Finding What Was Lost

Artwork by Charlie Robertson

Imagination is such a funny thing. When we are young, we fantasise about sailing around the world on a rollicking adventure. Then we hit our twenties: the annoyance of a career paves the way for leery weekends, and we cannot envision life could be better than booze, casual lovers and football. And when we reach old age, we imagine what life would have been like if our last partner – the one we shared twenty, thirty, forty years of life with – had lived another ten. 

Harry figured the life he imagined as a young boy existed and awaited him. But a wrong turn here, a bad decision there, and that existence wisped away like smoke from a cigarette. Life became a battle of chasing that nurtured vision, forever dooming Harry to a reality of dissatisfaction. Harry’s mind could not perceive how it could have been better, but dwelt on the shittiness of what is. He imagined what it was all worth. 

It was a conscious choice for Harry to stop chasing the carrot dangling from the end of the stick hanging in front of his nose. It coincided with the breakdown of his marriage. 

Now, Harry sits on his dirty couch in this tiny one-bedroom apartment, and, with clarity, he sees the mistakes, the wrong turns, the anger and the aggression that all led him down the wrong path. How the sum total of those moments, those choices, made him the man he is today, and gave him the life he believes he deserves. 

In my heart and mind, I have lost much more: the love of my child, the respect of a good woman, and a job that paid the bills and gave me some sense of worth in this world. I exist on handouts and subsist on government welfare payments. 

As he celebrates his forty-second birthday alone, Harry wonders if he could have imagined that his life would turn out like this. Would he envision this for his worst enemy? He never imagined finding and subsequently losing a family through his inadequacies as a man and a husband. 

The bottle in his hand has warmed, but he continues to drink from it. Waste not, want not, as they say. So, he sips and savours the bitterness of the beer, expecting the bitterness of the tears he has caused to have a similar taste. It does not make him happy, but it does make him drunk. 

And being drunk helps with the clarity. That, or it means he cannot think enough to invent a better life for himself. The television blares in the background, playing rugby. It does not matter which sport it is as long as it is loud. Rugby works best – the last remaining gladiatorial battle watched by many under the thin guise of sport. Blood, brutality and broken bodies. The fans scream at each try and every incorrect call by the referee. 

Chuckling to the flies on the wall, he remembers that he once wanted to play, to grow up and be one of the best in the game. To become a legend. To have thousands of fans screaming his name as he scores after trouncing the length of the field. But he grew into a weedy, short man who started to go bald in his early twenties. Who, by thirty, had no hair, but a big beard to compensate and a stomach that would outdo Santa Claus. 

Sweat dribbles down his forehead and into his eyes. A hand wipes away the dampness as he looks around this shithole unit to see if the windows are open. All of them are, but this summer has been hotter than hell, and today there is no whiff of a breeze. The humidity amplifies between the four walls that make up Harry’s living arrangements. 

‘Hey, Harry, you there?’ 

It is Mike from next door. Another broken man from a broken home who is happy to blame the world rather than himself for his situation. He is happy, so Harry supposes it works for him. 

‘Harry, buddy, you there?’ Harry cannot hide from him. Mike would hear the TV and see the windows open.  

In this run-down suburb, you do not open the windows even if you have nothing to steal. If thieves find nothing when they ‘visit’, they will torch the place instead. 

The blinds crack open as Mike inserts his head through the window next to the front door. 

‘Harry, I’ve got porn,’ he shakes a DVD case, ‘and a box of stubbies.’ His other arm peels up to reveal a yellow box. 

Porn is not really Harry’s thing. His dick does not get much attention from the ladies, and Harry fools himself that he likes it that way. Even in his prime, his little man was not a crowd favourite. He got some irregularly but nothing to set the record books alight. Now, it just sits there. 

His father used to say: ‘If you want to play with my thing, it gotta pull my string.’ Even if Harry’s had string on it, it would not do much. It never did much when he was active, and it usually failed to please. He heard that often enough. Easier to stop fighting a losing battle. 

