

  ‘Porter?’ Gran’s looking around.

  ‘No porters, Gran. Pared-down economy. You know, User Pays. Pak’n’Save. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish.’

  ‘I’ll take your cases, okay?’

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ she says with great hauteur, ‘I’d rather keep them to myself. No porters, for goodness sake. What a sloppy show.’

  I look out through the glass doors at the TranzAlpine, shiny in the early morning sun, waiting for us, the girl and her mad grandmother. I have a moment of doubt. I look at Gran in her odd get-up, suitcases close by; her face is fixed on the train, a smile hovering. The tickets are in my hand. But I could cash them in, call a taxi, get Gran back home before anyone is awake. Anyone, that is, except Finn, who’s no doubt wide-eyed right now, lying in bed, waiting for the folks to stir, waiting to face the music.

  ‘Call me old-fashioned,’ he’d said in his precocious way, ‘but I’m not all that keen to get in the shit, even for you, big sister.’

  Good sport.

  ‘Why don’t I just come too?’ he said.

  ‘No. It’d distract her, she’d just ask me a thousand times who the boy was. I don’t want distractions. I want to get her in the right mood, get her going.’ I zipped up the small case I’d packed, shoved it under the bed. ‘I’m going to be a midwife to the truth.’ Finn looked impressed, so I didn’t tell him it was a line from a novel. ‘Several truths, actually.’

  ‘How will you—’ he began. ‘What about … what are you going to say to—’

  ‘Tomorrow night,’ I said quickly, not wanting to think about that part yet. About Sonny. ‘All over by tomorrow night.’

  ‘Good luck, Sigmund.’ Finn held out his hand. We shook solemnly, conspirators, a frisson passing between us. ‘They say birth can be a messy affair,’ said my little brother, looking at me from under his ridiculously long lashes.

  ‘Well, Gran,’ I say, picking up a suitcase. ‘All aboard.’

  ‘Time waits for no man,’ says Gran, trotting along behind me.

  ‘Or woman,’ I say automatically. And we’ll probably have that little exchange at least another thirty-five times today.

  The TranzAlpine has changed on the inside too — fabric seat coverings with loud geometric patterns and blue anti-macassars. They’re in groups of four, an aluminium table between, fluorescent lights overhead. No red leather and black string luggage racks bellying downwards. It’s all spanking new, shiny, blue.

  Gran doesn’t seem to mind. I stick her cases in the new racks, fighting a wave of panic at what we’re about to do.

  ‘We can both have window seats,’ I tell Gran. The windows are wide; through them I can see some old stone sheds, an empty unkempt paddock, stacked sleepers.

  ‘I might doze for a while,’ says Gran. ‘I usually do that. But then I shall be as alert as a kitten. You’ll see.’

  Not a bad simile, really. She is a bit like a kitten. Small and bony, bright-eyed, skittish, fluffy and grey. Unpredictable as a kitten, too. I scowl across at her. She’s pulling her coat — stained, I notice, on the lapels — over her stockinged knees. I can’t see her pantyhose, but I know they’re lined with wormy pulls, pilling at the knee.

  There’s a faint whistle and the TranzAlpine gives a jerk, slides slowly away from the station.

  ‘Bombs away!’ says Gran. A prescient remark as it turns out. Bombs, bombshells. But that’s later.

  Now, as the train gathers speed, I feel the tension seep out of me. I’m tired after an anxious night, a 7 a.m. alarm and the stress of keeping Gran under control. Gran’s eyes are closed. Nothing I can do now, I think, short of pulling the emergency cord.

  I close my eyes, too, comfortable in the knowledge that nobody will claim the remaining
seats in this alcove. I’ve bought all four.

  Just a little rest, I think, while the train quits the city.

  If this is the birth of a story, I think, my eyelids getting heavy, then the baby’s well overdue.

  Truth will out, my other grandmother says.

  Just a little rest, I think. Before labour begins. Then we’ll be alert, ready for a safe delivery. I smile sleepily, pleased with my extended metaphor.

  I fall asleep just as the train whips through the Halswell level crossing, the clangour of the alarm bells rearing suddenly in my consciousness, then receding as quickly, a glancing violence, a forgotten portent.

  Chapter One

  I kept a diary for a while after Sonny left for Bosnia. But then it was the holidays and I didn’t seem to need it so much; the worst pangs had faded. I was busy by then, too, chasing another story, the story. And summer, you know how it is — the sun, the long days, the warm promising nights — it’s hard to be consistently gloomy when every morning is a new page in an open book.

