Candelo

completed.

one

My mother, Violetta, has always believed that there is a division between right and wrong, that it is possible to draw a moral line.

I’m not talking about morality in a puritanical sense, she says, nor am I talking about petty daily entanglements.

And she isn’t.

She is talking about something much larger than that. She is talking about the big issues, about taking a stand with an honest awareness of how each action will impact on the universal, about not being afraid to speak out, to battle for what you know to be right.

Simple, I say to her, with a certain measure of sarcasm.

She is usually easy to rail.

The problem with your generation, she tells me, is that you expect others to do the fighting for you. You are quite happy to sit around and talk about what’s wrong with the world, but you won’t do anything about it – unless there’s something in it for you.

She beats her fist on the table. She is on a roll. Look at feminism today, and she lifts her eyes to the ceiling in disgust. There’s no concept of united action. You get a modem, call yourself a grrrl and you never look beyond your own backyard.

I tell her that I have never called myself a grrrl.

I should hope not, she says. She barely draws a breath before she continues. What about cuts in health care? Education? Unemployment benefits? When was the last time you did anything other than sit around and complain? If you came to any of the few marches still being held, you’d see that it is predominantly my generation out there protesting.

I wish I hadn’t got her started.

Fighting for others has always been her life. For as long as I can remember. She sees inequality, she sees injustice and she is in there, battling for what she believes.

I’m not talking about the general, I say. It’s just that it is not always easy, on a personal level, to know what is right, and as I speak, I can see her rolling her eyes. If it isn’t huge, if it isn’t political, then it isn’t real to you.

She looks at me without blinking. It certainly isn’t of as much importance, she says.

When Simon, my brother, came to tell me that Mitchell had died, I was, once again, enmeshed in the personal. And even in that arena, even in my own petty daily entanglements, I was managing to shift that line, draw it anywhere in the sand, and justify its placement to myself.

I was sitting on the back steps to our building and looking at the work I had made Marco do. Four days before I had asked him to move out.

It was during the last rains that the stairs had started sinking. As the mud slid down from the hill behind us, the bottom steps slipped with it. Already rotten, the wooden posts and landing began to shift, the boards breaking under the strain, leaving only a rickety backbone of what had once been there. Enough to tiptoe carefully, from upstairs to downstairs, but only just.

Like everything in this building, they remained unrepaired.

The owner, Mr Wagner, lives in Germany and we do not know how to contact him.

Mouse once told me that he left the country because he had buried a woman in the backyard, under very sus circumstances, and he winked, knowingly.

For whatever reason, we have never seen him. We just pay our rent into a bank account, and the disrepair continues. Even when it is as dangerous as those stairs were.

And that is how they would have stayed, if I hadn’t begged Marco to fix them.

Why? he asked. It’s not like we ever go up there.

I told him they were life threatening. That they, Anton or Louise, could kill themselves.

Well, let them do something about it, he said.

They won’t, I told him.

And they wouldn’t. Anton, I think, liked the romance of it all. He bought himself a rope ladder and kept it near the bathroom window. Louise was too obsessed with the slow dissolution of their relationship to notice.

When I wouldn’t let up, Marco wanted to know why it concerned me so much.

I couldn’t tell him the real reason. I couldn’t tell him that I did, in fact, go up there. As often as I could. Waiting until he had gone off to work, waiting until I heard Louise’s footsteps on the stairs and then, when it was all clear, knocking on their door.

I just kept on begging him, until, finally, he gave in. Four days before he packed the last of his few possessions into a box and carried it up the path to the road, slamming the door behind him as he told me that I would be sorry, that I would regret my decision. Marco fixed it all; all except the bottom step, which, still rotten, had collapsed into the dirt below.

And that is where I was sitting on the day my brother, Simon, came to tell me the news.

I had been sick again. A dull nausea that had left me unable to make it to my front door. Too listless to move, I was staring out past the coral trees, out past the morning glory, out past the sea, while from above me, I could hear them, Anton and Louise, arguing again.

I am sorry, Louise would say when she knocked on my door late at night after fights such as these. I shouldn’t bother you. But have you got a moment?

And I would always let her in, my desire to know what was happening stronger than my ability to do what I knew was right. I would drink the scotch she had brought with her and I would watch the ice condense in the glass until the palm of my hand was cold and sweaty. Never lying but never telling the truth.

I heard the door slam upstairs, and I jumped.

I heard Anton tell her to calm down.

