Tonys AdventuresChapter 8 Tragedy Strikes
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My detached disposition stayed with me until late the next Friday night.
I sat on my lounge eating a pasta bake Vanessa dropped off earlier, and stared blankly at a little sign I erected over the archway to the kitchen that depicted the three little piggies in front of their brick house, wearing beanies, smoking rollies and each smirking defiantly. A caption underneath read 'So it aint home sweet home. Adjust.'
I was unexpectedly surprised by Joey's sudden appearance. He always had a habit of coming through the back of the house like we used to when we were kids. He invited himself into my house, and before acknowledging me, he made his way to the bar as was his habit and poured a couple of stiff drinks from my collection of Johnny Walker — the Blue Label stuff I kept around for guests. Typical.
He handed me my drink, we clinked glasses and silently nodded in respect to absent friends. Joey was very close to Pete and I, considered us brothers. He used to brag too much when we were young and stupid and thought himself our protector on the streets. The reality was slightly different; we had to bail him out a few times when his big mouth got him into strife.
This was in the days before his current affiliations, and since then he obviously learned to keep his mouth shut.
The moment passed and Joey returned to his usual charming self.
"Testa di cazzo, finocchio" What the fuck, faggot. His standard greeting in Italian.
"Ai gamisou, malaka" Go fuck yourself, wanker, my response in Greek. It was a tradition, or an old charter or something.Thank you Robert Rankin
"Ness been around today?" He asked eyeing the remainder of the pasta. He picked up my used fork and started digging in. What a pig. "If you had any brains you fucking gaylord, you'd ask that bitch to marry you. What's wrong with you, don't cha like girls anymore?"
"I like girls plenty shit for brains; I'm just not going to mess with her."
"Shut the fuck up stronzo, who do you think you're talking to? I'm telling you, pull yourself together, and ask her. She's so hooked on you, she even refused a date with me!"
"Ha! Fucking loser, what makes you think Vanessa would have anything to do with a fucking Mafioso wannabe? You've got to have skillz to be with a woman like that! Besides, Teresa would rip your head off."
"Fuck off!" He said conveniently ignoring the reference to his wife. "She gets wet when she sees me, she just feels sorry for you..."
"Oh?" I cut in. I didn't like where this was going.
"Okay, I'm sorry man, it kinda came out all wrong. No offence to you and your loss, or to her and hers. Just trying to lighten the mood a little, eh?
"Yeah, I know. I should know better."
"That's right. You should." He broke into a huge grin. "You should have seen the crazy look you just had in your eye just then. All twitching and shit, were you gonna go all Wu Tang on me or something?" He started laughing then, slapping his knee.
"Fuck off, I don't project." Indignant outrage.
"You do so! I know you. I could see it!"
"Okay, let's dance, bitch."
"You gonna get all Ching Chong on me, and do that kung fu shit you pretend you know?"
"What's the matter, are you actually scared of a man without a gun?"
"I'm scared of no man. You on the other hand..."
"Ok, here we go. This conversation gets more and more boring every time."
His laughter faded somewhat, but he continued eating. "You know, you messed my boys up pretty bad the other day." He was chewing the food like a cow, mouth open, bits of pasta flying everywhere. But this conversation was getting interesting, as I hadn't yet told him about Christine's adventures.
"Too bad neither made it out of the hospital. I had to find the last one at home." Joey cleaned his mouth with a napkin and continued with a serious look on his face. "Your brother Con came and saw me, after your little ... incident." He took a swig of his glass before continuing. "I'm glad he came to me first. That way they got off easy. Nice, clean and quick. Although, I don't think I've ever seen him quite so pissed before. Now he's a Greek boy I really wouldn't want to mess with. But you can't call him Con the Greek. It sounds gay. Nick the Greek sounds cool though, you got any relatives named Nick?"
"Joey, stop fucking around will ya? What do you mean he came to see you? How the fuck did he know what happened?"
