You're Never The Same

3

3‘That’s another one down to El bloody Nino.’

Vince looked up from the grave at the parched, brown paddocks surrounding the cemetery. Dry riverbeds, empty dams, and failed crops. Joey dead at forty-four. Interred back into that same baked earth. Vince looked up to the heavens—the endless, opalescent, cloudless Wimmera sky, the distant horizon, and the huge and fiery sun. Felt more like hell than heaven.

Uncle Jack loosened his tie, tilted back his hat, and gestured across the fence. ‘Should be flat out harvesting all round the district, by rights.’

Vince surveyed the landscape. This was supposed to be the centre of the Victorian wheat belt. In better days and better years, he and Joey had worked like men at harvest time. Opening and closing gates, shifting the field bins, and bringing food out to their dad as he drove the header up and down the rows, stripping wheat, barley, and the thick yellow carpets of canola. No air-conditioned cabins with their TVs and computers back then. Hard yakka all round. Then the happy drive into town in the truck to the weighbridge, another source of summer employment for the boys as they got older.

‘Was shaping up as a bumper crop this year,’ observed Jack. ‘But the spring rains never came.’

Vince looked down at his father in his wheelchair at the graveside and put his hand on that thin shoulder. Mick Hanrahan’s farming days were long behind him—he could barely control a walking frame these days, let alone a tractor. Vince inspected the puzzled expression on his father’s craggy, weather-beaten face. He had no idea where he was. Home was now the dementia wing of the Chatsworth Nursing Home in far-off South Melbourne. His wife was long gone—breast cancer, fifteen years earlier. Now his youngest son was dead too, laid to rest next to his mother and grandparents. Old Mick’s demeanour was one of bewilderment rather than sorrow, but Vince wondered whether the gravity of the day had penetrated that dense neural fog, even just a little.

‘Three years with no crop,’ Uncle Jack went on. He paused again, in the sparse manner of the men Vince had grown up with, and looked down at the coffin.

‘Young Joseph won’t be the last victim of this drought.’

* * *

The service had been simple and affecting. Mostly family and neighbours. A few words by a generic chaplain at the graveside with Joey’s estranged wife and their children, shocked and sobbing at the front, clutching roses in their hands, ready to drop onto the casket. It was a still day, flies everywhere, and a heavy blanket of oppressive heat surrounded the mourners. Vince had no hat or sunglasses and felt like he was melting inside his suit. There’d been no Requiem Mass. No church ceremony at all. Mum would’ve been devastated. He looked at her grave, adjacent to the freshly dug one.

Jane had organised the burial ceremony. Vince rang her after the gruesome discovery. The conversation had been brief. No, she didn’t want to come out to the farm, and no, she didn’t want a visit from her husband’s siblings. Then she’d gone to ground, not answering her phone and refusing to see any of the Hanrahans. Seemed more angry than sad.

Trisha had done all the arrangements for the wake in her usual role of family organiser.

‘Joe left strict instructions in his will about the funeral,’ she told Vince back at the house as they sat out on the deep front veranda overlooking the bedraggled, once-thriving garden. ‘He had no time for the Catholic Church.’

‘He wasn’t on his Pat Malone there.’

‘That’s the problem. Joe was alone.’ She put down her teacup with a clatter. ‘When were you last up here to see him?’

Vince paused, memories and guilt flooding into him. ‘I used to come up and help him with the harvest. But when the drought started he stopped returning my calls.’ He looked out at the brown earth. ‘I assumed there wasn’t enough crop to strip.’

Trisha turned her tear-stained face to his. Mum’s frown, thought Vince. Bad portent.

‘You could’ve driven that big BMW up to see him, couldn’t you?’

A dagger in the heart. ‘Was a bit busy with the practice, and then since … you know, the s**t hit the fan for me, I …’

Empty words, he knew. Trisha’s look, just like his mum’s, told a thousand of them.

‘Perhaps it wasn’t the drought.’ She looked away and motioned toward the arid surrounds. ‘After you went to uni, Joey knew he had to come home and help Dad. Maybe his heart wasn’t in it.’ She shook her head. ‘He seemed to lose his way.’

‘Is that the sister speaking or the family therapist?’

Trisha turned to face him again, eyes blazing. ‘It was obvious to anyone with a shred of empathy, for God’s sake!’

Vince nodded; he had no answer.

Trisha stood, walked over to the veranda rail and gazed into the dazzling stillness. After a few minutes’ silence, she sat down again, dried her eyes and took a deep, slow breath. ‘Your crew not here?’

Another dagger. ‘The girls have important VCE summer school subjects.’ He paused. ‘So I’m told.’ He raised his hands. ‘They hardly knew Joey.’

She scoffed. ‘And whose fault is that?’

Vince shrugged. ‘Mine, I guess.’

‘And Lydia?’

‘OS. Ivan had a conference in Singapore and she couldn’t get back in time.’

‘Fair enough.’

Trisha headed for the front door. ‘I’d better see to Dad and help Aunty Marg with the sandwiches. You should get off your bum and give Uncle Jack a hand with the drinks. That’s your forte, isn’t it?’

She glanced back over her shoulder. ‘Joey really looked up to you, you know.’

Coup de grâce.

* * *

‘Uncle Joe would’ve enjoyed this, mate,’ Paddy said as he booted a big torpedo punt down to the trio of shouting boys at the bottom of the paddock, wrestling and rolling in the brown dust.

