The tangy scent of stewed fish was hanging in the air when Primo walked in. He looked toward the open kitchen and saw one of the kitchen hands smiling into a sink overflowing with soapy water.
‘The old ones, they right,’ someone said at his elbow. ‘The food in here is like poison. I tell to you, some of these people can’t even boil the water.’
Primo gave the short attendant who had sidled up to him a quick glance, but walked on in search of his father.
A few hours a week here and there, Primo told himself. A few hours a week, that’s all she asks. You can do it.
Bristling with the desire to turn and leave, Primo held that thought uppermost in his mind as he wound his way through corridors to the recreational space where he expected to find his father.
When Primo walked in, his father saw him approaching and lifted a hand in recognition. Primo was surprised. More and more lately the old man didn’t recognise any of them immediately.
‘So, it’s you,’ his father said.
‘Yeah, it’s me,’ Primo replied and bent to kiss his father on the forehead as his mother asked he do for her sake. His father’s skin was clammy and rough, with calloused scabs, once hidden by a luxurious sweep of jet-black hair.
‘Take me for a walk outside. These old people make me sick.’
Primo nodded feebly and released the brakes of the wheelchair, pulling it away from the table.
‘You’re not going now, are you? We haven’t finished playing,’ a woman said, drawing yet another wooden marble from a cloth sack.
Tuesday.
Bingo.
Primo looked at the numbered mat at his father’s spot on the table. He had placed blue plastic bottle tops on all but three of the numbers. The old man was three numbers short of bingo!
‘You want to finish the game?’ Primo asked.
The old man frowned but said nothing.
‘You don’t want to win?’ the smiling female attendant asked. ‘You are so close. Three more numbers just to get, yes?’
The old man stared back at the young woman as though that was enough to answer all her questions.
‘Okay. You already won once today.’ She smiled thinly and focused her attention back on the game. A moment later she called out the next number. ‘Five! Cinque. Five.’
Primo noted it wasn’t one of the numbers his father needed.
‘He ate all his lunch today,’ the woman Primo knew as Deloras informed him. She always sat opposite his dad at the meals table and at bingo, in a proper chair, always wearing the same pearl necklace. ‘You ate all of the soup, didn’t you?’ she said to the older man. ‘But you left the mash. I don’t think you like mash.’
Primo’s father didn’t answer. He blinked instead, his eyes out of sync.
‘We had apple custard,’ Deloras told anyone who would listen as Primo turned the wheelchair away. ‘Last night we had peaches and ice-cream. Not too much ice-cream though. Just a dollop. Maybe half a spoonful.’
‘Yeah, thanks for that,’ Primo said dismissively.
The woman seemed satisfied with herself and smiled broadly.
‘We have a sing-along today, after bingo,’ she announced, but Primo was already pushing his father toward the exit. ‘You like singing, remember?’
‘No, not today,’ Primo heard another of the residents say loudly. ‘I’m going shopping today. At Myer. My daughter works at Myer. She owns it.’
‘No she doesn’t,’ another voice snapped in reply. ‘You liar.’
There was a muffled grunt of anger and then the sound of weeping.
‘Liar. Liar.’
Primo sighed heavily. There seemed to be an air of stagnant alarm, as though the residents, and perhaps the carers, too, were in a constant state of trepidation.
If not for his mother’s insistence, Primo would have abandoned his tentative visits a long time ago.
Outside, the sun wasn’t as Primo’s father expected.
‘Why didn’t you warn me?’ he grumbled and shielded his eyes. ‘The sun takes out my sight. Too bright.’
‘Wait here and I’ll get your sunglasses. And a hat. Do you need your hat?’
‘No, I don’t wait here. Maybe I go for run and you catch up,’ his father answered deadpan. ‘Yes, I wait here. What you think? Maybe I have a miracle from the God just now, this moment, and I get out of this.’ When he slammed both palms into the armrest of the wheelchair the entire structure rocked from side to side. ‘I wait here. Of course. I wait here.’
‘Do you need a blanket for your legs?’
The older man’s eyes glazed over. He’d get a blanket anyway. Just in case.
Just in case his father got cold. Just in case his father suddenly asked for the blanket.
Just in case.
‘I want to talk to you, Santo,’ the old man started the moment Primo returned. ‘About your mother.’
I’m not Santo, Primo wanted to say, but didn’t. There was no real point to it. His father would just become even more confused if he tried to correct him.
‘Your mother has another man.’
Primo didn’t flinch. He kept a steady pace as he manoeuvred the wheelchair over the rutted footpath. He’d heard this before.
Bambino was parked in the side street to their right, out of sight. Primo steered his father’s wheelchair left.
‘I know who him is, too,’ his father continued. ‘I see them together. They was have the sex.’
Primo felt a dull quaking in his throat. ‘Dad, please.’
‘She not see me. I was too clever for them. I was hide near the fence what is behind the house, and I see them. They do the sex.’
Primo looked down at his father’s ears sticking out on either side of the peaked cap he was wearing. Even as a child he had thought his father’s ears looked odd folding back over themselves.
‘You remember my girlfriend Maddie, right?’ Primo said. ‘Well, she’s going to Europe soon. She might go to Italy too, even though her family’s Irish, like Mum’s. I was thinking maybe I might go too, if I can scrape the money together and stuff. After my exams, you know. I could look up your rellies and Mum’s too, in Ireland. If we went to Ireland, that is.’
If his father had heard, if he had any opinion, Primo didn’t find out. The old man didn’t speak for the rest of the short trip to their regular coffee shop.