"I told you before, you do project." He smirked. "Nah, he knew there was something pretty wrong when he came here with you the other day when your little girlfriend was by herself and you asked him to look around the house with you. So, he hunted her down that night and got her to talk."
Shit. "Oh for fucks sake, are you for real?"
"Yeah, once he knew what to look for, it became easy. Process of elimination. Like I said, I'm glad he came to me first. He was planning some really nasty shit. I convinced him in the end to keep his nose clean, 'cause they were my boys and therefore my responsibility."
He became serious again and looked at me imploringly. "Tony, I promised you all a long time ago that I would never let my business interfere with our relationship. Inadvertently, it has now, and I apologize most sincerely. Those three have been taken care of in the old way, but unless you stop me, I'm going to have a little talk with the puttana that caused all this as well."
"Come on Joey," I waived my hand in dismissal. "What, are you pretending to be educated now? Inadvertently? have you been studying the dictionary or something? Leave her be. Stupid slut regrets it now, but really, she's irrelevant. She just doesn't matter mate. Forget her."
"Ok, but say the word and she disappears. I do feel partly responsible for what happened, but what do you expect, you were goin' out with such a porca puttana. Were you expecting love stories or what?"
"Nah, wasn't expecting anything at the time, just a little mindless diversion for a while."
"Some diversion." He finished his drink and made his way over to the bar. He picked up the bottle he cracked open just a few minutes ago and shot me his trademark smirk. He bought it over to the lounge and set it in the middle of the coffee table.
"Let's finish this bottle eh? I hear this stuff spoils if you don't drink it in the one sitting and it would be such a criminal waste." How many times have we each used that line while raiding each other's drinks cabinets?
"There is something else I wanted to talk to you about that's a little more serious." Joey was making me nervous now, because he was acting nervous. Joey doesn't get nervous.
"My new barrister wants to meet you."
Something about the way he said that annoyed me. It was obvious he was hiding something, but I didn't want to play the game, so I remained silent. Waiting for him to explain. It took him a full minute before he realized I wasn't going to interrupt and ask all the stupid questions he usually gets when he tries to bait someone. So he reluctantly continued without his usual air of superiority.
"I met her, a couple of days ago while she was working on a business case for me. I was stunned, and had no idea who she was when I first saw her."
"So? What's the mystery? She's just a lawyer right? Why the drama? What does she want with me?"
"The only way to answer that is if you allow me to arrange the meeting. I just want to tell you straight off, that she knows nothing about anything."
"Then why..."
"There are no answers I can give you at all that'll mean anything to you. You just have to trust me and meet her. I only met her through our normal legitimate business routines. She knows nothing about you or even me for that matter, but I knew instantly when I saw her that you two need to meet. That's all I can say. Are you busy tomorrow?"
The next day, late in the afternoon, my doorbell rang and I got up to answer the call. I instantly understood Joey's reluctance to talk the previous night once the front door was opened and I stepped back. She took a step forward.
It was a vision of Helen standing in my vestibule. The similarities were uncanny. The long raven hair, the bright grey/blue eyes, the five foot seven frame. The facial features were stunning, just like my Helen before the illness. Her luscious thick lips with the familiar perfect white teeth produced a smile so dazzling, I had to force myself to breathe. Her figure was just as I remembered, but it couldn't be.
Celine
Only someone with Helen's genetic makeup could look so much like her, and I knew that this person before me was her twin sister, Celine. The black sheep of the family, who left the brood at eighteen to make her way in the world and find herself. Apparently those were her exact words. She only maintained very sporadic contact with the family, and even then only through explosive exchanges with Helen, the last contact being made about four or five years ago.
She didn't attend our wedding, missed all the significant events of our families, and was apparently unapologetic about it all. We didn't know what she was doing, how she was going, if she was married, had a family or any of the important details that make up a life.
I only barely knew about her as it was a very touchy subject and not one that Helens family was prepared to talk about at any length. Helen herself wanted nothing to do with her, because of her abrupt departure without a word of reasonable explanation to anyone. They were as close as twins could be before Celine bolted. Helen was devastated.
