Love, Charlie Mike Read online

  At the end he pulled me away around a corner in the international lounge and gave me a long fervent kiss.

  ‘I’m not phoning, okay?’ he said, smiling.

  ‘I love you,’ I said, tears spilling.

  ‘Me too.’ He hugged me hard. And then he went, back to the crowd for a quick goodbye. He shouldered his bag, loped down the long corridor, turned the corner and was gone.

  Dear Diary, I wrote, Six weeks since Sonny left. If he doesn’t write before the end of the week …

  Dear Diary, I wrote at the end of the week, I’ve decided to be incredibly patient with Gran and then God will reward me and I’ll hear from Sonny …

  Dear Diary, I wrote three days later, It’s not humanly possible to be patient with Gran. She’s developed an obsession with the mail, as if suitcases weren’t enough. Today she checked the box fifteen times between 3.30 and 5 …

  Dear Diary, I wrote the next weekend, Brenna pointed out that since I haven’t had a letter either there is no God or he doesn’t believe in me …

  I had several study days the week before exams began.

  ‘Not that there’s much chance of studying with Gran up and down, in and out, babble babble, haunting the letter box—’

  ‘—that’d make two of you then,’ said Finn.

  ‘—looking for her bloody toilet bag, asking for the taxi, etcetera. Most sixteen year olds don’t have this handicap, you know. They have quiet houses, mothers bringing them cups of tea—’

  ‘Crap,’ said Dad. ‘Women all work these days. Betcha the mothers all work.’

  ‘—sane fathers and no geriatrics. I could just about cope if she didn’t come in every ten minutes and say, “Oh, there you are, dear.” Honestly, you guys have it smooth.’

  ‘Put your head down,’ said Dad. ‘Ignore her. Exercise your will-power. It’s only a couple of weeks.’

  ‘You try it,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t put up with it for half a day.’

  ‘Excuse me while I go and have a quick interface with the volley board,’ he said to Mum. Typical. The usual answer to a problem. Go and hurl a racquet at the Club volley board.

  ‘I’m sorry about this,’ Mum started, a slight social-work shading to her voice.

  ‘Have her put down, then.’

  ‘Christy!’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘What about notices,’ said Finn, shovelling Weet-Bix. ‘Signs around the place. She loves reading signs. You know how she does when she’s in the car: “Stop. Give Way. Loading Bay. Goods vehicles only. Trespassers will be”, etcetera. On and on till you want to give her a smack in the head—’

  ‘Why do you both have to talk so violently?’

  ‘You just put a sign on your door — don’t know why we’ve never done it before: “Christy is studying. Do not disturb.” Something like that. She’ll read it fifty thousand times a day and be happy. And she won’t come in. You know she always follows the rules,’ He beamed at us, his cheeks plump with Weet-Bix.

  ‘Very clever, darling,’ said Mum, kissing him on a fat cheek.

  ‘You’ve got quite a reasonable brain,’ I said, feeling briefly fond of him.

  It worked perfectly. I could hear her come up to the door every time, murmur her way through the sign: Christy is working hard for exams. Please do not disturb. Then pitter patter down the hall again, out to her suitcases, out to the letter box. Out to lunch.

  At ten o’clock when I came out to make coffee and get a muesli bar she was happily packing.

  At eleven when I came out for a second muesli bar she was sitting in the sun on the verandah with the suitcases beside her, chatting to Jess Morton from next door.

  At twelve when I came out for a cream-cheese-and-chocolate-hail sandwich she was at the gate peering into the letter box. I felt so pleased with the success of the sign that I made her a sandwich with the thin white bread she likes and a cup of very sweet tea and I sat with her on the verandah for a while, half-listening to the usual ramblings about the past.

  At 1.30 — studying made me incredibly hungry — I came out for juice and nuts and raisins. Gran was still on the verandah, warbling one of her neanderthal ditties — ‘K-K-K-Katie’ — waiting for the taxi that never came.

  At 2.30 she was back in her room, repacking, folding petticoats, cotton vests, stockings and her dainty bras, humming. I had a Vegemite sandwich and decided to do thirty more minutes.

  At three o’clock she was back on the verandah, suitcases at the ready, holding something in her outstretched hand, squinting long-sightedly at it. There was a pile of mail in her lap.

