The Face

My father Dan was a travelling salesman. Big fella. Tall, barrel chest, wide shoulders, narrow waist. A mouth full of perfect teeth that invariably shone from his wide smile. He was softly spoken, which had the effect of drawing you in, close, so as not to miss anything he said because, as everybody agreed, he was worth listening to.

When he spoke to you, he would bend down, cock his head and hit you between the eyes with his grin. He had dark, short, curly hair and large brown eyes that held just enough sadness, so as to render him entirely trustworthy. At age 40 he had just the hint of a hump on his back, which unexpectedly, served to make him look even more powerful. Perhaps he got it from all that bending and cocking. Or maybe it was from hauling and lifting heavy farm machinery. Which is what he sold.

He served two country districts approximately 4 hours apart, both on the river. Echuca north of Melbourne and Mildura up in the far Northwest. We saw my father for only 2 weeks each month, whilst he was at home in Echuca, and little enough then it must be said.

Six days a week he was gone before dawn and home for a late dinner after dark. As a child I knew he was home because he would come into our room and ruffle our hair, my younger brother and I, before gently closing the door. I don’t know. It seemed enough.

I suppose my father’s hump would have grown more pronounced as he aged. But we were denied the opportunity to find out. My father was killed in a highway accident when a semi-trailer jackknifed on a wet narrow road and took the cabin off his ute along with his head and torso. He was only a few months away from turning 50.

My brother called me with the news, his voice reaching and sobbing. Standing by the community phone in the common room of the university halls of residence, I struggled to make out what he was saying, Pink Floyd was wailing from the record player. ‘So, so you think you can tell, Heaven from Hell, blue skies from pain.’

Two days after my Father’s funeral. Here I am sitting on the lounge, a little red eyed, removing photographs from a large cork board, one by one, the photographs that chronicled my father’s life.

The photograph in my hand has caught my attention. The photo is familiar, for the last 10 years it has sat in a Two Dollar Shop frame on the top shelf of the bookcase in my father’s small home-office. I remember the day it was taken. My grandfather’s 70th birthday, a family gathering at Nagambie by the lake. Warm spring weather, my father and his brothers cooking the bbq. A chaotic afternoon of kick to kick that finished with Johnno going to hire a pedal-boat to retrieve the footy from the lake.

I run my finger along the line of little-uns on the grass in the front row, then uncles and aunts seated then up to the teenage cousins standing in the back row. Nanna had insisted that the photo be taken as soon as everyone had arrived, whilst we cousins presented an approximation of neatness.

My finger pauses at the left side, at my own idiot grin, too many teeth for my mouth with an unruly mop of brown hair just short of my collar. I’m standing to the left in the back row, tall for 15, but even so I remember I had to stand on tip toes to see over Uncle Barry’s shoulder.

I continue along the row, Gazza, Blue, Johnno, Jenny. Unbidden comes a memory of Jenny at 17, skiing in a bikini at Eildon. Next is Dave-o and last on the right is…

Me.

Fuck. What. Wait!

I place the photo carefully on the couch beside me, rub my eyes, then pick it up again. My face is still there, on the right and also in the left. Same idiot grin, same mop of hair. The only thing that catches my eye is the corner of a wide collar. It’s purple. The other me, the one on the left has a blue shirt. Blue’s my colour. Never purple! Jesus, only poofs wore purple in Echuka in 1968.

Mum is in bed with ’one of her heads’, she’s been there since getting the news of my father’s death. She only got out of bed for the funeral really. I barge into the darkened room a bit more abruptly than I intended, and she starts in surprise. ‘Who's that?’

‘It’s me mum. Ben.’

‘Where’s Jackie?’ Her question prickled. Jack is her favourite.

‘He’s working today mum.’

‘Oh.’ She sounded disappointed.

‘Mum, can I ask you about this photo?’

‘Not now please love. I’ve got one of my heads.’

‘Just quickly mum.’ And I turn on her bedside lamp. ‘See, at Grandfather’s 70th. Who’s that?’

