This is the Life. Alex Shearer

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СКАЧАТЬ and the back of the head. But when she had done, she didn’t charge any extra, just the standard rate. Louis looked at me to pay, so I took the money out of his wallet and the Chinese girl seemed surprised when I gave her a tip, though she plainly deserved one.

      We thanked her and left and I handed Louis his wallet back.

      ‘I gave her a tip,’ I told him. ‘With your money. Hope that was all right.’

      He didn’t respond, just put the wallet away in his blue cool bag.

      ‘How do the bits and pieces look?’ he asked, taking a glance at his reflection in a window. The sun was high and bright and the shop windows were like mirrors.

      ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘She did a good job.’

      ‘Where’s my hat?’ Louis said.

      I gave it to him and he put it on.

      ‘Aren’t you too warm in that?’ I asked.

      ‘It’s all going to fall out anyway,’ he said.

      I saw that the brand name on his beanie was Piping Hot.

      As he put the hat on, I saw his scar clearly for the first time. It had healed well but still looked ugly. I didn’t like the thought of it – of having your skull cut open and a part of your brain taken out, even an infected part.

      ‘Let’s go and have a coffee,’ Louis said. ‘I’ll shout you a coffee.’

      Louis always had the knack of sounding particularly generous, even when he wasn’t actually doing that much.

      ‘I’ll stand you a coffee,’ he said. ‘Or lunch.’

      We walked on down the street. The Brisbane suburb looked American to me; it had that wide-spaced look, with buildings sprawling out instead of up – like some outback town.

      ‘How about here?’

      There were cafés everywhere, but this one had plenty of free tables outside. The waitresses were young and friendly. Not Chinese, maybe Malaysian. But I guess they were all Australian really. They’d just started off as Chinese and Malaysian once, and now they were Australian, same as the one-time British and Irish and Greek and Scottish were. It was a broad church, you might say.

      We sat at a table and a waitress brought a menu over.

      ‘Can you light one of those gas burners?’ Louis asked. ‘I’m cold.’

      ‘You want to sit inside?’ I asked him.

      ‘No. But I’d like the burner.’

      ‘Sure,’ the waitress said. ‘No worries.’

      And she opened a valve and pressed some button to light the burner up.

      When she’d gone I said to Louis, ‘How come no one here has any worries?’ He looked at me, puzzled. ‘Everyone says “No worries”,’ I told him. ‘I can’t believe they don’t have any.’

      He didn’t respond. He kind of looked right through me. But that was nothing new. He’d always done that, since we were kids.

      He was staring at the menu but couldn’t make sense of it, so I read it out.

      ‘I’ll have that,’ he said. But then he wanted to know the price, and when I told him, he almost changed his mind.

      ‘I’ll pay,’ I told him.

      ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘But it’s expensive.’

      ‘It’s the cost of living, Louis,’ I said.

      And what else did he have to spend it on anyway? And how long left did he have to spend it? The world was full of people with money worries, but there were also people with no money worries at all, yet they were still worried – they were worried that something might happen and their money wouldn’t be able to fix it.

      I sometimes think that if you started listing all the things that money can’t fix, it would be even longer than the list of things it can.

      Sometimes money is as much use as rocks in the desert, when what you need is a glass of cold water.

       2

       TERRI

      Terri has two stories – or, rather, she has one story, but there are two versions of it, with contradictory endings, and this is permutation number one.

      The first time I heard about Terri was when Louis rang me one morning. It was always morning when he rang – morning my time, late evening his. He’d have got back home from whatever particularly crummy job he was doing that day. Louis had a good brain and he had a degree and a masters and an engineering diploma, but for all that he worked in low-skilled, low-paid employment, for, like the character of Biff Loman in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, it was as though he couldn’t ‘get a hold on life’.

      He told me once that he didn’t work in the field he was qualified for as he ‘didn’t like the politics’. The problem with that, as far as I was concerned, is that there are politics everywhere. You could have the dirtiest, least-respected, lowest-paid job going, but there’s still politics in it; there’s still a boss, still co-workers. You can’t get away from politics any more than you can get away from other people. It can be done, but it’s not easy. You’d need to be a hermit.

      But, in common with many people who don’t fit into the world as it is, Louis just had to do things right. No slacking, idling or cutting corners. The bummest job had to be done just so, and he was always complaining about bad management and employees who didn’t care, even when he was working as a maintenance man on the minimum wage, or in a factory somewhere, on the assembly line. Louis always appeared to know what needed to be done to run a business properly, he just couldn’t seem to do it for himself. He tried setting up on his own a couple of times, but lost money on both occasions. Yet, for all that he was so well qualified and educated, he believed that working with your hands was superior to working with your mind for some reason. Maybe he thought it was more genuine, more authentic. And the irony of that was that all our parents had ever wanted for both of us was an education and an escape from the drudgery of factory labour and manual toil.

      Anyway, he called up and I answered the phone. There had been a time when calls were rare, just Christmas and birthdays and emergency measures. But the cost of international calls had come down and we spoke frequently, maybe once a week or a fortnight.

      ‘Hey!’ he said.

      ‘Hi, Louis,’ I said, a little annoyed at being interrupted at what I was doing but trying to conceal it. You can’t blame people for ringing at inconvenient times. When you call them it’s probably the same. ‘How’s it going?’

      ‘You won’t believe what happened,’ he said. And then, as usual, having said that, he fell silent, like he wanted me to extract the information, like he was the winkle and I had a pin.

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