  ‘This is a foreign postcard,’ she said when I came behind her, my stomach giving little kicks at the sight of the card, its lurid colourings, bright greens and oranges, like old-fashioned picture postcards.

  ‘Giz a look,’ I said, hearing the wobble in my voice.

  She turned it over and read the address. ‘Char-lie Mike. Funny sort of name.’

  ‘Show us, Gran,’ I said, holding my hand out.

  ‘No one we know,’ she said, looking at the picture again. There were girls and boys in folk costume, green hills, white stone houses. No soldiers in this Bosnia. ‘Not even our address. Ninety-nine Locksley Avenue.’ She frowned at the lettering and held onto the card, not letting me have it.

  ‘It is our address, Gran, Ninety-nine Locksley Ave is our place. It’s for me. Charlie Mike is me. I promise you.’

  ‘Charlie Mike,’ she said, looking as if she’d tasted something off. ‘What’s wrong with Christy Marie Callaghan, 13 April 1979? My first grandchild. Bobby’s daughter.’

  Funny, the things she suddenly remembered.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong with it,’ I said. ‘It’s a nickname. A pet name.’ I plucked the card from her fingers and stared happily at the messy writing.

  Dear Charlie Mike, I read. Bosnia is like being inside the old lady’s brain. We’re sharing Santici with the Dutch contingent. A Croat area surrounded by Muslims. Accommodation in shipping containers. I kid you not. Bosnian kids are cute but they’d thieve from their grandmothers. We’re mostly running road checkpoints, keeping temperatures cool between ethnic groups. The wine is red and rough. I’ll write soon. Don’t cut your hair or anything drastic. Love, Sonny.

  I kissed Gran on her lightly powdered, violet-scented cheek, then lay down on the verandah in a pool of sunshine, holding the Bosnian folkdancers and the hills of The Former Yugoslavia under my palm, the word love plastered tight against T-shirt, right over my heart.

  Chapter Two

  The suburbs are behind us now. Leaving Christchurch, a city somewhat reminiscent of stately England, says the paper tablemat in front of me, the TranzAlpine crosses the patchwork of the Canterbury Plains and its cropping country. New Zealand’s Great Rail Adventure! says the heading. If only they knew. There is a menu on the tablemat, too. I drink my complementary fruit juice and consider getting Gran a Kiddies Pak for lunch. Since she’s having her second childhood.

  ‘Mixed cropping, as you can see.’ Duncan, the second train manager, delivers a commentary over the sound system. ‘Increasing deer farming, though … rabbit scourge …’ I look out the window while Duncan drones on. The skyline stretches blue and white all the way to the foothills, an unimpeded view, just a few macrocarpa hedges and the massive pylons striding south to Bluff. It’ll be a hot day in Canterbury, but we’re heading north-west and once we go under the mountains the dry nor’wester will be behind us; we’ll burst through the other side into slanted driving rain.

  ‘… morning tea just before Springfield,’ says Duncan.

  True to her word, Gran is still dozing. I’ve brought my diary and a book, but I doubt I’ll be reading. I’ll stare out the window until she wakes up. Then after morning tea and Springfield I’ll get busy, steer her towards Memory Lane, place a few signposts to jog her memory.

  ‘What memory?’ said Brenna. ‘You’re kidding. You’ve tried hard enough. She’s past it, Christy, face it, the memory cells are shot to
pieces. Why’s she going to remember nineteen-forty-six if she can’t remember to put both legs in her stockings.’

  ‘The immediate past recedes, the distant past looms large,’ I said, quoting a book on dementia.

  ‘In that case you’ll probably get a lot of crap about debutante balls or Bridge games played before the Ark.’ She was deeply sceptical about this part of my plan. She didn’t know anything about the other part.

  Gran dozes upright; her head doesn’t droop sideways like other people’s. And her knees always rest together in a well-bred way. No sloppy posture, undies peeking. The triangular end of a lacy white hanky is just visible at her blue, veiny wrist. She still has the slender waist and hips of a young girl, a firm bosom, thick white hair, only a slightly scraggy neck.