Harry misses his dad. He is not dead, but he wishes he was. You see, something happened to his father sometime around his fiftieth birthday. Harry and his mother lost him. When Harry goes to visit, he does not see his dad in that husk of bone and skin sitting on the couch. Doctors said he only had months to live, but that was years ago. Mum may have had a life if he went when the doctors said, but now her sole purpose is to look after him. That means wiping drool off his chin and shit off his arse. If that happens to me, shoot me. 

‘Harry! Fuck, man, you in there?’ 

Mike is into porn. He thinks if his last wife watched some with him, it may have saved their marriage. It is hard to keep a straight face when he rolls out that theory. Mike calls himself a ‘ladies’ man’. He gets with the ‘chickies’ whenever he can, he claims. He is not a good-looking man, but he has money, so maybe that is enough to persuade them to join him for a night of carnal pleasure. If you believe the stories at the local pub, there is a trail of broken hearts chasing Mike around, trying to get him to settle down with them. 

Beer, though – that is a different story. Free beer tastes better than any beer you buy yourself. Even XXXX. 

‘Get yourself in here and crack a couple open. The Storm are kicking our arse, but I want to see the end of the match.’ Harry hopes Mike buys it because the second half has only started. In thirty minutes and a few beers, Harry is sure Mike will have forgotten about the DVD. Besides, this is the last game of the round, and Matty Johns will be on after it. So, they will have a good laugh at his antics. 

‘Yeah, alright.’ The door swings open on rusty hinges. Slam, and he is in. Thump, thump, thud. Two steps in, and he drops the box of beer to the ground. Another rusty door: this time the fridge, and he loads it up. 

‘Here, get this into ya.’ Everything that comes out of Mike’s mouth sounds crude – a double entendre unrealised that would have no happy ending. 

Harry downs the last of his warm beer as Mike shoves a frosty can into his hand. The simple pleasure of the icy can brings relief. A quick wipe over his forehead to disperse the coldness brings derision from the other man. 

‘Fuck, it’s not a wet wipe, ya bastard.’ Mike laughs before sculling most of his can. On cue, he rips out a burp that peels the remaining paint off the walls. ‘Nothing like a coldie to take the edge off the day.’ 

The game goes on, and the Parramatta Eels’ losing streak continues. The cans stack up, and their mouths loosen. Mike blathers about the girl last night – ‘A real tiger in the sack, if ya get my meaning’ – and the commentators drone on about the team’s bad form. Harry tries to compete with mundane dalliance stories, but they feature none of the ribaldries Mike has in excess, so Harry lets him talk – a voyeur on this man’s life and wondering why he could not have the same. 

Noise: that is all it becomes. A noise that carries Harry away into a blissful state of unawareness, lost between drunkenness and this life. Eventually, Mike stops talking, and Harry notices. 

‘Hey, is that your phone?’ 

Through the head haze, Harry listens and pinpoints the direction the sound is coming from. Weaving his hand through the couch cushions, Harry finds the trilling mechanical device. Hitting the green button on the screen, he lifts it to his ear. 

‘Harold, are you there?’ 

‘Hi, Ma...’ 

‘Harold, are you there? This is your mother.’ 

‘Yes, Ma, I know...’ 

‘Harold, this is your mother speaking.’ Every conversation with his mother starts this way. Her grasp of technology, even a simple mobile phone, borders on non-existent. 

‘Yeah, Ma, I know it’s you.’ 

‘Harold, I have some news for you. Your father has passed away. He left you money, and I am going to move in with my sister down the coast. The house is yours.’ 

His phone slips from his hand. Mike is nothing more than garbled noise in the background. The door slams – a crash through the haze – and Mike is gone. 

Lost in the loss of his father and the crumbled foundations of this life, Harry cries. Not since his twelfth birthday had tears – ugly, larger-than-himself sobs – flowed. The disappointments, the heartaches and the lies, the resignations and indignations well up in his soul and heart and flow from his eyes.  

