The Families by Vincent O'Sullivan

Author:Vincent O'Sullivan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Victoria University Press

KEEPING AN EYE

Brendan held the phone away from his ear when his sister began shouting. ‘I’m not deaf, Susan,’ he said, raising his own voice slightly, but not in anger, not in the least. It was a bid for reason attempting to restore calm.

‘Yes you are,’ his sister told him. She breathed deeply, a sign he hoped that her anger was on hold. Then, ‘You are deaf,’ she said, ‘you are not listening to what I am telling you. You are simply not listening.’

‘I am not agreeing with you,’ he said. ‘That is quite another matter.’

Again, the breathing which her brother now knew was her infinite patience with him. ‘It is not a matter of agreeing, Brendan. There is nothing to agree about. It is a fact we are talking about and you cannot deny it. We’ve all got the shame of it.’

She waited, as she expected him to go on, go on with his absurd attempt at being level-headed as he would say, and was disappointed when he did not. Then ‘Well?’ she demanded. ‘That’s all you have to say, is it?’

‘The line isn’t very good. There’s crackle on the line.’

‘It’s clear enough at this end.’ She waited again, placing the ball, as she was no doubt thinking, in his court. She was a great one for the telling image.

‘All right, then. I’ll drive across. Across to the Home.’

‘At once?’

‘In the morning.’

‘God!’ his sister said. ‘I thought you’d be more concerned.’

‘In the morning. If it is a problem it won’t go away before then.’

‘I’m disappointed,’ his sister said from the other end of the island. ‘I’m disappointed and disgusted that this is how casual you can be about it, but not surprised.’

‘I’ll let you know how I get on.’

He went back to the lounge, to the leather armchair facing his wife. It troubled him more than he revealed, his sister calling him within minutes of the call she had received herself, standing with her phone in what she grandly called the Conservatory, looking out at her sloping section of lemon trees and camellias crippled across wire-frames, the pergola with its dense web of passion vines, and beyond that the thin arm of the harbour, the pines black as in children’s drawings against the late evening sky.

‘That must have been important,’ Marion said. It was a rare thing for her sister-in-law to ring. She lowered the volume on the television, the figures of a British series on a grotesquely obese family appearing even more repellent without sound.

Brendan asked her, ‘Can you turn that bloody picture off?’

There was a click and it dwindled to a black dot. ‘It makes me sick just to look at them.’

‘Nothing that is human,’ she began to quote. A BA, as he liked to tease her, comes down to a box of quotes you can hand round like poppies.

‘What isn’t alien?’ he completed the tag for her. His raised hand thudded back on the chair’s broad arm. ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘It’s so hard to stay calm with that woman.

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