  ‘Youth!’ growled Dad, stomping past my bedroom at 8 a.m. ‘All care, no responsibility.’ It got right up his nose that I stayed in bed till half past whenever and he had to slope off to work. ‘Not like us wage slaves!’

  ‘Milk, no sugar please,’ I called out. ‘And honey on rye. Rata honey!’

  ‘Get stuffed,’ said Dad, starting to hit a ball against the bathroom door. It was his indoor volley board and, incredibly, Mum never complained. BANG BANG BANG. The bathroom door shuddered and rattled. The hall was wide, but even so there were small dents in the walls where he’d knocked them with the racquet.

  ‘Thirty-love, forty-love, shit, forty-fifteen, shit, forty-thirty. Come on, Callaghan, eye on the ball, focus. Hah, game, Callaghan!’

  ‘Shuddup!’ I yelled.

  Every morning, same routine. Nutty as a fruitcake. But he did bring me tea and toast.

  ‘What did your last slave die of?’

  ‘Went mad so I had him put down.’ We did this number most mornings, too.

  ‘You think I need a shave?’ said Dad, feeling his chin. Among the many peculiarities which characterised his mid-life crisis was an extreme reluctance to shave. He grew a beard briefly but we hated it. Even Mum, who seemed to accept his weirdest behaviour without a blink, drew the line at a bushy grey beard.

  ‘You look like Richard Seddon,’ she said.

  ‘Seddon was fat,’ said Dad. He was very proud of his lean figure.

  ‘In the face, you look like him in the face. The thing is,’ she added, casual but cunning, ‘the thing is you actually look heaps younger without it.’

  Oh well. Off with the beard. Now that he’s fifty he’s paranoid about looking old.

  ‘The trouble with shaving,’ said Dad now, squinting in my mirror, assessing his face, ‘is that it’s such a bloody waste of time.’ Yeah, yeah. Time best spent flinging round a tennis racquet, no doubt.

  ‘Takes ten years off you,’ I said, letting my toast plate slide to the floor. I shook my pillow, preparing to doze again.

  ‘Agassi’s got a beard,’ said Dad.

  ‘Agassi’s got a goatee.’

  ‘Best return service in the game.’

  ‘Have a good day at the office, dear,’ I said. ‘Close the door on your way out.’

  He had the last laugh though. ‘Gran’s up,’ he said, putting his head round the door a moment later. ‘Very busy packing. Make the old girl a cuppa, would you? I’ve got an early start.’

  ‘Finn can.’

  ‘He says it’s your turn. He says he’s done it the last three mornings. He says he’s having a well-earned rest.’ He went off whistling.

  Just what a girl needs first thing in the morning, I don’t think. Her demented grandmother beginning the first of several thousand bag-packings for the day, emptying drawers, squeezing in coathangers, folding, folding, looking for her drawstring toilet bag, her best lisle stockings …

  ‘How would you like two grandmas?’

  I sang my favourite incantation as I waited for the kettle to boil.

  Sometimes at the dinner table, when Gran had asked Mum for the trillionth time if this was fish, dear, or have tomatoes come down in price yet, Cushla, and when Dad had slumped forward, head on the table in drunken parody, and Mum was giving us all the hairy eyeball, then Finn and I, united and nasty, would softly hum our anti-grandmother song.

  ‘Very rude to sing at the table,’ said Gran, right on the button.

  ‘And mean,’ said Mum.

  I watched the steam from the kettle paint a small opaque cloud on the window and I sang the original, unadulterated version of the song, fixing Dad with my mind’s narrowed eye.

  ‘And how would you like two Daddies …?

  We can arrange that.

  Get on a chair behind the door,

  Hey diddle diddle.

  Here comes Poppa

  So up with your choppa

  AND SPLIT ’IM DOWN THE MIDDLE.’

  From the prehistoric record archives of my maternal grandparents: thank you, Peter Sellers.

  It wasn’t really Sonny’s going which drove me to a diary, it was living with a menopausal father and a demented grandmother — the twin burdens of my adolescence.

  ‘Ah, come away,’ said Brenna, ‘you’re exaggeratin’, girl.’ She overdid her accent for effect. ‘At least your Ma and Pa’re’n love and don’t lambast the shit one from the other.’ Brenna’s parents are divorced and despise each other — ‘to the very marrow,’ she says.

