4.

This is too much too soon. It’s terrible structure. If I was editing this, I’d say there’s too much negative focus on Lana, and not enough of whatever the relationship was before. There’s no balance. It needs balance to introduce the characters and my world, although there’s no real plot – there is, sorta, in my head, although I don’t know how well it’ll be realised until my death, but more of that later, too.

The morning’s a simple routine: some stretches trying to get flexibility back into my neck and back, play my shots in Words with Friends (a Scrabble knockoff) as I brush my teeth, shower, and then I sit in front of the computer and write for a bit. I’m just beginning to get into the flow of it – in to the flow where I feel purposeful and like I’m doing my thing, the only thing I’m meant to be doing – when I have to leave and meet Dom.

There’s a small restaurant, Ben’s, just down the road from me – a pizzeria that has an outdoor section where we can sit in the sun.

Dom’s already there – although he’s a couple of years older than me, he wears his age better because he keeps himself in shape. He’s a self-trained martial artist, and good at it. The only thing that gives away his age is his baldness, although he wears it as well as a cue ball. When some people go bald, their revealed to have light globe-shaped craniums, like they’re aliens or something. His looks okay. On his right arm, tattooed in this ornate, cursive font is the word FAMILY – he’s been married thirty years, and has four kids.

So that’s the flattering stuff. And I should be flattering because I’ve known him for just over forty years. But it’s easy to make friends as kids because all you really need to have in common is that you want to play. Age changes things, whittles away what you have in common, until all that remains is longevity, and longevity means nothing. Not really. Longevity reveals differences.

“Read the updated script?” I ask.

Dom’s a struggling actor – somehow, he thinks he’s going to be the next action star like they had in the 1980s, when guys like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a series of clones (like Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, etc.) dominated cinema. Of course, films have moved on, and while we still have action stars like Liam Neeson and Jason Statham, they can, well, actually act.

“No, not yet,” he says. “I’m gonna do it this weekend.”

He won’t. Something will come up. The only thing Dom does better than martial arts is excuses. Once, he was meant to come up with some casting suggestions for another script we wanted to try get up into a film, and he showed up claiming he’d plugged his phone into the wrong outlet, and it had short-circuited, and everything was on the phone.

“But I will,” he says.

“Look, the only way we’ll get anywhere is if people hit their marks,” I say, somewhat sanctimoniously, and I hate that, I hate that about myself, but he gives me no option. “If people are given stuff to do, they have to do it. Everybody can’t come to a halt because they have to wait for somebody who hasn’t done what they’re meant to do.”

“I’ll do it tonight,” Dom says. “I swear.”

We have a little team of hopefuls – all of us working jobs to pay bills, living lives like most everybody, but all clinging to this dream of making a film. The three others are great. Give them something to do, and they’ll do it. And we all know that Dom’s a problem child. But the others (as far as I’m aware) like him.

He’s so earnest, like a puppy that shits where it shouldn’t, chews up things you need, eats your dinner when you’re not looking, but is so loveably clumsy and stupidly cute that people just can’t stay mad or disappointed.

I don’t ditch him (overlong friendship aside) because he has one skill: he’s good at networking. Well, sorta. He’s not so good at having conversations with real people that’ll lead to real and constructive outcomes, but he is good at meeting people who might be useful one day. This is more bad writing from me – I should be showing you this. But I’m just telling you because for the sake of Dom it’s easier. He’s like chlamydia.

“So you’ll read the script tonight?” I say.

“I’ll read it tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“Tonight.”

“Look, I want to make something,” I say, slowly, because this is like explaining a magic trick, “but I can do this with people who are serious about this.”

“I am—”

“That means everybody’s gotta hit their marks – that means if I ask for something to be done by a time, it has to be done by that time.”