Once their orders had arrived Primo said, ‘Mum loves you, Dad. You dishonour her when you say things like you said before. Doesn’t she come see you every day? Doesn’t she wash all your clothes because you don’t like how they wash them at the Home?’
‘Of course she loves me.’ Primo’s father smiled suddenly, stirring his latte with concentration. ‘Why you need tell me such a stupid thing? You think maybe she not love me?’ The old man paused, then added, ‘If you think this, then you not understand you mother. She is good woman.’
Primo smoothed down the pages of the newspaper that lay at his fingertips. It was as though his father’s past was being looted from him in fragments, and soon there would only be a vast dark space of nothing, bearing no resemblance to the life he had lived.
‘You have girlfriend, Primo?’ his father asked, leaning slightly forward and grinning expansively as he lifted the latte to his lips.
Primo swallowed. So, you recognise me now, he thought grimly.
He was the last-born son, the youngest son by twenty-two years to Santo, the first-born son. Primo. Number One. He wasn’t even Number Two son. He was Number Three.
But he was Primo.
Number One.
Primo smiled at the incongruity and reached for his Coke.
‘Yeah, it’s Primo, Papa. Maddie is my girlfriend, Dad, sort of. Maddie. Remember? She’s the pretty one you said looks like that famous Italian actress.’
‘Sophia Loren.’
‘No. The other one. Gina someone-or-other.’
Primo’s father licked the top of his glass. ‘Gina Lollobrigida. The one with the big tits. You girlfriend have the big tits?’
Primo looked past his father at the window of the coffee shop. He caught sight of his own reflection and held it. The back of his father’s head was reflected in the window, the letter U from the café’s name, Urban Vibe, etched on his skull.
‘I got my driver’s licence this morning, Dad,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Got an almost perfect score, too.’ Primo paused and licked his lips before adding, ‘I guess it’ll be okay for me to drive Bambino now and then, eh, Dad? I can finally get rid of Adrian’s old shitty bike, too.’
Across the table his father gazed at Primo blankly, as though he hadn’t heard. Coffee residue clogged the corners of his lips, and Primo noticed a crusty sore in one of his dad’s nostrils.
‘So, what do you think? Can I take Bambino out for a spin?’ When his father ignored him Primo sat forward and touched him lightly on the back of the hand. ‘Dad? It’s okay for me to drive Bambino, right? She just sits gathering dust otherwise. And that can’t be good, right?’
‘You have a bambino?’ his father asked and Primo sighed. It was all getting too hard, trying to keep up the appearance of normalcy. No wonder his mother was exhausted.
You wear Mum down, Primo thought, with a pang of frustration.
A woman pushing a stroller, heavily laden with shopping bags, became jammed behind the old man’s wheelchair.
‘Sorry,’ Primo said and got up to gently move his father’s chair.
‘Why you sorry?’ his father countered. ‘You not responsible for you mother not love me.’
Primo and the woman exchanged an awkward nod. The child in the stroller pumped chubby fingers in the air, grabbing at nothing, content to repeat the gesture again and again.
‘Thanks,’ the woman said under her breath. She took a table two down from them and lifted the child out of the stroller and onto her lap. The child wasted no time grabbing at the menu, dropping it at his mother’s feet.
‘Kids,’ she said to no one in particular.
‘Have them when the time is right,’ Primo’s father called over his shoulder.
Primo didn’t meet the young mother’s eyes. He looked down at the empty glass his father was spinning gingerly in its saucer.
‘Everything in its time,’ the old man said in a whisper. ‘I like to go now. I finished.’ And, as though to emphasise this, he held up the empty glass for Primo, and then for the young mother. ‘See. Is empty.’
The young mum shrugged in Primo’s direction. You don’t know the half of it, Primo wanted to say, but said instead, ‘He has a very firm idea about when to have kids.’
Obviously uncomfortable now, the mother busied herself with the menu.
Primo allowed himself a small smile and swung his father’s wheelchair back toward where they’d come from an hour earlier.
With his iPod plugs firmly in his ears, Primo settled into a steady pace, deliberately targetting the potholes and shards of broken concrete.
‘I always say his wife too much the boss in that house,’ his father said without warning. ‘Adriano not even can go pub for drink after the work. Must come home for look after the little girl so the wife can have rest.’ The old man threw both arms in the air in angry disgust. ‘She home all the bloody day,’ he snorted.
‘Her name’s Stella, Papa,’ Primo said forcefully. ‘Adriano’s wife. Her name is Stella. She works too. From home. And the little girl has a name too. Bethany. Beth. But you know that, don’t you? And you know why Stella kicked him out too, don’t you? Of course you do, eh.’
Primo stopped pushing and stood in front of the wheelchair, pulling the plugs from his ears.
‘You remember all sorts of shit when you want, don’t you?’ he snapped. ‘Why not my girlfriend’s name? Why not that Mum couldn’t possibly have an affair because she spends every minute worrying about you!’
From under the shadow of his cap, Primo’s father chewed his lips, blinking furiously, his hands gripping the armrests, but he said nothing.
‘You’ve switched off, haven’t you?’ Primo said shortly then laughed with his mouth only, and they set off again.
A short time later, settled back in the sitting room in front of the TV, Primo’s father asked for someone to turn down the volume. He wanted to rest.
‘Have a good walk?’ the bingo attendant asked, reaching for the volume control.
Primo didn’t bother answering. The day had turned. There was a solemnity in the regret that lately seemed to wash over him more and more, and which Primo was finding harder and harder to ignore.
Just as Primo turned to leave, the old man said under his breath, but so that Primo couldn’t miss it, ‘Bambino not a toy.’