I led her to the lounge room. Was it dumb luck or something higher that guided her directly to the sofa Helen loved to sit in? She took off her heels and curled up on the left side of the three seater as if she was Helen herself. That old déjà vu feeling was freaking me out.
She couldn't have known about Helens illness, couldn't know about our pain and suffering, our dreams unfulfilled. I sat opposite her in my usual spot. I could feel annoyance building inside me as I began. I could see that she sensed a bit of hostility.
"What are you doing here?"
"Joe convinced me last week that I had to meet you, but he didn't tell me until an hour ago who you actually are. This is confusing now because he said nothing at all about my sister Helene or Helen as she prefered. I guess I'm here to say hello. I really do want to come home." Her voice sent knives straight through my heart. She sounded just like Helen.
"Your timing sucks."
"I'm getting that feeling, actually." She looked down not knowing what to expect. I could feel her nervousness, and I could see that she knew nothing of Helens illness yet. She gently rubbed the fingertips of one hand over the fingernails of the other in the same manner Helen would when she was highly agitated or upset. This gesture only annoyed me, almost beyond reason.
"What do you want Celine? You're far too late to make a difference to anything remotely significant in our lives, you're a veritable stranger to myself and your entire family and you've spent more years away from them than you have with them and the only reason I haven't kicked you out yet is that you remind me so much of my deceased wife."
I hit her pretty hard with that last bit, but I wanted to see a genuine reaction, and I wanted it to be real. I felt that it was the only way I could ascertain what she did or did not know.
She started by asking the obvious questions, and then progressed more and more frantically as the story became clearer. Her anger, and fury, disappointment and shame astounded me. This is how Helen would have responded. This could not have been faked, that much was obvious.
"I've missed so much. I still don't understand after all these years why I felt I had to leave so long ago. The first few years were the hardest..."
"I don't give a fuck Celine. All your shit, you had bought upon yourself. Look around you at the home I shared for eighteen years with someone who always took the harder road and made it work. Someone who missed you so much I heard her lie and say she hated you on an almost weekly basis. Someone who had a beautiful life here and had it wrenched forcefully from her grasp." My voice was rising now and I was moments away from wanting to commit homicide.
"She had it all, and you know what? She appreciated it. She was the epitome of the domestic Goddess. She lived and gave. Her time. Her love. Her efforts and consideration. Freely and without reservation. Even now, a few years later, people out there still feel the loss. My whole family included. She was the centre of my world." My hands were trembling, my voice shaky, my throat dry.
"You on the other hand, don't exist, why did she die? Why do you still live?"
Celine remained silent, shoulders shaking, head down, tears flowing. I don't know what she was thinking but I'm pretty sure she realized that coming to this house was a big mistake.
She had no one else from her family to go to now either. Her parents retired and moved back home to Marseille about seven years ago, only returning to visit Helen and myself every year. After Helen, there was nothing left for them here.
Eventually I made her a pot of tea and bought out some coffee for myself. I cleaned the ashtray and bought out a fresh packet of smokes. I'd given them up many years ago, but since Helen went away, I found myself with the strongest urge to smoke again and gave myself over to it. Back to a packet a day.
Celine poured a second cup of tea for herself. "Why didn't she call me? Did she hate me that much? She's always had my number. I was the one that was always trying to make an effort with her."
"I dunno Celine. She always maintained that she hated you, but that was a façade anyone could see through. She was devastated that you left."
"I was such a fool; I thought I knew it all, had my life all planned out and now it's too late. I latched onto a guy, and he put me through school, I read law at Sydney Uni. I was able to travel and see the world. I was dumb enough to think and believe that I didn't need anyone else."
"Such a cliché. So this whole split thing was about the obtaining of money? Humor me and be brutally honest ok? I don't have the patience to talk to your agent right now. I guess you could probably see that."
I was not going to indulge her in a session of self analysis and therapy. If she wanted to talk like Oprah then I would put us both out of our misery by kicking her out and going to bed.