I heard her open the door and slam it again, the whole building shuddering with its impact, the windows rattling, the tremor travelling down the railing to the stairs as Anton no doubt shrugged his shoulders in helpless indignation at Louise’s fury.

I began to pull myself up and, as I looked down at my feet, my ankles, my legs, cramped from sitting for too long, I failed to see him. My brother. Coming down the path towards me, the pale blue of his bus driver’s shirt normally letting me know who it is before he arrives.

But not this time.

When I looked up, he was there.

And he had come to tell me that Mitchell had died.

two

Simon still lives at home with Violetta.

She used to worry that he would never leave. Now she just accepts the fact that he is there. Her house is large and their lives barely intersect.

In the past, their few exchanges of words were usually about the dishes, cleaning the bathroom, not leaving the laundry sitting in the washing machine for days. It was always Violetta directing the complaints, a staccato list as she rushed around the kitchen, tiny, bird-like in her high heels, picking up bowls, glasses, cups and never really putting them anywhere. Just shifting them, from one spot to the next. Sometimes Simon would look up from the paper and, not wanting any confrontation, quickly look down again.

Since my mother has been ill, Mari, who lives with her, has taken up the complaints. Not that she was silent in the past. But she would usually direct her frustration at Vi, telling her she could not bear it any longer. He is a slob, she would say. For Christ’s sake, Vi, he’s a grown man. You shouldn’t still be picking up after him.

Once it became so bad that Mari packed her bags and told my mother that it was her or Simon. Violetta had to choose.

Don’t make me do this, Violetta said.

She would, no doubt, have drawn back on her cigarette, then stubbed it out, half finished, before commencing to roll the next one. She would have told Mari she was being ridiculous. She would have promised she would talk to Simon.

And then, finding it all too difficult, she would have gone back to the report she was writing, ‘The Sexuality of the Adolescent’, or ‘Crime, Children and Incarceration’, or perhaps a piece for the paper, a book review, a speech.

Her notes would surround her and the ashtray would be overflowing. She would be immersed, unaware that Mari was packing the last of her bags, closing the door behind her, locking it and pushing the key through the letterbox. Unaware that Mari had, in fact, gone.

It is not that my mother does not care, it is just that she wouldn’t have wanted to know. She would have waited, certain that a phone call would come. Or a knock on the door. Mari, wanting to pick up the rest of her things.

And when Mari did turn up, two maybe three days later, Vi would have stayed in her room while Mari cleared out the kitchen cupboards. Vi would have turned up the radio while Mari emptied the shelves, quietly at first and then, realising that Violetta was not going to come out and beg her to stay, more loudly, until she was dropping each pan on the floor, not once but twice, before she put it in the box.

It would only have been when the noise became unbearable that my mother would have opened her door. Clack, clack, clack in her heels, furious at the disruption, both of them glaring at each other across the almost bare kitchen.

You’re being ridiculous, Violetta would have said, arms folded.

Am I?

I’ve talked to Simon, and seeing that Mari was not going to waver, not without a little more, she would have told her that he had promised to change.

Hardly the words Mari had hoped for but at least they were some kind of start.

Please, because Vi would have known that it would not take much more. There’s no need for all of this.

Not much of a reconciliation, but enough for Mari to stop her packing, just for a moment, and for my mother to reach out and touch her arm in the absent, barely there manner that she has.

Really? Mari would have asked.

Really, Vi would have said.

And in the silence that followed, they both would have looked away from each other, uncertain. Knowing that another move had to be made. Knowing it would be Mari; Mari who would look at Vi, who would tell her how awful she looked, like she hadn’t slept, like she had been smoking too much, not eating, all of which would be true. Because this is the way my mother is. Whether Mari is there or not.

I am sorry, Mari would have finally said.

I am sorry too, and they would have stepped towards each other, still hesitant, still unsure as to whether the argument really was over, my mother drumming the tabletop with her fingers, wanting to light a cigarette but trying to stop herself.

Coffee? Mari would have asked.

And as Vi nodded, Mari would have begun to search for the percolator, unpacking the boxes on the floor at her feet.

It was all right; and my mother would have reached for her pouch of tobacco, her sigh of relief audible. Mari was home and life was, once again, normal.

Simon, no doubt, would have been completely unaware of the drama. It is unlikely my mother would have told him. Or perhaps he did know but he, too, just chose to ignore it, staying in his room and watching television or sleeping.

Like Vi, he is good at avoiding.

Simon and I are not close. We were once, but it seems so long ago, it is difficult for me to remember.

