This, p.1
This, page 1
First published 2023 by MidnightSun Publishing Pty Ltd
PO Box 3647, Rundle Mall, SA 5000, Australia.
www.midnightsunpublishing.com
Copyright © Lazaros Zigomanis 2023
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
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Internal design by Zena Shapter
Typeset in Palantino and Marydale.
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To the scared, confused kid in all of us crying out for understanding, crying out to be heard, and never knowing from where that solace will come.
AUTUMN
March-May 1989
1.
Mum’s bawling comes in big, guffawing sobs. Dad’s solemn – you couldn’t tell what he’s thinking; it might be about a horse race he’s bet on. Steph, my older sister, is inscrutable, although she’s like that a lot now. Uncles and aunts and cousins stand with heads bowed, some sobbing, others sniffling.
This is what Aunt Mena’s life comes to. Her family will go home tonight, and things will be different. Her kids will never be able to go to her again. She’ll never show up at our functions with that big, toothy smile and that laugh that trilled through every room.
She’s gone, and all that’s left is that emptiness wherever she used to be.
And the mourning.
And this funeral as a last goodbye.
Which prompts the question to jump into my head: Who’ll mourn for me?
This isn’t what a fifteen-year-old should be asking himself. My problems should be girls, school and keeping my parents happy. Not this. It doesn’t even make sense. I have plenty of family. I have friends. Plenty of people would mourn me, wouldn’t they? I tell myself they would but I can’t shake the cold feeling that I might mean nothing, that I’m alone.
The priest is a stocky man with a big, square beard and little round spectacles. He finishes his benedictions, firing off rapid Greek – the same way he prattled on at the church service for an hour – that’s indecipherable. We make the sign of the cross, then file in procession past the open grave.
As we pass it, we pick up a chunk of dirt and throw it in. I watch my clump hit the rosewood coffin and, for an instant, I see Aunt Mena lying in there, arms folded across her chest, eyes closed and now forever still. I think about myself in there and about my friends and family doing this for me.
The food comes out then, carried from the backs of station wagons – trays of flake, calamari, plates of chicken and bowls of salad, set up on picnic tables under the swaying willows that dot the cemetery. Eskies full of beer and soft drinks come next. The mood changes from funereal to picnic. Everybody mingles to talk about the nothings in life, except for my sister and me. We drift under one of the willows, like we’re using the overhanging branches to shut ourselves away from everything.
Steph folds her arms across her chest. She’s twenty-two, and while she might seem typically Greek – with her big, dark eyes, high cheekbones and dark hair drawn back – she does her best to hide it, or to at least try to deflect it into something exotic, like Italian.
‘The only time we all get together nowadays are weddings and funerals,’ she says.
‘And birthdays,’ I say.
‘Some birthdays. That was the last time I saw Aunt Mena outside of the hospital – my twenty-first. She asked me when I was gonna get married.’
That’s the eternal question when you’re Greek. Life’s about getting married and making a family.
‘You never know when it’s your time,’ Steph says.
Aunt Mena had cancer – six months from diagnosis to her death. We saw her a couple of weeks ago in palliative care. She’d grown thin and the skin hung from her face. Although she was in pain, she’d come to accept she was dying. I don’t get that. How do you just accept your life’s over?
‘You missing anything at school today?’ Steph asks.
‘Supposed to talk to the counsellor,’ I say.
‘The counsellor?’
This comes from my twenty-six-year-old cousin Jim, who’s bloated over to us – bloated, not floated, because Jim’s always been big and stocky, although hard work has turned it into muscle that could melt back into fat the moment he stops taking care of himself. His fiancée, Nicola, in a spotted black and white dress, hangs off his arm like a pair of fuzzy dice, while his teenage sister, Anthea, loiters behind him. Jim is the son of my Aunt Toula, Mum’s younger sister. He’s the family poster boy. He graduated high school with top marks, went to university to study medicine and is now interning at St Margaret’s Hospital. Whenever Mum or Dad remind me, Steph, or both of us together, what the benchmarks in life are, Jim’s trotted out. Look at what Jim’s doing. But that’s being Greek. You’re always compared to somebody.
Well, somebody good, at least.
‘You got problems?’ Jim says, almost belligerently – not really at me, I think, but at the prospect that a counsellor should know your problems. More typical Greek. You never reveal problems to outsiders. You hide them so they don’t cause embarrassment.
‘It’s about career’s counselling,’ I tell Jim.
‘You’re in what now? Year 11?’
‘Year 10.’
Jim waves away Year 10 with a flick of his hand. Year 10’s nothing. He has this big head, like a carved Halloween pumpkin that sits under a mop of curly black hair. He gets it from his dad. They should be in the line of heads on Easter Island.
‘What’re you going to do when you finish school?’ he asks.
I shrug.
‘You don’t know?’
‘I’m in Year 10.’
‘Should have an idea.’
‘He writes stories,’ Steph says.
‘Stories? What stories?’
‘Just stories,’ I say.
‘What’re they about?’
I shrug once more. This will be my blanket defence.
‘You don’t know?’
‘Mostly, they’re about this kid–’
‘Kid? What kid?’
