Establishment Blues

Thanks to everyone who commented on the Prologue on this page and on FB. Here is the next chapter . The working title is Establishment Blues and this chapter introduces Matthew, Lisa’s brother. Let me know what you think…

Chapter 1.       Matthew

Matthew startles awake, sweating and tangled. He rolls onto his back and kicks off the sheets. He was dreaming about coffins. There was a dozen of them, floating on a rolling ocean, just outside the break. Matthew had paddled out there. He’d left his father’s will inside one of them and he had to find it before they all sank. He knew he had to check each one, but the waves got higher as he paddled further out, and the coffins were breaking up. Pieces of paper started to float out through the cracks. People were gathering on the beach to watch. He realised he wasn’t wearing any clothes. The coffins were sinking. Then he was in the middle of the papers as they floated free on the surface. They were all copies of the same will. They had multiplied in the coffins and somehow this made sense to him. He grabbed for one, but it was slippery in the water like a new-born baby. He couldn’t hold onto it and he began to panic, his chest squeezing. He pinned the paper between his body and his board and started back to shore, but as he paddled, he could feel it shrinking underneath his skin. Desperately, he put it between his teeth, but now it was no bigger than a postage stamp, now a coin, now a grain of rice. A wave rose up behind him, the biggest yet, and getter higher and higher. If he caught it, he could ride it all the way to his house and be able to put the will inside the filing cabinet before it got any smaller. He stood up, but he was on nose of his board. He could feel the tip under his toes. He was going to stack it and he clenched his teeth to keep the will safe. The wave crashed over his head, tumbling him in the wash, and when he surfaced, the will had gone.

Matthew rubs his eyes with one hand and looks up at the ceiling, waiting for it to come into focus. The nightmare has made him feel sad and anxious. His chest is heavy, and his throat feels tight. He reaches for the bottle of water on his bedside table. The wills – his dad’s, Lisa’s, his own – are all in the safe at Lisa’s house, he remembers, so he doesn’t need to worry about his own copies, wherever they are. Lisa would say that the nightmare was not about the will at all but something else that is troubling him. That could be a dozen things. Where would he start? With his dad, of course. The moment in Lisa’s spare room one week ago grips him and his chest sinks further into the mattress. People say it is a blessing when someone dies after a long illness. People say a lot of stupid stuff. Matthew would prefer his father to be alive and well. He would prefer not to have sat by him while he died. Lisa said he would never regret it, but Matthew is not convinced.

The misery floods him again and Matthew closes his eyes and breathes, focusing on the air flowing overing his upper lip, through his nostrils and down the back of his throat to his chest and then back out again. Chest, throat, nostrils, upper lip. And again. The cool air flowing in and the warm air flowing out. He wants the feeling to pass before he talks to Clare. He needs to be in the right frame of mind. Last night he came home way too late, and he was drunk, and probably should have slept in the spare room. He knows he deserves a grilling. He’d been on a roll with the pokies and lost track of time. He doesn’t know what he’d been thinking, staying out the night before his dad’s funeral. Well, he does, but that doesn’t bear thinking about until he’s calmed down, had coffee and some ibuprofen, and settled his head.

Clare comes out of the bathroom and stands in the sunlight, towelling her hair dry. She is golden. Even through his hangover and after his conversation with Lisa, Matthew gazes at her, appreciating that he has married a goddess. She angles her body toward him and he knows she is posing for his benefit, showing him the curve of her hip but nothing else. He marvels that after twenty-five years she can still be such a flirt. She is wearing the lingerie she bought on the weekend. It is dark red, with lace over her breasts and at the tops of her thighs. He wants to touch it. When she turns to the dressing room, he can see her adjusting the straps in the mirror, appraising herself. He closes his eyes. On their wedding day, she refused to let him see her dress until she walked down the aisle, and when she entered the church he had been transfixed. The dress had a low, low neckline and left her arms bare, with thin, glittering straps over her shoulders. She had kept her eyes demure and lowered as she walked, and when he bent to kiss her, his hand between her shoulder blades landed on bare skin. He had wanted to take her straight to the hotel. Later at the reception, she unbuttoned the long dress to the whistles and applause of their guests and revealed a short miniskirt underneath. He had danced all night with her, marvelling at her long bare legs and his own good fortune.

“Big night last night?” she asks from the dressing room.

He groans, returning to his misery. Maybe there is some ibuprofen in the bedside table.

She emerges wearing a knee-length fitted red dress and matching jacket. She twirls, showing off her tanned calves. The soles of her black heels are red.

“Wow, is that new?”

“Hugo Boss. I bought it yesterday on my lunch break.” She looks triumphant, and so she should, he thinks. Women half her age would be pleased with themselves if they looked like her.