"Agreed. I do want to talk." She gave me a sly grin. "I see what Helen meant when she said to me once that you have a tendency to cut through the fluff. So I'm not going to color anything.
"Getting back to your question of money, well yes, it was about living the fairy tale existence. I thought by taking emotions out of the equation, finding an appropriate prospect would provide me with a lifestyle that we both used to dream about. I told her back then, that as soon as we have a chance and find someone, we were to go for it. I thought that if I could convince her to come out and visit me once she would see that it wasn't so bad. She would see that we could have everything we ever wanted."
"That didn't work." I said. It pissed me off that she wanted to take my Helen away, but I remained quiet on this for the time being.
"No. She resisted fiercely, and thought me a whore. I know she would have loved the lifestyle but not at any cost. I suppose that only I hung on to that dream."
Celine went back to fidgeting with her fingers. "I'm aware of what I've missed out on but I did occasionally try to come home. I'm not a complete monster. Helen never let me. She always made it very awkward for me; she was quite unreasonable about reconciliation. Then, the more time that went by the harder it became." Bullshit. I didn't think she tried hard enough. As much as she impressed me with her honesty so far, I could feel she was still holding back. Maybe a nudge in the right direction...
"Maybe she knew you were full of shit. Maybe she wanted to see you make a real effort. And maybe she wanted to know that effort was genuine."
I knew I wasn't being particularly nice, but she had yet to make me care for her. It was becoming increasingly clear with every passing second that this was not Helen in any way. Regardless of how she looked and sounded. She was not Helen. And I was finding comfort in that, and courage. She was an imposter.
"I think that the strain you put on that family was a cruelty of the highest order. You may have thought that you had your own life and could do anything you wanted, and that may be true to an extent. But the family unit is not just a bunch of animals that live together with you, raise you, nurture you, guide you and invest in you, to be discarded, tossed aside when something better or just newer comes along. They also don't just give up on its members after a short time either. Maybe it's that kind of dedication that Helen wanted to see from you before she'd allow you to come home and risk hurting her parents again."
Celine had closed her eyes and wept quietly while I was speaking my mind. I continued in a softer tone.
"Their leaving to go back to Europe was meant as therapy for your mother, who spent her final years in Sydney waiting for your return. When she left she was little more than just a shell of a human being. Maybe that's another reason Helen 'hated' you so much. She could see firsthand the damage a self absorbed daughter could cause a family."
By now Celine was a wretched soul slumped on Helens side of the sofa. She was expecting to have something to come home to, a sister, a father and mother. A life she's missed out on. Instead she learns she has nothing. She lifted her moist red eyes to mine.
"The horrible thing now is that I miss her and my parents with an ache that I suddenly find crippling. I always knew that I could somehow make my way home and everything would end up ok. It never occurred to me that there would ever be a time where it would be too late, that there wouldn't even be a home to come back to. There was always going to be a tomorrow. Stupid huh?"
"Yeah well, best laid plans and all that."
"You must hate me right now. How can you stand to even look at me?"
I matched her gaze evenly.
"It's even harder than you can imagine."
I won't say that we became close friends right away, but I think she realized she had a lot of regrets and wanted to go into overdrive to start making up for lost time. She told me a few days later that she's already lost her twin sister, had serious reservations if there would ever be a relationship with her parents, and that her whole life now appeared shallow and empty since our meeting. She could see what she missed out on. I laughed in her face when she told me it was 'all my fault.'
If she tackled her professional career the way she came on to my family, then I have no doubt that she'd be an extraordinary lawyer.
She installed herself permanently into our regular family rotations, at times forcefully and virtually thrived on the shock factor of suddenly appearing at functions where people didn't know Helen had a twin sister.
I was a little apprehensive at first, but then more bemused at her attempts to get everyone involved. She became a regular visitor into my parents' home after turning up one day unexpectedly, and told them everything. I've got to give credit where it's due, and I've got to say, the chick held nothing back. She was absolutely obsessed with learning everything she could about her sister's life.
