Happy Birthday

I got to Tom’s a just at midnight, the moon hanging low, sinking below the range. The turn-off was where it always was, past the dead stringybark and the hand-painted sign for eggs nobody had sold in years. I had meant to be there by dinner. I remembered the bend before the bridge, the guardrail bright in my lights, and then I remembered gravel under the tyres. Long drives did that. Some other part of you took over the middle and handed back the ending. The four-hour drive was gone. I tried to recall any part of it. Nothing. I shrugged it off and walked up the drive.

Tom opened the front door before I reached the verandah. He had a tea towel over one shoulder, the way Dad had always worn it. He had gone grey since I’d seen him, and he stooped a little more.

‘You’re early,’ he said.

‘Am I?’

‘No. Come in.’

He held the screen door open a long time. I went past him and he flinched, like a man standing in a draught. We were never huggers. I took the hint and kept my hands in my pockets.

The house was colder than I remembered. The old oil heater was on, but it did little to warm the weatherboard house. Marnie was in the kitchen, wiping the bench. I said hello. She put the rag down, said her head was bad, and went up the hall without turning around. She and I had never got on. I put it down to the wedding. Tom’s kid brother, taking the stage for the speeches, I’d had too much to drink. My jokes had landed flat, the guests were as quiet as the dead, and then, tripping over my words, I’d called her Stacy, Tom’s previous girlfriend, not once but twice.

The table had the remnants of dinner. Plates with the detritus of a meal, and used wine glasses stained the colour of blood. In the middle sat a half eaten supermarket cake, the icing sagging, a candle lit and now extinguished. ‘I ate on the way,’ I lied, before he could produced some left-overs. I couldn’t eat. Whatever appetite I’d had was somewhere back on the road.

‘You were always a hungry kid, you’d eat at the neighbours and then come home and eat again.’

‘Used to be.’

He sat down himself down on the far side of table. ‘Used to be.’

It was a strange thing, talking with Tom then. He told me something, I answered, and he waited. Then he went on as if my answer had arrived late, and what he said fitted something I’d said an hour before. It was like trying to take a mobile call out in the paddocks, the signal nothing more than a rumour. Twice he stopped mid-sentence and looked at the chair a little to the left of the one I was in, as though I had shifted when he wasn’t watching.

He told me about the roof, which had been leaking along the south pitch. He told me about a cousin’s divorce and a dog that had died in the spring. I asked how old the dog was and he said fourteen, to the empty side of the table, minutes later.

At some point he stood and started to clear the table. It was late.

‘You can have your old room. It’s made up.’ His voice was clipped.

‘I always have my old room.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know you do.’

The room was at the back, off the verandah, with its own door to the yard. Dad had put that in so we wouldn’t track mud through the house. The bed was made, the sheets turned down, and somebody had put a thin striped candle in a jar on the dresser, the sort you find in a birthday packet. Beside it was a photo of me at the pier down at Geelong, squinting, with an ice cream going soft in my hand. A card was propped against the frame, stiff and cream-coloured with a printed line of type across it. I picked it up to read it and the words wouldn’t stay. It was like that at night in that house. The stove clock had the same trouble, and so did the calendar by the phone. The numbers shuffled when I looked straight at them.

My boots were by the door. The left one was split at the toe. Those boots had been on so many adventures, beaten and worn. Oddly, someone had polished them. I stood and looked at them for a while, and I felt the way you do when you find a thing you’d given up on in a coat pocket, glad and a little robbed.

I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a good sleep, but that night I put it down to the drive. I lay on top of the blanket and listened to the house and the life outside. The old house creaked as the temperature changed. The cicadas keened from the bushes, rising and falling in a rhythm you could find if you listened for it. Maybe 2am, I heard Tom come down the hall in his socks. He stopped at my door and stood there. I sat up and said his name.

He put his forehead against the wood. I could hear him breathing on the other side, long and then short, as if he were trying to get something off his chest.

‘I’m going to bed,’ he said at last. ‘It’s late, mate.’

‘I’m up,’ I said. ‘Come in if you want to talk.’

He did not come in. After a long gap he said, ‘You said that last year.’

‘Said what?’

‘Come in if you want to talk.’ He laughed, and it came apart in the middle. ‘You always have the same things to say. I’ve got them by heart.’

I heard him go down the verandah and out to the gate, and then I heard nothing. The gate was always propped open with a brick, and Tom always left the porch light on.

I got up and went to the window. The verandah light fell across him in a yellow slab and he stood at the edge of it facing the road. The road was empty. It was always empty out here. He had his hand on the rail, his elbow at an angle that was Dad’s exactly. I had no idea what he was doing there.

I went to the door to ask him what was up, why he left the gate open when I’d already arrived. I put my hand on the door and pushed. It didn’t move. I assumed a damp, swollen frame. Maybe Tom and I could fix it in the morning.

So I stood at the glass. After a long time Tom took his hand off the rail and turned around. He looked straight at the window, at the place where I was standing, and for a second I thought he had finally seen me. His face held very still.

Before he went back into the main house he walked past my door. He almost didn’t stop. Then he turned, and I heard his forehead come to rest against the wood. ‘Fuck, mate. Eleven years,’ he said, and his voice cracked. ‘I miss you. Happy birthday. I’ll leave the light on. I’ll leave it on every night. You come as often as you like. Do you hear me? I’ll keep the gate open.’

He wiped his face on his sleeve and went back up the verandah. Behind him the porch light burned on over the open gate and the empty road, and I stayed at the window and watched it.