She squints. ‘It’s you love.’ She answers, surprise in her tone that I don’t recognise myself.

‘Then who’s this?’ I ask pointing to my left self.

Her eyes widen and she glances quickly between the faces. Then at me. Her lip trembles and she closes her eyes.

Finally she says. ‘Oh, I remember.’ She taps the right hand boy. ‘That’s your second cousin. Your Grandfathers, brothers, grandson. Can’t recall his name we don’t see them much. Ever really. Now turn off the light please.’

And she closes her eyes dismissing me.

An hour later I’m still sitting on the couch holding the photo, I’ve no recollection of a distant cousin turning up, and I think I would remember a doppelgänger. I’ve just got off the phone to Jenny. Besides haunting my juvenile imagination, she is also the family memory bank. Nope, no extra distant mysterious cousins.

‘I would remember someone as goofy looking as you Benny.’ She finished with a laugh and hung up. Then she rang back and told me she was still sad about Uncle Dan, and sorry for laughing.

I think my mother lied to me.

In the kitchen the third drawer down, beneath the cutlery, sits the handy drawer. It’s hard to find anything in it of course, but eventually, after being pricked by the sweetcorn prongs, my fingers discover the magnifying glass.

Looking closely I can tell it isn’t me, similar, but not me. Also, there is something not quite right about the face in the photo. It doesn’t quite match the rest of the faces. It’s the sunlight. Then I see it. The face is lit from the right, the rest of us are lit from the left. As I look more closely with the magnifying glass I can see the faintest evidence of a neatly cut paper-edge across the top of the floppy hair.

Someone has added this face to the picture by cutting and pasting, and re-photographing. It could only have been my father! But I guess he wasn’t going to tell me anything now.

Then it occurs to me, maybe he is telling me something now. Why not? This could be a special message meant for me. Couldn’t it? I would be the only one who would notice, or care. He wanted me to know that there was someone out there who looked just, like, me.

‘Ralf! Come here! COME HERE! RAAALF!’ Someone is screaming at their dog from the park at the end of our street and it has brought me out of my trance. A memory at the edge of my mind of a pre-season practice match. Under 14’s? Under 15’s? Banger Baxter giving me a shove because he’d passed the footy to the opposition full forward. Who, so he claimed, looked like me and sounded like me. And so we were both c—nts apparently. I never got a good look at the other kid because Banger’s shove caused me to fall and sprain my wrist, and I was taken to the hospital for an X-ray.

What else? My father wasn’t at the match, but he picked me up from hospital. What else? Where was the match? Some really shitty muddy oval, nothing unusual there. But the hospital. It wasn’t Echuca. It was outside our zone. Mildura? It was coming back. A long bus ride to the game, Banger brown-eyeing passing cars until the coach threatened to kick him so hard in the nuts he would choke to death on them.

Then a long drive home with my father, stopping for a rare treat, a burger in Swan Hill. It almost made the sprained wrist worth it.

Mildura then.

I left a note on the kitchen bench for my brother. ‘Heading to Mildura for the night. See you tomorrow.’  I grabbed the keys to my rusty blue Cortina and left.

Four hours later, it’s dark and crisp-cold. I should have grabbed a jacket. Pulling slowly into Mildura the lights of an oval, glow above the low-rise commercial buildings. It’s Thursday night. Footy practice night. I turn into Twelfth Street, a few blocks and I pull into the crowded club car park. It’s after 7 and the seniors are running laps. 6 young blokes in a cluster have almost lapped two old stagers, when they think better of it and slow down.

I head for the club rooms.

I target grandma-aged women, I figure they might be more likely to care. The second one I ask, points to a woman counting frozen Four n’ Twenty pies in a large chest freezer. I wait for her to finish writing her tally, excitement building in my chest, and I show her the photo.

‘Christ, no doubting paternity in your mob.’ she observes. ‘Who now?’ She asks, and I pull out the magnifying glass.

She looks at the photo, then at me, then at the photo again. ‘Well if it ain’t you, it’s gotta be Billy Rogers.’