  ‘Loving parents are overrated.’

  Actually it was Mum who planted the seed, so to speak. Good old Mum. I really should appreciate her more. Tragic that she’s a social worker — sorry — counsellor. You can have enough of sensitivity and empathy. Truly, you can.

  ‘Try me,’ said Brenna, unconvinced.

  ‘I hear what you’re saying, Brenna. I know where you’re coming from.’

  ‘Your Ma never uses jargon.’

  ‘She told me to own my statements once.’

  ‘Oh. Well.’ She was disappointed, I could tell. ‘She’s damn near perfect, though. She’s a lovely, patient, unnosy … fruitcake.’ A good description really — she covered all the bases. ‘At least she’s never tried to analyse the subtextual messages of Shortland Street.’

  It is true I’ve never had to put up with my mother deconstructing Shortland Street like our friend Gretchen has (obviously a sociologist mother is death), but Mum could be a bit less good-natured and serene. She could lose her temper occasionally. React irrationally. Say things she regretted. Be mean-spirited and vengeful. Selfish and self-absorbed. In short, she could be a bit more like me.

  ‘Let’s face it, Christy,’ said Brenna. ‘Your mother is a saint.’

  ‘What you need,’ said my mother in her calm, saintly way, several weeks after Sonny had left and about a minute after I’d said I was going to kill Gran and end Dad’s veteran tennis career. ‘What you need,’ she said, ‘is a hole like King Midas’ barber. Dig a hole and whisper all your aggravations.’

  ‘I’m not sure whispering’s in Christy’s repertoire,’ said Dad, who was lying on the couch, apparently scouring a tennis manual, apparently oblivious to the real world surging around him.

  ‘I’d need a ditch,’ I said. ‘A gorge. A volcanic basin.’

  ‘Ready when you are,’ trilled Gran, appearing in the doorway with her suitcases. ‘We don’t want to be late, Cushie.’

  ‘Excuse me while I excavate a chasm.’

  ‘Good girl,’ said Gran.

  Oh shut up, you silly old bat.

  I stomped round the vegetable garden thinking about euthanasia and suddenly the idea of a diary occurred to me. No need to dig a hole. Write it down. People kept journals in times of great trial and confusion. They recorded all their spleen and sorrow, their loathing and longing. Anne Frank, for instance. Oscar Wilde. Salman Rushdie. Probably Mary, Queen of Scots.

  I bent down and pulled up a tiny carrot ruf
fle to see how it was doing. Mum and I had planted them the weekend Sonny left.

  ‘Gardening is good for what ails you,’ she said when she found me lying on my bed, crying. I had been deriving a peculiar satisfaction from staring at the ceiling and feeling the fat tears gather in the corner of my eyes, slide sideways off my face onto the pillow. My face was tight with dried tears, my cheeks were sore from teeth clenching. I didn’t want to give in to full-scale sobs, but I didn’t want to get off my bed either. I didn’t want to eat, I didn’t want to see any of my friends, not even Brenna. I couldn’t see the point in anything. From the moment the plane had disappeared into yesterday’s cold blue sky I’d felt like Sonny had died.

  ‘It’s warm outside,’ said Mum.

  ‘So?’

  She shook some seed packets at me. ‘Spring garden. Baby carrots, sweet radishes, pots of basil.’

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘C’mon love,’ she said, unusually persistent. ‘You’ll feel better, I promise. Trust me.’

  It was warm outside, the first really warm spring sun. I liked its heat on my back as I squatted beside the raked-over garden. Mum was all right, too, because she didn’t ask questions. I concentrated on the furrows of earth and the dried seeds, their different shapes and colours, their feel under the finger. I placed them in their beds very carefully and covered them over. I watered with gentle deliberation and marked each row in the traditional manner, an empty packet stuck on a stick. I felt tired and dull and blank, but dutiful and useful, like a recovering psychiatric patient doing occupational therapy. And Mum was right, it was therapeutic. By the end of that long day I felt ever so slightly better.

  Four weeks later I looked at a couple of centimetres of skinny carrot and wondered for the hundredth time why Sonny hadn’t written.

  My first diary entry was a catalogue of reasons for no letters.

  1. He’s jet-lagged and exhausted.

  2. He’s busy setting up camp with the rest of the contingent.

  (For a while I had actually imagined them pitching tents and gathering wood like big Boy Scouts at a jamboree.)