And then she stepped in and started to resume everything Helen used to do within our group. Everything from cooking at functions, to babysitting, to counseling the wives of the group, which would invariably lead to counseling for the husbands. It was the most bizarre few months I've ever lived through. We all took the view though that this was all more about therapy for her than anything else.
So of course, my parents welcomed her with open arms. The one subject that I got her to agree to was never to discuss or even hint at romance. It was natural I suppose that some people would think that there had to be something going on between us, because she was so much like Helen.
The problem as far as I was concerned though, was that she was absolutely nothing like Helen, because where it mattered the most, Celine ran away, Helen did not. To me that meant everything.
A hurdle that came up unexpectedly was Vanessa. Her dislike of Celine was almost violent, and became something of a major discomfort for me.
She was only hostile towards Celine in front of me and out of earshot from everyone else. Whoever else talked about her was encouraged by Vanessa to go into details, so she always presented a serene and caring front. Even when she was in Celine's presence, she was a sterling example of a warm and caring friend.
When we were alone though she refused to hear a single word about her, stating she had more important things to think about than some tramp pretending to be Helen. I would have taken offence, but she really didn't look like she was messing around. Her dislike was real.
The one time I tried to coax anything out of Vanessa by insisting she tell me what her problem was, she gave me a funny look, quietly called me a bastard and locked herself in the bathroom to begin her nightly ablutions. Clearly I was dismissed. Steph and I looked at one another in confusion for a moment and shrugged. We went back to playing GTA 4 on his PS3.
About six months after Celine's dramatic appearance she called a family meeting at her place, which was a huge penthouse apartment in upscale Rushcutters Bay as she had some sort of announcement to make.
We were all invited, from my parents to Vanessa, Joey and my brothers and their wives and kids. We numbered around forty five people, and yet her place still seemed as though it could hold many more. It was massive, with a rooftop terrace that suited our gathering perfectly.
Everyone seemed in good spirits, except for Vanessa, who was in a particularly foul mood and was snappy at just about everyone. Even Steph was not immune to her considerable ire. He found shelter behind me, but offered no insight into his mother's mood. He was just as confused as the rest of us.
I kept him beside me and kept throwing one-liners at him till I had him in fits of laughter. Vanessa almost cracked a smile at one point, but looked up at me, frowned and turned away. At least she was civil towards Celine, given it was her party.
After we'd all been fed, Celine stood at the head of the table and called out to us as she was about to speak, requesting everyone make their way back to their own seats. Vanessa looked like she was going to be sick. I pulled her aside for a moment and just as she was about to snap at me I grabbed her wrist firmly and lifted to ensure I had her undivided attention.
"Let go of my fucking hand." She hissed.
"Not until you tell me what's wrong." I lifted the back of my free hand and felt her forehead for temperature. "Are you sick? Do you want me to take you to a Doctor? Tell me what's wrong?"
After staring into my eyes for a long moment, she visibly relaxed and looked as though she was about to say something important, when Con's wife Margaret appeared right next to us and asked if she was ok.
Vanessa looked at both of us, put on a brave face and smiled. "I'm ok guys, really. I think I was coming down with something, but I feel better now. Really, I'm ok."
Neither Margaret nor I believed her for a second, but we had to accept it unless we were going to miss Celine's speech.
She turned quickly and made her way back to her seat, as I was shamefully caught by my sister in law admiring Vanessa's amazing back side. Margaret gave me a sly, knowing kind of grin, made the 'shhh' sign by putting her forefinger to her mouth and moved away to her own seat.
Now that was embarrassing.
Back at the table, Steph was eyeing his mother curiously, and my brothers were pretending that they were ancient kung fu grandmasters battling it out for supremacy while sitting next to each other. Joey was standing over them, throwing a slap in there every now and then, while his mum was standing behind him smacking him in the head trying to get him to behave. Some things never change. Feeling left out, my father threw a bread roll at Tom's head and told him to sit and behave. I had to laugh, it really was very funny.
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