Fall On Me: Extract
As he has done for as long as he can remember, which is too long, he knows that better than anyone, Lou Bard wakes alone at dawn. The clock-radio gives him a crackly blast of news headlines, a lead story about some federal politician back-flipping left, right and centre – again. He’s too groggy from sleeping to grasp the actual issue, although he’s sure that doesn’t matter in the slightest, so he gets himself down the hall to the shower. It’s the first day in June and as if wanting to celebrate the onset of winter the house is cold on his skin; it’s even cold in his eyes. Lou is grateful for the Tastic he installed last month: there’s heat on the top of his head, on his face and shoulders. He smiles. Today will be a good day. He has every reason to believe that.
As he waits for the shower to warm up he takes advantage of the ceiling heat and checks himself in the mirror. His fortieth birthday is still two years away but he’s noticing more and more that age is being less and less kind to him. If he doesn’t suck in his stomach he’d have a belly, it wouldn’t be too large or that obvious, but it’d be a belly none-the-less. His chest still looks strong, even if it’s losing some definition around the edges, and he has a full head of hair, although if he misses a day’s shave he has grey stubble on his chin.
He slips out of the T-shirt he goes to bed in – an old Hawthorn number that someone or other gave him for Christmas one year, probably a housemate who didn’t know better – and the now misshapen grey gym shorts from all those years ago when he actually went to the gym. At last he gets beneath the water. Watching his face in the little round mirror that balances precariously in the shower tidy, he gets to shaving, going slowly, deliberately. After all these years Lou hasn’t tired of this act of maleness; he likes the feel of his skin when he’s smooth and patted dry.
He thinks about the day ahead. It’s Monday. Except it’s not any old Monday. After a year’s worth of planning and designing and purchasing and building and detailing and finishing, the shop is ready. The shop – his shop, Lou’s – is reborn. There’s a new pitch-black awning at the front to expand his square-metreage by six tables, two along the window and four adjacent the gutter. He’s painted the entire facade the deepest red he could find so that in the late afternoon and in the shade of the plane trees along the street it looks almost as black as the awning. (Black, he’s thought more than once, is the colour of a confident shop.) Also completed is the painting of the inner trim, in ‘Long Autumn’, which in any other person’s language is burnt orange. He did the paint-job himself, right through the previous Saturday night and into Sunday morning so the place would be dry and stink-free by Monday.
As he painted he’d listened to his REM albums on CD, mostly Eponymous, his favourite. Lou has only three important elements to his life: his son Luke; the shop, which customers call ‘Lou’s café’; and the old worker’s cottage in Wellman Street, rented as it may be, but it’s still his and Luke’s home, the only home they’ve ever had. But a fourth – there are days when it’s a close fourth – is his REM collection on vinyl, which he sometimes plays endlessly on repeat in the shop because three years ago he’d found in a second-hand store a record-player from the seventies that could do this. He bought the record-player because it reminded him of his parents who for the last seventeen years have escaped to the mainland never to return, and the player still reminds him of them, not that he misses them, he’s too old for that, but he does like thinking of his mother and father, the solidness of the history they gave him.
At the beginning of the year Lou installed a professional kitchen in the shop, put in new fittings throughout the place. It took months to make a decision about the furniture, which in the end was no real decision at all: despite everything he’s done to the place, making it new, or at least newish, he chose to keep the motley collection of timber tables and chairs. No two chairs are the same, and some don’t sit evenly on the floor, but after thirteen years all this is too much a part of the place to jettison. Plus he likes the hickedly-pickedly mismatch – it reminds him of himself, of his life.
Yesterday a sign-writer came around to do the new sign in the window. LOU’S. Staking a claim, making it as clear as day. LOU’S, in big two-foot-high silver letters in a grand half-arc, which is the opposite of the first-floor windows, which, because of old age, have slumped in the middle so the top half of the building looks like it’s smiling, or it’s a bit pissed.
And now Lou Bard is smiling, and it feels like it’s he who could be a bit pissed.
Thirteen years – yes, this is the reason why he’s done all this work. The shop has reached its teens. How good it will be to go to work today, to see the new shop, the new Lou’s, the new me, he thinks, huh!
As he lets this happy thought linger, he feels the warmth of the Tastic charging over the top of the shower curtain and, for the first time in such a long while, he feels his crotch begin to stir. He’s never forgotten how his body could do this – it had, after all, been doing it all its life – but in the last year at least these moments have been getting few and far between, to the point where he can’t remember the last time he woke with that welcome morning stiffness. At the end of last year, Lou even dragged himself off to the doctor, who examined his ‘undercarriage’ before saying that ‘as dire as it may sound, old Lou, you’re just starting to get a bit long in the tooth, as it were’. But now there’s movement at the station. Just a bit, a hint of what had once been.
Lou doesn’t want to push his luck so he leaves his crotch alone, turns off the water and gets dry. He can’t help taking a quick break from the drying to check himself in the mirror again, his face mostly, the cleanly shaved skin. He doesn’t have to touch it, he knows how smooth it’ll be. He smiles some more. The shop’s turned thirteen and I’m finding a bit of horn, he thinks. He shakes his head, how ridiculous he’s being, how teenage. He wraps the towel around his torso, and, making sure all is safe and secure, walks back up the hall to his bedroom.
When dressed, he opens the bedroom blinds. A hint of pinkness is forming at the base of the sky over West Launceston. He wishes he could bellow out a great cry of happiness. But he can’t. Luke’s still asleep, as he’ll be for the next two hours, as is Anna Denman, their current housemate.
‘New shop,’ he says. ‘Here I come.’