  But the hanky and the Nice Girl’s knees and the proud waist are misleading. A closer look and you can see that her clothes are all to hell. She’s got the cardy half of her apricot twinset on, twinned today with a ming-blue jersey and a red skirt. When I knocked on her bedroom door this morning she was already dressed, a paisley scarf at her throat, gloves on, one fawn, one grey. I left that alone, but when she turned to get her purse from the dresser I saw the tell-tale pantyhose leg poking out from under her skirt, a limp tail.

  ‘Whoops,’ I said, closing her door behind me. I bent and gave the pantyhose leg a gentle tug. ‘You forgot something.’

  ‘Leave that alone,’ she said, peevish. ‘I like it like that.’

  Normally there’s no arguing with her if she uses that tone. But there was no way I was letting her out the door with a floppy tail. ‘Gran,’ I said very firmly. ‘They won’t let you on the train if you don’t put your other leg on. In.’

  ‘What leg?’ she said, dabbing perfume.

  ‘This leg.’ I pulled the tail again.

  ‘Dresser must’ve forgotten.’

  If you say so, Gran. Honestly. Full of crap.

  Now, in the train, watching her sleeping, I see that there’s another jarring note — something I missed in the semi-dark outside her bedroom, out the back door, down the side path to the taxi. She has her favourite cameo on upside down. The Edwardian bun of the woman is like a beard on a broad chin. This strange, half-naked, reversed creature rises and falls, rises and falls with the lifting and dropping of Gran’s small chest. In and out, in and out goes her gentle, lady-like breath, in and out, in and out.

  The train sways gently; out the window, a rabbit, a grey streak against the green paddock, racing headlong for cover.

  The third Saturday Sonny came to our place a storm was blowing. The old gum outside my bedroom crashed onto the corrugated iron fencing between our property and Jess Morton’s, crumpling a good metre of it. But Mum and Dad, undeterred, were going to the Riverside Tennis Club Midwinter Christmas Dinner. The Riverside Club’s notion of midwinter was rather elastic, since it was actually mid-August, practically summer.

  ‘Tell me truly,’ I said to Mum, getting her alone in the bathroom while she made up. ‘You’re only going to humour him, right? You don’t really want to go, do you? Listen to a bunch of nutters talk about tennis?’

  ‘They’re not all nutters.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘There’s all sorts.’

  ‘No one under forty.’

  ‘Lot of school kids, actually.’

  ‘It’s nice of you to go along with him, I suppose. Conjugal duty and all that.’

  ‘Darling,’ said Mum, pencilling her eyebrows, ‘I know you find this hard to understand, but I enjoy your father’s company. I like going out with him — I wouldn’t care if it was water polo.’

  ‘Why don’t you have dinner with normal people, then, in a real restaurant, having real conversation not about sport?’ There was a horrible whine in my voice but I couldn’t help it.

  ‘Chin hair,’ said Mum, handing me the tweezers.

  She eyed me as I eyed up the curly black hair under her chin. I secretly liked this job. ‘Could you just go easy on Bob? Be a bit kinder. A bit more understanding?’

  ‘Doubt it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Cos he’s impossible.’

  For a while after Sonny and I got together I’d felt quite benign towards Dad and his tennis. But I soured.

  ‘C’mon, Cush!’ called Dad from down the hall.

  ‘It’s only gone seven!’ she called.

  ‘I need to catch Gordon, ask him about his restringing man!’

  ‘See,’ I said, tugging hard at the hair. ‘Why do you go along with it all?’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘Running off to tennis all the time. It’s not normal!’

  ‘He likes it.’ She fitted her joke Fimo Christmas cracker earrings, looked at me in the mirror. ‘Stress release—’

  ‘So he doesn’t like work. Nobody likes work. You’re not supposed to like work.’

  ‘I love work.’

  ‘Because it gets you away from Dad!’

  ‘Oh, Christy! You’re impossible. Look,’ she said, ‘it’s not just his work. It’s Gran—’

  ‘Fat lot he has to do with her.’

  ‘He finds her very difficult.’

  ‘Don’t we all.’

  ‘Honey—’

  ‘Honey!’ said Dad, barging in. ‘Let’s go!’

  ‘It’s customary to knock before you enter a bathroom,’ I said.