“Matches your shoes. And your handbag.”

“I know.” She blows him a kiss and returns to the bathroom to finish her hair and make-up. “I’m having breakfast with the girls before work this morning, remember? I won’t come home before dinner. Late client meeting. I’ll just meet you at the restaurant.”

Of course, he’d forgotten about dinner. He wouldn’t have time to come home after the funeral through the rush hour traffic. They’d had to go 30kms north of the city to find a house that Clare liked that also had ocean views and was in their price range. To be fair, it was a spectacular house, like nothing he ever dreamed he would live in, standing up like a champion over the coastline. Matthew and Lisa had grown up in an old house, just a brick bungalow, on the farm east of Perth. It had no home theatre or deck with a second kitchen. No coastal views. The garage had been built on later, the guest room was a sleep-out on the back veranda, and there was only one toilet. Matthew remembered hopping up and down outside the toilet door with a full morning bladder waiting for his father to finish the newspaper. These days he can chose between four toilets when he wants to pee.

Dinner tonight is with a real estate agent and his wife. The wife is a friend of Clare’s. They live down south now, in a corrugated iron monster house cantilevered out over the side of the hill and with views across the bay. The real estate agent has agreed to find Matthew and Clare a holiday house on the beach. Clare has her heart set on it; two of her friends have properties in Yallingup and spend their weekends there now that their kids have finished school. Clare wants to do the same. She has promised him a writing room with views of the surf break. Matthew is hoping that more time in the country will mean more time alone with his wife and less time with neighbours who know the brands and the purchase price of every damn thing he owns. Less time away from Lisa and Bevan, as much as it hurts him, will also be good for both of them. All four of them.

After Clare leaves, Matthew swings his feet off the bed and tests how it feels to be upright. He looks down at his long thighs. He likes to think that he’s in good shape for someone who spends all day looking at his laptop. At 47, he can still run five kilometres each day and he has retained the lean musculature that he developed in his days working on the farm. It doesn’t hurt that he’s tall. His height is one of the things that he knew Clare liked about him from the start. She prefers a man who is bigger and stronger than her, she said all those years ago. Matthew met her at a university college party. He was doing an Arts degree, majoring in creative writing. She was in first year Commerce. He remembers that she had been wearing white lace shorts and a black t-shirt with a wide neck like a sailor. She wore her blonde hair long and straight and swished it when she laughed. They’d shared a cigarette.

When he finished his degree and returned to the farm to work and write, Clare came up for weekends. They’d take a swag out into the paddocks and drink beer and have sex under the stars. When it came her turn to graduate, she got a bookkeeping job with the farm’s accountant in the town and they lived in the workers’ shack at the back of the main house. Together, they had gone to local B&S balls, sleeping it off in the back of the ute, and drove to Perth on weekends for Friday drinks at Lisa’s and to attend engagement parties in posh riverside homes. When their own turn came, they put a marquee on the lawn in front of the farmhouse and invited their guests to come up from Perth and bring their swags. They had danced all night and he thought he was the luckiest man alive.

Matthew shaves and then stands under the shower, washing away the night before. The suds run down his legs and he watches them make tracks before sliding around his bare ankle bones and pooling between his feet. It had been a good night, all things considered. Most of the night, he’d been up, little wins here and there had kept him going. His mistake had been taking a break to go the bar. He’d got talking to a girl and they’d had cocktails the colour of her dress. He can’t remember her name now – there was always a girl at the bar – but she said she was a journalist and had written a book. She wanted him to help get it published. He guesses he now has her number in his phone. She was pretty and smart and although he can’t remember what her book was about either, he’d thought at the time that it would fly. But she’d kept him out of the gaming room for half an hour and that was where he’d gone wrong; he’d interrupted the flow. When he returned, it was all downhill except for that one time when he thought he had it again. He can see his wallet on the floor on the bedroom, reflected in the bathroom mirror, and he turns away to wash the soap out of his hair.

Dry again, Matthew pulls on a pair of jeans and a white slogan t-shirt – always was, always will be – and walks barefoot to the kitchen. The light from the backyard hits him halfway down the stairs and he holds one hand across his eyes, creasing his face against the pain. He thought they were expecting a late cold front to come through today. There is nothing but blue sky through the windows. He pulls the medicine box down from above the fridge, pops two white pills out of a blister pack and lines them up on the bench with two ibuprofen, a multivitamin and a glass of Berocca. Switching on the coffee machine, he avoids thinking about the empty wallet on the floor upstairs. He’s fucked up, big time, this time. He knows she won’t take it well. Maybe he’ll call Bevan. He always seems to know what to do.