At the time of his visit, we only saw each other infrequently. Sometimes I would come home and he would be there, sitting outside my front door, smoking a cigarette and staring at the scuffs on his shoes. No doubt he had been there for hours, never thinking to call before he arrived, never thinking to just leave a note and go. He would wait, his shirt untucked from the creased cobalt blue of his bus driver’s trousers, too tight, his stomach bulging out over his belt, his fingers nicotine stained, never without a cigarette, his eyes far away, staring at his shoes but seeing right past them, seeing something that only he can see.

He never comes for a reason. He just arrives. When I let him in, he is large and heavy in my small flat, filling the room that is my lounge and bedroom, not wanting anything to drink or eat, not even wanting to talk about anything in particular.

Instead, he will tell me in slow halting sentences about what happened on his route that day, or perhaps he will give me a run-down of an article he read in the paper, or a movie he watched on television, a blow-by-blow description of the plot, each scene described in excruciatingly dull detail.

I try to listen, but I soon find I am cleaning up around him, washing up, hinting that I have people coming over or I am going out, making phone calls to friends, until eventually he heaves himself up and sighs.

Well, I suppose I’d better go, he says.

As we part, as I watch him making his way back up the path, step by step, not even bothering to brush the oleander aside as it slaps into his face, I wish I had tried.

It is the gap between what he once was and what he has become.

The size of it. There in front of me.

And in the face of that, I am no good.

On that day, the day that Simon came to tell me Mitchell had died, he had not been over for almost two months.

I opened the windows wide in preparation for the thick yellow haze of smoke that would soon settle. He sat, heavily, in the armchair that had once belonged to our grandfather, thumbing through a script I had been reading for an audition.

It’s a film, I told him, a small part, but better than usual.

He put it down.

He is not interested in my work. Nor is Violetta. But, in her case, this disinterest is a relief. The few times she has come to a play I have been in, she has sat right near the front, leaning forward, so that I can see her staring, I can feel her staring. And afterwards, she tells me exactly what she thought. She tells me the script was didactic, the interpretation facile, the politics conservative, all the while drinking red wine and waving a cigarette in the air.

I put the script away and leant against the doorframe, one foot in, one foot out, looking out across the garden as I asked my brother how he was.

He told me he was okay, just the same, not much happening, and as I glanced towards him, I saw he was rubbing his hand nervously along the top of his thigh, unable to meet my eyes.

What’s up? I asked him, and, frustrated, I turned away, rolling my eyes in irritation as I waited for him to speak.

You’re so impatient, Marco would tell me when he saw me with Simon.

No I’m not, I would argue, but I would know he was right, and I would feel ashamed.

He’s not that hard to talk to, he would say whenever I came home to find them both out in the garden, smoking cigarettes and seemingly managing to converse with ease; not once, but several times.

Just because he’s a bus driver doesn’t mean he has no opinions about the world, and Marco would raise his eyebrows to reinforce one of his favourite points: I was, and always would be, just too middle class.

And I would be furious with him.

From behind me, I could hear Simon clear his throat.

My brother’s voice is soft. He often looks down as he talks; his words trail off as he realises that his attempts to be heard are floundering; half-finished sentences fall at his feet. He was answering me, but it was not just his uncertainty, nor just my failure to listen, it was the name that confused me, hearing it out loud after all those years, so that he had to say it again.

Mitchell.

And I was, for a moment, relieved. It wasn’t Vi. It wasn’t Bernard.

He wiped his forehead with the bottom of his shirt and, despite the cool, I could see that he was hot. Clammy. The perspiration condensing near his hairline.

What happened? I asked, my surprise at the mention of Mitchell’s name only just beginning to register.

I waited for him to speak. In the silence, I could hear them above me, Anton and Louise. She was sweeping the floor of the flat. This is what she does when she is agitated. He was helping her move the furniture. This is what he does when he feels guilty.

Simon, too, glanced upwards.

I watched him swallow, followed by the hesitant scratch of a cough. Wiping his nose with the back of his hand.

I want to go to the funeral, and I could barely hear him. I want to go to the funeral, he said again, lifting his head now and looking straight at me.

I did not want him to say what I knew he was going to say next. I guessed before he even spoke the words, before he even asked me if I would go with him. And I looked straight back at my brother and told him that I didn’t want to go.

Not to Mitchell’s funeral. Not to that.

three

I do not know how Mitchell was when they took him away.

He may have hung his head, his long blond hair stiff with salt and falling into his eyes as they put his hands behind his back.