I’ve never given this speech directly to him. Usually, it’s in a group setting, and I throw it out like I’m addressing everybody, although it is specifically for the benefit of him. He’ll nod and agree and be earnest, just like he’s doing now – nodding earnestly, like we’re consecrated on the same page, and this is something we share, and only we share. The others are just recent friends – I’ve only known them a few years, and because of him. I think he believes that gives him seniority, but seniority don’t mean shit. If it did, people wouldn’t ditch their friends when they partnered up into romantic relationships.

“Yep, I’ll read this tonight,” he says. “I promise.”

The only thing he knows about promises is that the word exists.

“I can talk to my cousin, too,” Dom says. “He said he can invest some money – to start us up.”

These are all things I’ve heard so often. The biggest surprise is he trots out this shit like it’s for the first time, and he hasn’t let me (and the others) down repeatedly in the past. He does have a cousin who’s rich, and I have no doubt his cousin has off-handedly made some comment about possibly contributing to making a film one day, but Dom always conveys it like it’s contracted and done.

So this is something else I do even though it gets me nowhere, but I keep trying because it’s these little dreams that keep us going in life – keep us moving forward as we do all the things we need to just to get by. It’s a fucked-up dichotomy the way society’s evolved, that we work too long, make too little, and too rarely get to grasp something beyond our aspirations.

The waitress arrives, this cute little thing who’s probably not out of her teens. There’s a homeliness to her with her hair tied back into a ponytail, and her round glasses. I don’t look at her sexually, because that would be too lecherous, and while I can appreciate women, there are boundaries tethered to my own age.

But when I was a teen, and during my brief forays into the world as a twenty-something, I’d project some romantic possibility with people like this, extrapolating an entire history, as well as a possible future, just on the basis of whether she appealed to me. In my thirties, I did it with similarly aged people.

I don’t know if other guys behave similarly – I doubt it. In their teens, most guys would just be thinking of sex, and how far they could get it. Something’s warped in my mind that produced a different expectation, and I wonder just how far it sits from something unhealthy, like idealisation. Or stalking.

It’s not something that happens anymore. Lana fixed that – not because we’re together (although that contributed), but because being with her transformed that idealisation into an improbable, embarrassing fantasy. Real relationships can be like the shitty job you only do because it pays the bills.

“Are you two ready to order?” the waitress asks.

We order lunch, but I won’t bother going into the rest of our conversation because it’s more of the same, and it bored me sitting there enduring it, so recounting it any further is just a second hell.

 

5.

The home my mother’s in looks like a block of flats set up in the middle of middle-class suburbia. Everywhere else, it’s just houses and houses, and then there’s this big orange building with a winding drive out front that leads to a staff parking lot, and a street with too many parked cars.

Inside the lobby, I have to punch my name and who I’m there to visit into a little computer. It takes my temperature to make sure I’m not sick – I’m unsure how. Then a tiny printer attached to it whirs and whirs and whirs. Then tries again and whirs and whirs and whirs. It’s meant to print out my name. Nothing, though – this place must get a lot of visitors, because most times I visit I don’t get a label.

I ride the elevator up to the first floor, then start making mental notes of signposts so I can find my way back: elevator, staff station, corridor that curves into the main building, walking past a row of windows that overlooks an atrium, straight past one juncture, past another, then left. I’ve only made this trip every week, and sometimes twice a week, for the last year, and I still get lost.

Places like this are well-meaning, and I appreciate many of the elderly here need full-time care, but this place is just a bank of safety-deposit boxes for the residents. Stick them here, keep them safe, until the account’s closed. So few of the people here, the residents – because that’s an important distinction from everybody else – have any real autonomy.

Walking past doors, I see one elderly woman who lays in her bed, staring blankly at the ceiling – she’s always there. Another room contains a man propped up in a chair, his head bobbing as he fixes on a television that’s blaring I don’t know what – by the sounds of commentary about reels and freshwater, it must be something about fishing.

Growing old’s fucked.

