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‘Aw, okay. I don’t see so much of her.’
‘Why’s that? I thought you were getting on.’
‘Well, I got a bit pissed off, to be honest.’
To cut a long one short, whenever Louis went round to see Terri she had some little chore waiting for him – a dripping tap to be fixed, a washer to be put on, a sash cord to be replaced. And then, one afternoon, it was a favour for a neighbour, and then another neighbour, for the street seemed to be full of women on their own, ex-wives and widows, who all had small jobs around the house needing done by somebody both handy and reliable.
According to Louis – by implication, if not outright expression – the price of sex was some initial house maintenance, and he was starting to feel resentful; he was starting to feel used.
‘She always needs something done,’ he complained. ‘Or, if not her, one of her friends. And I’ve already done a day’s work. Then I’m going round there and spending another couple of hours unblocking drains or whatever. I’m just getting a bit pissed off.’
Next time we spoke, he hadn’t seen Terri since the last time we’d talked. Intimacy was over. But they remained friendly. She even offered to have Louis to come and live with her for his last few months. But he wouldn’t go. He wanted to stay independent, and maybe he was worried about the DIY.
So that was his version. But there is another.
We were sitting in Louis’ living room, which was all red, dust-matted carpet and Salvation Army furniture with the price stickers still on, and cheap plastic curtains that didn’t quite fit the windows, and which were coming off the end of the tracking for lack of stops.
The hand-basin in the bathroom took an hour to drain, so each time you used it, it filled up. You’d brush your teeth and spit out the toothpaste into the sink and the stuff would stay there and you couldn’t wash it away. The kitchen sink was the same. In the shower you had exactly one minute before the tray filled up and began to overflow.
I said we should get a plumber around but Louis was against it.
‘It’s screwed,’ he said. ‘It’s no use. We’re screwed. The whole thing’s screwed.’
I’d been trying to encourage him with tales I’d read on the internet of long-term survivors, people who’d had the surgery and the radio and the chemo and had lived on for five, six, seven years and were still going. He appeared to make an effort to believe me, and I thought I saw a flash of optimism in the milky eyes, but then he got upset about the drugs he had to take and whether he’d taken some out of sequence.
‘We’re screwed,’ he said. ‘It’s no good. We’re screwed.’
I tried to convince Louis that we weren’t screwed.
‘They’ve got us by the balls and curlies,’ he said.
‘We’re not screwed, Louis,’ I said. ‘They don’t have us by the balls and curlies. We’re not without resources, are we? We’ve come this far and look what we’ve survived. We’ve got through all that and we’re still going.’
‘Maybe,’ Louis said. ‘But now we’re screwed.’
‘We’re not, Louis,’ I said. ‘We’re not screwed at all. We could have years yet. All right, I’m not saying it’s not serious, but there’s people who’ve got through it and survived. There can be good times ahead. And we can get a plumber round.’
‘No point. It’s screwed,’ Louis said.
‘Louis, there’s a blockage in a pipe somewhere, that’s all it is. A plumber can fix it. It’s a half-hour job. I’ll ask Don, your neighbour, if he can recommend a plumber and get him round.’
‘No use,’ Louis said. ‘We’re screwed.’
I went round to see Don anyway and got a number for Barry the plumber and I called him up.
‘Sure, I’ll be round Thursday, mate. No worries.’
No worries, I thought. That’ll be the day.
But it didn’t cheer Louis up much. He still said we were screwed, and by then I was starting to agree with him, though I never said as much.
He was right, of course. We are screwed. Every single one of us. People go on so much about winning and being winners and coming in first and all the rest of it. But we all have to lose in the end and the best we can hope for is to go gracefully. Everyone dies. Death comes for us all. We’re all screwed. We’ll all stop functioning properly sooner or later. So Louis was right.
On the other side of the coin, though, when I suggested getting a fan heater to warm the chilly Australian winter evenings – not exactly cold by northern European standards, but cool enough – Louis was against that too. He said, ‘We don’t need any heaters, we’re tough.’
‘You’re tough, Louis,’ I told him. ‘I’m getting a heater.’
And he’d asked the Malaysian girl to put the burner on at the café, hadn’t he?
I went to a shop the next morning and bought two heaters – a convector and a blower. I brought them back and plugged them in. Louis sat in his Salvation Army armchair and toasted himself. They got to be inseparable, Louis and that heater. Towards the end of his life, that was one of his firmer friends. He wouldn’t have it in the bedroom though. He drew the line at that level of comfort and self-indulgence.
‘I’ll be all right when I’m under the blankets,’ he said. ‘You don’t have heaters in the bedroom.’
I guess you didn’t when you were tough.
I recognised the blankets. I’d seen them before. They’d belonged to our mother. They had to be thirty years old and they were disintegrating. When I tried to wash them, the fibres came apart and blocked the washing machine. I went out and bought some doonas – Australian for duvets. While stripping the bed I got a look at the mattress and went on to the internet to order a new one. It was falling apart. Underneath the mattress was a thick crop of dust growing out of what was left of the carpet.
‘Have you got a vacuum cleaner, Louis?’ I asked.
‘Of course I have,’ he said indignantly. ‘Of course I have a vacuum cleaner.’
‘Where is it?’
‘I don’t remember,’ he said.
We had a look and found it in a cupboard. It was out of a museum.
‘Who was the last to use it?’ I asked.
‘Kirstin,’ he said.
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