Base urges arise: smoke and drink, drink and smoke, until his life returns to the fucked-up blur of nothingness it is. He would be a man about this – laugh and joke around with other blokes in the pub, pushing any deep, dark emotion further down until it transformed into another ball of searing heat to be expunged with more alcohol. 

Fuck the money he did not have; he would drink himself into oblivion. Pass out on the floor with a smile on his face, well-deserved and yet not well-worn, destroying the neural links to memory. 

Late evening heat crashes into him as he walks the street, his feet knowing where to go, his mind a miasma of thoughts. Raucous revelling explodes from his local as he slinks in. Hands go up, greeting him, and he offers a weak smile in return. They don’t see it – of course they don’t. They are all here for similar reasons. 

Spilling all the cash in his pocket onto the bar, Harry orders. Not beer this time. This calls for something stronger, something more mind-numbing. ‘Whiskey. Cheap. Neat. And keep ‘em comin’.’ 

The barman stares and then nods. A glass of whiskey, overpoured, lands on the bar. Harry drinks deep, the burn in his throat welcome and necessary. Eyes to the ceiling, the glass offers no more. 

He drinks and drinks and drinks; the money dwindles until only coins are left. Unsteady, he gets to his feet, offers a little prayer – a final goodbye and thank you to his old man – and stumbles out into the darkened night. 

Crashing into brick, the outer wall of the pub holds him up as he stares at the moon. Realisation punches him in the guts. His dad is gone, his mum is moving away, his wife has left him. He is nobody without those facades. 

Over time – and especially in the early phase of the relationship – Harry became what she wanted, and forgot to be what he wanted, until the concept of him outside the couple was no more. And now there was no couple. There was no him. 

The world spun: a mosaic of ordinariness, a kaleidoscope of blandness. 

Body sliding down the rough-hewn wall, Harry’s arse hits the cold pavement, his chin hitting his chest. He would not cry again. He would do something better. 

A squeal of tyres rips through the quietude of thought and night. Headlights, intense and unyielding, blind him. 

The lack of thought and emotion creates clarity: bright, white, hot clarity. In the vacuum of newfound loneliness, something is reborn and reignited. He needs to find ‘him’ again, but how does he do that when he does not know what he is without his wife’s underlying personal structure? Life screams in retaliation, demanding a life anew. The veneer of his life cracks and crumbles, falling to pieces at his feet and melding with the small puddles of salty water. 

Would his father’s money help? Harry scoffs at the thought, the realisation that he has become a millionaire wrinkling his brow. Sure, money would make it easy, but there was a currency of the heart and soul that money could not buy. 

He would imagine, again, finding the man the young boy had once dreamt of becoming. 

Moonlight shines down as if spotlighting the lonely man soaked in tears and refuse – his own and the world’s floating by – for all to see. No one saw him. No one ever had. 

But he smiles back at the large white face in the sky, its beatitude there for all to see. For the first time since that little boy became lost to him, he could see it – could really see it. 

He wants to see more – not just the moon, but the world, the planet and its people. He wants to be the explorer who looked over the backyard garden of his parents' house and imagined an ocean, vast and wide, full of pirates and adventure. 

‘I have discovered something,’ Harry mumbles to the moon. ‘You are not brought into this world to understand or misunderstand it. You are born to experience it. You can travel the world and see it, and you can go to new places and be a part of it – get lost in the wonderment of living and in the minutiae. Textures, tastes and feels – the senses alive to enhance the everyday. 

‘I lost that, maybe as a youth or a small boy, but I know I lost it. That loss has never been as important to me as being a societal beast of burden – ensuring my family was fed and had a roof over their heads. But now I wonder if I could have done and been both. 

‘Or now that I am unburdened by one, am I able to be the other?’ 

Finding what was lost had never weighed upon Harry’s soul until he had lost everything. 

The broken man stands, gathers the shards of his life – some wanted and others unwanted – and walks away, wondering who he will be tomorrow.