‘This teenager, Jean Razor.’
‘John Razor?’
‘Jean.’
‘It’s a girl?’
‘Jean is a boy’s name.’
‘So, he’s French?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why’s he French?’
I think it’s because Star Trek: The Next Generation started on TV not too long ago. The captain of the ship is Jean-Luc Picard. It sounded exotic and cool. But I can’t explain that to Jim. Or that I like science fiction. He won’t get any of it.
‘The name sounded good,’ I say.
‘And what’s he do?’
‘He can travel through dimensions the–’
‘Dimensions.’ Jim waves it all away, annoyed, the way he might wave away a fly that keeps flying around in his face. ‘Writing. Where’s that going to get you?’
‘He’s fifteen,’ Steph says. ‘Not everybody has it worked out so young.’
‘I knew when I was fourteen.’
‘Not everybody’s as cluey as you, Jim.’
Jim tries to puzzle out if that’s an insult or not – it is; Steph’s telling him how full of himself he is. Steph doesn’t care about this shit. Posturing, she calls it. And I can see that – a way to build yourself up through comparing. But Jim doesn’t see it. He might be book-smart, but I don’t think he’s people-smart. He’ll have terrible bedside manner. But he nods, deciding she’s recognising how precocious he was.
‘How’s Furniture Warehouse going?’ Nicola says. She flutters her long, curled eyelashes. There’s a greasiness about her. I bet she’s slimy to kiss, although kissing Jim would be like kissing a black hole. Even the way she asks the question is greasy, like it’s meant to slide under Steph’s defences.
‘It’s a job,’ Steph says.
‘A job,’ Jim scoffs – Steph’s story is legendary around our family circles. ‘You got that fellowship prize in high school, that…what was it called?’
‘The Boland Fellowship.’
‘You graduated with better marks than anybody–’
Anybody includes Jim. But he’s not going to point that out.
‘–and then after two-and-a-half years at university, you dropped out,’ Jim finishes. If he were a lawyer, he’d be preaching the defendant’s guilt to the jury. ‘And for what?’
‘It wasn’t for me.’
‘Bet your parents went nuts,’ Nicola says.
‘They were okay,’ Steph says.
They weren’t. Everybody knows they weren’t. Nicola’s just point-scoring. Mum and Dad blew up. You’d have thought Steph had held up a bank. She should’ve. She would’ve gotten off easier. And a public defender in the process.
‘I can’t wait to get to university,’ Anthea says.
Anthea’s fortunate enough to miss the hereditary big head; she wears too much make-up and is always finding ways to be sultry – even now, in boots, t ight black pants and sweater, and the sort of jacket that only buttons at the bottom and shows off that she’s disproportionately bigboobed. She might’ve been dressing for a club, rather than to bury her aunt.
‘I was thinking of studying law,’ she says.
She won’t. She’s an idiot.
Jim grins, trying to inspire a familiarity between us that we’ve never had. ‘You need to think about the future,’ he tells me. He slides an arm around Nicola’s waist and pulls her close. ‘We should get going. But we’ll see you at our wedding in December, huh?’
‘Can’t wait,’ Steph says, with an eagerness you’d use for dental appointments.
Jim points at me as he leads Nicola and Anthea away. ‘And I’m going to ask you again then – trust me!’
I force a smile and watch them pack into Jim’s shiny new Ford.
2.
The only sound on the drive home comes from the tinny speakers of Dad’s radio. Usually, he’d have it on the horse racing or the Greek station, but Steph changed it on the drive up. Dad lowers the volume. Bon Jovi’s ‘Born to Be My Baby’ fades out and Melissa Etheridges’s ‘Like the Way I Do’ starts.
I try to puzzle out my future – partly because of Jim and partly because I was meant to see the school counsellor today – but instead my mind goes straight back to my funeral. Who’ll mourn for me? The thought nags at me.
I’ve been to other funerals: my maternal grandfather when I was five (heart-attack: I got to kiss his cold cheek, because it was an open coffin at the church service); my other grandfather when I was seven (cancer wasted him away, so there was no open coffin); and Uncle George (also a heart attack, at sixty-three) when I was ten. Last year, my grandmothers passed away within six months of one another. Now Aunt Mena.
‘Did you see your cousin Jim?’ Mum asks.
So it begins. You won’t get the full effect. Mum and Dad only speak Greek to Steph and me. I’m not going to remind you of that all the time. I will tell you that what they say loses something in the translation. You don’t get tone, either. Greek condemnations should be acted on stage as some great tragedy, even when the things you’re talking about aren’t that tragic. Also, this is coming from people who left Greece in the 1950s, got menial jobs because they couldn’t speak English and worked tirelessly to build lives for their kids, so every word comes from this fountain of sacrifice that you bathe in every day until you reek of the guilt.
‘He’s going to have a good job,’ Mum goes on. ‘He’s going to be married.’
Steph glowers out the window.
‘He’s going to be a doctor,’ Dad says.
‘A doctor!’ Mum says. ‘Do you know what people think of me when they see you, when they find out you dropped out of school?’
‘Mum, they don’t care–’ Steph says.
