This is the Life

Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

Copyright © Alex Shearer 2014

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014

Cover photographs © Seb Oliver/Corbis (figures and beach); Shutterstock.com (sky and plane)

Alex Shearer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007529711

Ebook Edition © February 2014 ISBN: 9780007529728

Version: 2015-02-06

For Bob, who understood the problem.

About the Book

“I don’t have much advice to give anyone; I’ve learned very little in my life; but here’s a gem of wisdom. Don’t take a dying man’s kettle away. You won’t be doing him any favours. Nor yourself either.”

This is the story of Louis, who never quite fitted in, and of his younger brother who always tagged along.

Two brothers on one final journey together, wading through the stuff that is thicker than water.

Tender-hearted, at times achingly funny, This is the Life is a moving testimony to both the resilience of the human spirit and to the price of strawberries.

About the Author

Alex Shearer was born in Wick in the north of Scotland, and now lives in Somerset. He has written for television, radio, film and the stage and is the author of many books for children, including the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize-shortlisted The Speed of the Dark. Several of Alex’s novels have become films and TV series, all over the world; one became both a Manga comic and a full-length Anime film in Japan. His books have been translated into many different languages.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

About the Book

About the Author

1. Haircut

2. Terri

3. Plumbing

4. Terri Two

5. Babies

6. Old Black Dog

7. Fried Fish

8. Matadors

9. Strawberries

10. Cat

11. Tricks

12. Crossing

13. Chain

14. Jack and May

15. Numbers

16. Free Lunch

17. Ashes

18. See Red

19. Phascogale

20. Observer

21. Interlude

22. Good News

23. Masks

24. Melon Claw

25. Dictation

26. The Way

27. Reprise

28. No Dramas

29. Wildlife

30. Flat White

31. Shell

32. In Time

The Origins of This is the Life

About the Publisher

1

HAIRCUT

We walked in and the two Chinese girls who ran the place looked up and gave us a nod. They were both busy and neither of them seemed too pleased to see us. But Louis was oblivious to that, so we sat down anyway and waited our turn.

Soon as we sat down, the two Chinese girls started working very slowly, as if there were a competition between them to be the last to finish. The prize for coming in first would be to have Louis as the next customer, and neither of them wanted that. So they both attended diligently to detail and went snip-snip-snipping with fine precision and they used plenty of combing and lots of changes of blade sizes and plenty of holding up of the mirror for a look at the back of the head.

By this time Louis was all beard, moustache, straggly hair and eyebrows. The eyebrows arched quizzically, or, if Louis had been fiddling with them, which he did, they pointed up like small devil’s horns. I didn’t think he had had a shave or haircut in six months, maybe longer. Nor had he trimmed his beard in any way. He looked like a wild man, like one of those rough sleepers you feel part sorry for, part afraid of, and part repelled by.

The remains of some ancient dinners were hiding in the moustache. No wonder the Chinese girls were working slowly. If I’d been a Chinese girl, I’d have worked slowly too, or have closed the place early, or simply have said no and have pointed at the door.

But they were too polite, or kind, or resigned, or simply didn’t want to lose the business. Finally, one of the seated customers was done with. The taller Chinese girl – who also appeared to be the older – shook hair from the gown and then invited us to step forwards.

‘She’s ready for you, Louis.’

Louis looked at me in that milky-eyed way he had adopted, and in which fashion he looked at almost everyone. It was a strange look, one of appeal and also of stoical resignation. It took me back half a lifetime, to when we were kids. No, more than half. It was a lifetime. His, at least, and maybe mine too soon – who knows?

‘Louis?’

He stood up and took the beanie hat off, handing it to me along with the blue cooler bag he carried his needed possessions in – things like drugs and paperwork and his mobile phone, which he seemed to have forgotten how to use, and his bank card, the number for which he could not remember.

He sat in the barber’s chair.

‘So what will it be?’ the Chinese girl said. She half looked at Louis, but really she was addressing the question to me, and we all knew it. But Louis was an adult and he still had a brain – well, most of one.

‘What would you like, Louis? How short? General trim? How about the beard? Short but not too short, maybe? That all right?’

He gave me the milky-eyed look and nodded.

‘Short but not too short, please.’

The Chinese girl nodded, and she got to work. If she felt any revulsion or repugnance, she didn’t show it. She knew there was something wrong and that Louis wasn’t firing on all cylinders, but that maybe he had done once. It wasn’t as if he’d always been this way, which would have been a different matter. But it wasn’t like that at all.

She seemed to realise all that, and she clipped and snipped almost with respect and reverence for the old Louis, the Louis as he was, Louis as he had been. Not, in all truth, that he had ever been so different. You wouldn’t have called him dapper or well-groomed at any stage of his career. (If you could call it a career – maybe random trajectory might have been better.)

But she cut away, first with the scissors and then with the electric trimmer. Gradually, Louis emerged from behind the disguise, and then suddenly there he was again, just like he’d been when we’d been punching the daylights out of each other all those years ago. Just older and greyer, that was all. I started to wonder if he hadn’t always had that sad, milky, lost and appealing look in his eyes, as if to say life was just one bewildering mystery, and why didn’t he fit into it, when he could do so many things, and be good at them too. But nobody ever had an answer to that. Nobody, in my experience, has the answer to much along those lines.

‘Eyebrow?’

Louis looked at me again and he raised one of the eyebrows to which the Chinese girl was referring as if to ask my opinion.

‘If you could,’ I said. ‘That would be great.’

It wouldn’t be great. It would just be shorter eyebrows. But that’s the kind of thing you say to people in shops. It’s along the lines of Have a nice day and How are you doing? and Awesome and No worries and No dramas.

Louis settled back and closed his eyes to let the eyebrow work begin.