I jerk back, and she notices, and gives me a searching look. Then she says. ‘Annie’s Bed n Breakfast, Seventh street.’ I thank her and leave the rooms, stumbling down the concrete steps because I’m not watching where I’m going.

Rogers. My mum’s maiden name.

Annie’s Bed n Breakfast is a Victorian double fronted, white with ornate wrought iron, picket fence and a sign hanging from chains out over the footpath. There are pruned rose bushes in the garden, but the lawn is a little long. I hesitate at the gate, nerves getting the better of me. But my hand resting on the gate has jangled a small bell. So I open it and walk up the steps to the door. There is one of those twist bells mounted in a metal rose in the center of the door so I twist it and hear the bring bring. A light comes on inside and then outside lighting the porch. Footsteps. A woman’s, the door opens. My mother stands frozen with her hand on the knob. Mouth open. Eyes wide.

It’s not my mother. But a softer version with a few more lines around her mouth, grey roots untouched, glasses, a floral-patterned frock covered at the front by a plain aqua apron.

She touches her mouth with her left hand, her face full of wonder. ‘My boy, you’ve come home.’ She whispers, as she steps forward and touches my face, then pulls me forward so she can rest her cheek on my chest.

My first thought is that this woman has mistaken me for her son Billy. But before I can move, my doppelgänger steps into the hallway. A question on his lips, now forgotten. He stares, then I think he is falling, but he catches himself on a small dresser, toppling a porcelain dog onto the polished floorboards. The noise causes the woman to start, and she turns around, but she has my shirt front gripped in her right hand. Eventually Billy finds his voice. ‘You better come-in then mate. I’m Billy.’

‘I’m Ben.’ I reply.

The woman leads us into the kitchen. There is a round table a four-seater but only three wooden chairs with floral cushions. An electric stove is built into the original hearth. On the mantelpiece there are more porcelain dogs, some with hats, cigars and pool cues. A gold clock in a glass dome. And a picture of my father. I stare at it for a moment, then I turn to Billy and say, ‘Who’s that?’

‘My uncle Dan.’ He answers. ‘It was my Uncle Dan.’ He murmurs wet eyed.

The woman glances at her shoes, looks at me, looks at Billy, smiles and then smothers it and takes a deep breath.

‘Put the kettle on will you love.’ She says in a voice, so like my mother’s that I start toward the kettle. She notices and puts her hand gently to her mouth again.

‘Weak black?’ Billy askes without turning, as he lifts cups from hooks and spoons tea into a pot.

‘Yes.’ I answer.

When we are all seated the woman looks at me and says. ‘My name is Annie. Annie Rogers.’ Then she looks at Billy. ‘There’s no easy way to do this. So let me tell you a story.’

‘Once upon a time there was a man named Dan, married to a woman named Shirly.’

My parents, I realise, but I don’t interrupt her.

‘They had been married for 3 years and trying desperately to have a child but without any success.’

What about me? I think. But I don’t interrupt her.

‘Eventually they approached Shirly’s twin sister, Annie, to ask of her the impossible. To have a child by Dan, so that they could adopt. Annie, was horrified at first, but the desperate young couple prevailed, and Annie fell pregnant quickly.’ She is focussing on a sauce stain on the tablecloth.

‘The nine months passed without physical trouble, but Annie had growing doubts about giving up the expected baby. Dan and Shirly stayed with Annie for the last two weeks of the pregnancy and did all they could to make her comfortable. But she wasn’t comfortable. A little after midnight on the 21st October 1953 Annie went into labour.’

My birthday. I think. But I can’t possibly interrupt her.

‘Dan went and fetched the midwife and 3 hours later a little boy was born. And then unexpectedly a few minutes later, another little boy was born.’

I stare at Billy. My mouth open like a cod fish.

‘Dan was always a smooth talker, and he convinced the midwife to just sign and date the birth certificates, ensuring her, that he would complete the details later. Then Shirly and Dan drove off, with one of the certificates and one of the baby boys.’