It was Sunday, and Trisha had gone into town for mass—‘Still hanging in, just’—and Vince was having a kick of the footy at the front of the house with her husband Paddy and their three wild lads. They used the two poplars near the dam as goal posts, just like he and Joey used to do all those years ago. Except the dam had water in it back then. Vince looked around. And there used to be grass underfoot.

Paddy, Trisha, and their brood lived in a terraced cottage in Brunswick. Trisha worked as a family therapist at the nearby community health centre. Vince envied their devotion to each other and their close family unit. Me and Lids and the girls started out that way, he reflected. What the hell happened?

‘Joey told me that you and him used to play kick-to-kick out here all the time when you were little tackers.’

Paddy was tall and wiry and always smiling. He had a ponytail, a sleeve of tats, and an earring, and he and Vince had gotten on well right from the start. When Trisha brought her new boyfriend up to the farm that first Christmas, Vince was just off to uni and Joey was still at school. Paddy, a chippie by trade, had helped with the harvest and replaced a few worn weatherboards on the house.

‘Wild-looking bugger,’ their father had said. ‘Decent enough young bloke all the same.’

Vince jerked himself back to the present. ‘Too right, we did,’ he answered. ‘The old man used to roost it down to us and we’d fly for a specky. I was always bigger, but Joey would fight and fight for that ball. He’d never give up.’ Vince’s heart started pounding and his chest tightened. Too right. Joey would never give up.

Detectives from the Ballarat CIB and their forensic examiners had spent most of Friday in that old wooden van, concluded that the cause of death was suicide, and closed the case.

‘I think I’ll go inside for a spell, Paddy. Bit out of condition.’

* * *

Trisha had volunteered to clean up the house and go into Horsham the next day to see Joey’s solicitor. Vince had an early dinner, said his goodbyes, and headed south again. It was a sad farewell too, even for a renowned emotional cripple like himself. With Joey gone and the end of the line of three generations of the family on that land, it was gut-wrenching to drive away from Clonmel, maybe for the last time.

‘Lucky the old man’s away with the fairies,’ he said to the long, straight bitumen strip ahead. ‘Joey in the ground and no one running the farm—it would’ve killed him.’

Vince drove on through the small Wimmera towns. He knew the road well. Every year after harvest, Mick and Mary would pack up the family and head down to Port Fairy. They rented the same small fibro near the caravan park on Griffiths Street each summer. ‘Just a change of sink,’ Mary would say as she wrangled the children while her husband talked farming and racing in the front bar of the Star of the West Hotel. The boys would play cricket at low tide on the East Beach and assign Mary and Trisha to positions in the outfield amongst the shallows. Little Joey was full of mischief and spirit in those days. Appealed after each delivery, swung the bat like Adam Gilchrist, chased every ball …

As he slowed approaching Ararat, Vince noticed a salty taste in his mouth and realised his cheeks were wet with tears. Trisha’s words after the funeral had hit their mark. The last time he had been up to see his brother had been well over a year ago, a few months after he’d been banished to Warrnambool …

‘Joey’s battling,’ Trisha had said on the phone. ‘Jane and the kids have been spending more and more time staying with her mum in Horsham.’

Vince had just been smashed by both Lydia and the Medical Board and sent to Coventry. I’m battling too, he’d thought, but he reckoned there was a bit of schadenfreude at work there.

‘He’s become more reclusive and less communicative,’ she went on, ‘and sounds like he’s hitting the bottle.’ She paused. ‘Alcohol and marriage breakdown—what is it with you Hanrahan boys?’

‘Okay, Trish, I’ll go up and see him,’ he replied, letting the last comment go through to the keeper. ‘But it’ll be like the blind leading the blind.’

So Vince had driven up for a visit. It soon became apparent that each brother was immersed in his own cocoon of existential suffering. On the first night, Joey put away half a dozen VBs and Vince OD’d on diet Coke and cups of tea, amongst the sporadic conversation about sport. On the Saturday evening after a counter meal at the local pub, he decided to chance his arm.

‘So, Joey, what’s going on?’

Long pause. Joey stared steadily at his glass. ‘How do you mean?’

He looked up, lips compressed in a slant and one eyebrow raised. A familiar expression. Joey had restless brown eyes, a slender but strong body, and was ‘tough as a Mallee root’, as old Mick used to say. Vince noticed that his little brother’s black curly mop was thinning out and turning silver at the temples.

‘I don’t see Jane and the kids around the place.’

Joey laughed. ‘Too isolated. So I hear.’ He pointed out the pub window. ‘Been a bit dry too, you might’ve noticed.’

‘Must be tough on the financial front.’ Vince pulled out his cheque-book. ‘I’m happy to help you out.’

‘You can stick that where the sun don’t shine.’ Joey picked up his pot, gulped it down, and slammed it back on the table.

‘Fair enough,’ Vince said after a pause. Come this far. ‘You seem to be giving the grog a nudge. What about seeing a counsellor?’

Joey laughed again, as before—no smile. ‘s**t! Once I start taking advice from you, I might as bloody well give the whole game away.’ He got up. ‘Time to hit the sack. Best you make an early start tomorrow. Bit hot and dusty for big-shot doctors up here.’

Vince had rung Joey once or twice since then, but found he wasn’t up for chitchat so he’d stopped bothering. He’d emailed him that year to arrange to meet down at the MCG for their usual date at the AFL grand final, but received no response. Surprising, he’d thought; the Cats were favourites and Joey was a Geelong fan like him. Even his dogs were named after their players.

Vince had spent the following year trying to save his own professional and personal futures—a temporary reprieve with the first and facing a straight-sets loss with the second. Just keeping his head above water. No time to worry about his little brother.