I wondered if maybe he was developing cataracts, and that possibly accounted for the milky look that was turning to cream. He already had glaucoma. He’d had a lot of ailments. Maybe he hadn’t looked after himself. He’d lived with Bella for fifteen years and Kirstin for seven. She’d moved out ten years ago and he’d spent a solid decade neglecting himself.

The Chinese barber took a comb and trimmers and deftly cut back the mad eyebrows. By the time she’d finished, Louis looked normal and sane. He wasn’t the wild man any more. You even realised that he was almost good-looking. In fact I wondered if he wasn’t better-looking than me and thought that he might be. But then, as any not so good-looking person can tell you, looks aren’t everything.

It took her a while to do it all, and when she was finished, she did the business with the two mirrors 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.

‘What happened, Louis?’

‘I went round to see Terri this afternoon,’ he said.

I felt I ought to know who Terri was, but I’d forgotten.

‘Terri? Who’s she again?’

‘Terri, you know, who was married to Frank.’

‘Ah, Frank. Right.’

I should have known who Frank was too.

‘That I used to work with. The roofing.’

‘Right, yeah.’

I recollected now. Louis had been in business a while with Frank and they fixed roofs together. It all went wrong when Frank acquired a dog and brought it along with him to the sites. It was a traumatised rescue dog and it barked incessantly. The barking drove Louis mad and he threw a spanner at the dog one day, which got Frank mad, and the working partnership didn’t last much longer after that.

Terri had had enough of Frank too, as his drinking had moved from heavy to alcoholic levels. So she divorced him and she bought a small bungalow in a retirement village. She wasn’t so young any more, but who was? And she was still attractive and had the proverbial heart of gold.

‘So why’d you go round to see Terri? Just visiting?’

‘No, she called me about her guttering, asked me if I could fix it. It had come loose. There’s supposed to be some maintenance guy round there for all that, but he’s up to his eyeballs. So I took a ladder and went over with the ute after work.’

Louis had a ute – a utility vehicle, a battered old Nissan van with a flat-bed trailer and a silver aluminium box screwed to the flat-bed, in which you could keep tools, and which you could secure with a padlock.

‘So was that okay?’

Long pause.

‘Yeah. I fixed the gutter and she asked if I’d like to have a cup of tea, so we had some tea and we were sitting there talking, you know, about Frank and what have you—’

‘How is Frank?’

‘He’s in hospital. He’s got diabetes now and something wrong with his liver. He kept coming round and wanting me to go drinking. I’d just have a couple of beers, but that wasn’t enough for him. He’d bring Scotch as well, and when I refused to drink any more, the last time he came round, he lost his temper and we had a row. And I haven’t seen him since.’

‘Ah.’

‘Anyway, I was sitting there with Terri, and I don’t know what got into me or what came over me, but right out of the blue I suddenly said and I don’t know why, I said, Terri, would you like to go to bed with me?’

Silence then, like Louis wanted me to ask a question or needed some prompt to continue. I wanted to sound politely curious but not pruriently nosy.

‘Wow, well, that’s pretty direct, Louis. No kind of preamble then? Just straight out with the main question.’

‘Well, I don’t know what came over me. It just came out.’

It had to have been about seven years since he’d split up with Kirstin. I wondered if he’d been celibate all that time, but that’s not the kind of question you ask your brother.

‘So how did she react? What did she say?’

‘Well—’

I heard a faint but colourful chuckle.

‘Well – she said okay.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Just like that!’

‘Yeah. Just like that!’

‘Were you surprised?’

‘I was shocked at myself for saying it!’

‘Well – well done.’

That was pretty inappropriate, but I didn’t know what else to say right then.

‘Yeah,’ Louis agreed, then went silent again, as if maybe fishing for further queries or compliments.

‘So – eh – how did that go?’

‘Great. And then she asked me to stay to dinner.’

‘Least she could do,’ I said.

‘I mean, I’ve known Terri for years,’ Louis said. ‘And always liked her. But not, you know—’

‘In that way?’

‘No. But just sitting there, well, I don’t know what came over me.’

‘Lust?’ I suggested. But Louis just laughed.

‘I’m going back to see her again next week,’ he said.

‘So it could be a regular thing.’

‘Have to see,’ he said.

I still had the feeling that he would have appreciated a few more questions but I couldn’t think of any. And he never asked me about my sex life. In fact Louis never asked me much about my own life at all. His baseline appeared to be that my life was okay and further enquiries were not necessary and would have been superfluous.

‘Well, I hope it all works out,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ Louis said, and he was sounding a little pleased with himself now, I thought, as if he was the only man in the world to have persuaded a woman into bed, which annoyed me somewhat, as I’d done a bit of that too in my time, in a modest way, but who hasn’t?

We chatted a little while longer and then we hung up, promising to talk again soon.

It was my turn to call and I rang him a couple of weeks later.

‘How’s it going, Louis? How are things with Terri?’

‘Oh, okay. Okay.’

‘Still seeing her?’

‘Oh yes. I go round once a week and help out at the bungalow and do a little decorating or whatever, and then stay for dinner and, you know – do the business.’

‘Do the business?’

‘You know, do the business.’

‘You’ve got such a poetic way with you, Louis.’

‘Well, you know, whatever you want to call it.’

‘So it’s all going fine.’

‘Seems to be.’

‘Good.’

And I was pleased and to quite an extent relieved that Louis had someone else to unload his woes on, someone with a warm and sympathetic and absorbent shoulder on which to cry. I wondered if they’d move in together, he and Terri. But next time he called, things were under stress.

‘Hi, Louis, how’s it going?’

‘Ah – not too bad.’

‘How’s Terri?’

‘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.

3

PLUMBING

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.