  ‘Did you know, Little Buttercup,’ said Dad, hands in pockets, up on the balls of his feet, ‘did you know that Boris Becker’s former bodyguard is addressing the Riverside Club Midwinter Christmas Dinner? With exhibits!’

  I took a deep breath. ‘That’s nice, dear.’ I turned to the mirror to check for pimples. ‘Close the door behind you, there’s a good boy.’

  ‘You okay?’ said Sonny. We were snuggled up by the fire, listening to the storm, the pulse of the CD player through the ceiling. Finn was on the Mac, playing maths games and singing loudly with an African percussion group.

  The Mac was in Dad’s office — if you could call it an office. It was more like a locker room or a gymnasium these days, littered with dirty tennis socks, sweaty whites, reserve racquets, balls in various states of wear, colour-coded sports bags, and several pairs of cross-trainers. There was a rowing machine in one corner and an exercycle in another. There was even a set of dumb-bells on a wall rack, designed and built by the sportsman himself. The technical drawings for the redesign of our house — which he’d been working on when the tennis disease struck — were buried under a pile of paperwork on his desk, and the desk was no longer the focal point of the room but pushed up against the wall. Finn had cleared a path through the clutter to the computer. He had suggested removing it to his room but Dad, maintaining the fiction that any day now he was getting back to his blueprints, insisted the Mac stay at the ready in his ‘office’.

  ‘Finn’s getting some drums,’ I told Sonny. ‘With his milk-round money. He saves it all up. Good little boy.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I’ll move out then. Drums, dementia and Andre Agassi the Second.’

  ‘Join the army. Order and discipline.’

  ‘Shift to Burnham?’

  ‘Sleep under my bunk. Or in it.’

  The air heated up between us. All our kissing and hot embraces, it was leading us — well, to the obvious place, but I was nervous, I needed to say something.

  ‘Is it very wide?’ I asked. ‘Your bed?’

  ‘Wide enough,’ he said, kissing around the back of my ear, nibbling my earlobe.

  ‘I’ve never slept with anyone,’ I said quickly.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Except Brenna.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘I don’t mean slept with her, I mean just slept.’

  ‘Oh, slept.’

  ‘Not the Wild Thing.’

  ‘Not that it’d matter.’

  ‘She’s my bosom buddy—’

  ‘But not like that.’

  ‘Not that sort of bosomy.’ We laughed and
laughed and didn’t talk about it any more, but the ice was broken.

  ‘Your old man’s got the tennis bad,’ said Sonny later. Finn and Gran were in bed. I had checked Gran several times; she spent most evenings packing, or watching the television in her room. Sometimes, feeling guilty about this solitariness, I sat with her, and there would occasionally, briefly, be signs of the old Gran: a perfectly recalled story, a tart comment during the news, chuckling, even, at a sit-com. And then the suitcases would beckon.

  ‘So how come he didn’t play for twenty years?’ said Sonny.

  ‘Thirty years. He was busy being normal — working, reading, mowing the lawn, going out with friends. Having a life. Now he hardly goes out on Saturday nights because he has to play Interclub on Sundays.’

  ‘Only in season.’

  ‘It’s the season all year. He’s a maniac. One minute he was a real person, next minute he’s chucked in everything for tennis. It was when Gran came to live.’

  ‘Probably had to get out of the house.’

  ‘He was designing this extension for the house so Gran could have a separate wing, but then he just started playing tennis all the time and it’s still not done. That was two years ago.’

  ‘Stress,’ said Sonny. ‘Living with his old lady.’ He grinned. ‘A man’s gotta have his sport.’

  ‘It’s a religion.’

  ‘Come here,’ said Sonny, pulling me into his lap. ‘Don’t worry about it, Charlie.’ He laid his warm cheek on mine, turned his head, began kissing. I put my arms round his neck, leaned my breasts into his chest. ‘Charlie.’ He tightened his arms around me.

  ‘Why are you calling me Charlie?’

  ‘My new name for you,’ he said, pulling us both back onto the floor. ‘A name that no one else calls you. Christy, C. C for Charlie — you know, phonetic alphabet, army talk.’

  ‘My second name’s Marie,’ I said, looking at him above me now, such a look on his face that I had to breathe in deep.