‘I’m embarrassed to be seen,’ Mum says. ‘Even at your poor Aunt Mena’s funeral, I know that they’re thinking of her and looking down on me.’
‘They’re not looking down on you, Mum.’
Mum’s sigh is overdone. Everything about her is sad: her eyes, her face, the way she slumps, the air she exhales, the seat she sits in. A tear slides down Steph’s cheek. But it’s not sadness; Steph’s happy with who she is. It’s anger. She doesn’t want to be made to feel this way, like all she’s ever doing is letting them down.
‘Mum, can you please–?’ Steph says.
‘You don’t shout at your mother!’ Dad says, glancing back at her.
His own anger gets the better of him as he remonstrates. The car swerves – not a lot, but enough that it’s a momentary fright.
‘You watch your driving!’ Mum says.
This is how things unfold. Nobody’s ever safe during these times. Dad tries to support Mum and then he gets it. It’s not that they hate each other – this is the way they communicate.
Dad flicks the radio back to his Greek station. I don’t know the song that plays – they all sound the same. I hope it’ll mellow Mum and Dad, but I know that some new recrimination is building.
Mum pats her chest, like she’s trying to soothe a pain in her heart. ‘It’s all right,’ she says. ‘We came here to give you a better life. And now…’
Steph’s jaw clenches.
‘You take the opportunities we give you and you throw them,’ Mum says. ‘You throw them away.’
Mum goes on. None of it’s malicious. Every parent wants their kids to do better than they have, but with Greek parents it’s rocket-fuelled. And whatever we achieve, I always feel like it’ll never be enough.
When we get home, Steph flees into the bungalow Dad and the uncles built for her in the backyard, right by our lemon tree. Steph was always complaining about privacy, about the way Mum and Dad would storm into her bedroom without knocking, about the way their shouting disturbed her when she was studying, so this is what she got: this bungalow. Six months later, she dropped out of university.
I follow Mum and Dad up the stairs to the back door. A fence – narrow side passages to either side – separates our house from the neighbours’. Their yard is manicured, the grass so neat and bright because they water every night. Rows of tomato and corn fill their garden. You could get lost in there.
The screen door at the back of their garage swings open and Olivia, Steph’s best friend, comes out and heads up the stairs. Olivia’s the same age as Steph, but worldly. Steph hasn’t left the state. But when Olivia graduated high school, she backpacked over Europe for a year, sending Steph postcards. Now she works as a hairdresser. She’s tall and athletic and always dragging Steph to stuff like yoga and pilates at the gym. Her dark hair is cropped short.
I lift my hand to wave, then stop myself, because waving would make me look like a dork. I’ve just started noticing Olivia. I mean, we’ve lived next door to one another for eight years, but she was always just Olivia. Now, she’s Olivia. I want to be cool. But that’s when Mum chimes in.
‘Hello, Olivia, love,’ she says.
‘How’re you?’ Olivia stops at the back door to her house. ‘Steph told me she was going to a funeral.’
‘Our cousin.’ Mum clutches her chest. ‘Cancer.’
‘Oh, that’s horrible.’
‘It was very painful.’
Mum’s English is fluent, but I’m unsure how much she really understands. She knows what to say and when and where to nod, but I don’t get the sense she’s taking anything in. Or maybe she’s just not listening.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Olivia says.
‘Thank you, love.’
As Mum goes on, I burst into the house and retreat to my bedroom.
As far as bedrooms go, mine’s simple – the single bed (with its new gold doona) sits by the curtained window, adjacent to a wall closet. Opposite it is my desk, flanked by a set of drawers on one side, and a narrow bookcase angled against the corner in the other. There’s nothing on the walls – not like my friend Riley, who has pictures of Madonna, Kim Wilde, and Samantha Fox topless; or my best friend Ash, who has pictures of Guns’n’Roses, Metallica, and his footy team. Mum wouldn’t want to spoil the room that way.
I change into a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, then sit on the bed, trying to figure out what I should do. Whatever happened at the funeral still buzzes through my body as a weird sense of restlessness. I check my clock radio: 2.22. I’d catch up with Ash and Riley, but they’d still be in school.
I grab my folder from my school bag and flick through it. I’ve done my book report on I Am the Cheese for Mr Baker’s English class, the report for Mr Tan’s computer class and the legal quiz for Mrs Grady’s Legal class.
That leaves my writing.
Three orange A5 exercise books sit at the top of my bookshelf. I’ve gone through four exercise books – Steph’s reading the other one – writing short stories about Jean Razor. I grab the top exercise book, find a pen, lay down on my bed, and flick to where I left off.
The Soulless Lords have cornered Jean Razor at the top of the Temporal Tower, by one of the Mirror Portals. I reread the last paragraph. My handwriting is a scrawl – sometimes, even I have trouble reading it.
I force my pen down onto the page. The ideas come slowly at first, but I focus on Jean Razor getting through the Mirror Portal. A new world opens to him – and me. And with the new world comes a new story. Now, my writing grows quicker – and uglier. The Soulless Lords have minions – the Grave Shadows. They’re dispatched to catch Jean Razor. Jean Razor escapes to the Forest of Volcanoes.