Lana’s terrified of death; I’m not, as long as it’s quick, and doesn’t involve months of suffering, or years of deterioration. But Lana wants to live as long as possible. Showing her these people would probably cure her of that delusion. Once the mind’s gone, life’s nothing but waiting for your body to catch up.

My mother’s lucid enough most of the time, though. I find her in her little room, laying on her side, two fingers from her right hand on the pulse in her left wrist. I’m unsure what she’s measuring – she has a pacemaker and other heart issues, so I can only guess she’s checking her heart’s got a good beat. Of course, I could ask, but we don’t really have those conversations in my family.

I lean over, and kiss her on the cheek. Age has pruned her up, until I can’t imagine how she ever carried me when I was a kid, or beat me when I made trouble – not that that was regular, or even untoward. Migrant parents are very hands on. But I don’t see her as young. Does anybody with their parents? It seems only a perception that crops up after they die and we while through their old photos and see them young and unencumbered with their whole lives, and all their dreams, ahead of them.

As I sit in the chair by her bed, her gaze goes to the cargo pants I wear – my favourites: although they were green originally, they’ve now faded almost to white, but nothing else I own is as worn and comfortable, and comfortable is important to me. If it was socially acceptable, I’d walk around in flannel pyjamas.

“I don’t want to start an argument, but I don’t like those pants,” she says.

She says this in Macedonian – it’s what we speak. Her English sounds good, but isn’t good enough to hold a genuine conversation. And while she might not want to start an argument, her tone’s argumentative. I could wind this up immediately – she’s cultivate hair triggers in myself, and my brothers – but clamp down on the frustration.

“They’re comfortable,” I tell her.

“You smell like beer,” she says.

“I had one when I had lunch,” I lie. I had two.

“You have lunch with that cunt?”

While that pejorative could also apply to Dom, she’s referencing Lana. Here’s some aspect of provincial migrant culture: don’t get involved with divorcees with kids. Well, that’s my mum’s side of it. Lana’s parents look at me as the no-hoper who lives in a small flat with no real money and less prospects. They’d probably get along famously if not for me.

“You can’t find a nice girl, have some children,” she says, then reels off our litany of cousins who’ve done that as a condemnation of my inadequacy.

Before I arrive, I vow that I want to have a long and meaningful visit, but the moment I step through the door the timer’s on. About ninety minutes seems fair. And while most visits vary in animosity, she’s in a shit mood today.

I want to say that age is responsible, that her heart problems are the cause, that her deteriorating hip and surrendering knees have transformed her into this bitter person, but she’s been like this as long as I can remember. The only thing that’s changed is the frequency so, yeah, maybe those other things have contributed, but they’re not the cause, and I have no idea what is – her mother was like this, too. That’s the number one reason psychiatrists and psychologists make money: because of the shit parents pass onto their kids.

“Can you stop going on about this?” I ask, and try to do it diplomatically.

“You don’t have to shout.”

“I didn’t shout,’ I say, and I didn’t.

“Why don’t you just go home if you’re going to visit like this?”

There’s no winning this. She sets traps – I don’t think she even does it consciously. You walk into them, and even if you don’t, she responds like you have. Then comes the castigation. I don’t know what she gets out of this. Moral superiority, maybe? Validation that she’s so shitty because I didn’t accomplish the things that mattered to her most (namely marriage and kids)?

Then I think maybe I didn’t because she fractured me in a way that stopped me functioning the way I should, although that’s another story in itself. Maybe I’ll get there. This episode has already darkened my mood, and tapped into feelings – especially unworthiness, inadequacy, and self-loathing – that I don’t want to mine, because I know they have to potential to explode and kill me.

I force myself to sit there, force myself to make meaningless small talk, as well as make conciliatory offers – asking her if she wants something to drink, asking her if she wants me to put the television on, asking her if she wants me to bring anything in – but she bats them away, so we just play this game back and forth, back and forth, me growing tenser and darker, until the ninety minutes is up and I feel I can leave in good conscience.