Chapter Twenty

AMBROSE WAS close-lipped about the Hawthorn game. To my surprise he’d put together my other flat-packed box, which turned out to be a pretty nice desk. I’d forgotten what it looked like.

“Looks good, right?” Ambrose said proudly.

I also discovered that he used the superglue to repair a broken chair that was stashed in the spare room, but the broken lamp wasn’t fixable according to Ambrose.

“So I’ve bought you another one. They’ll mail it.”

He looked happy for the first time since he came home, so I let it slide. Ambrose could buy me a lamp if he wanted to. He’d also prepared a meal that looked delicious, and over dinner he asked me, “You can chuck a sickie tomorrow, can’t you?”

I was floored. “You want me to call in sick at work? What for?”

He grinned at me, but I knew his face, and I knew his smile. The tension behind the smile worried me. Something was up.

“I need a lift.”

I didn’t buy it. “What about Uber?”

“I want you to come with me.”

What? “Why? Where do you need to go?”

He speared another piece of chicken with his fork, mumbled something to himself, and said, “I’ve arranged to meet my grandfather.”

His grandfather.

Whoa.

I took a deep breath. “You mean your dad’s dad?”

That was big. That was huge. “Tell me from the beginning.” Ambrose’s dad had never been in the picture. We had discussed it from the time we met. Neither of us had a dad. I didn’t even know the name of my father. Ambrose knew the name of his father, but I didn’t think they’d ever talked or met.

“I started to look for my dad last year,” Ambrose said quietly. “Obviously, because of who I am, I had to be a little circumspect, because I didn’t want it splashed all over the news. I managed to track him down in April. He’s dead.”

My heart sank, and I put my hand out to grab his. He grabbed me back and clung. “I talked to an aunty. She told me a little about him. He was killed in a car accident seven years ago. I didn’t know if I wanted to take it further, but then my aunty rang me and said my grandfather wanted to meet me. So I rang him today and told him I was in Perth. He asked me over to his house tomorrow morning.” He looked at me intently. “Can you come with me?”

Did I want to lie to my employer, go a stranger’s house, meet people I didn’t know, and possibly make small talk? About as much as I wanted someone to rip my arms off and beat me with them.

Did I want to support my old friend and the man I loved?

“What time do we need to leave?”

AMBROSE’S GRANDFATHER was named Joseph and lived in the eastern suburbs.

“Does he know who you are?” I asked Ambrose as we drove to the address. “I mean, as in that you’re Bro-Jak?”

Ambrose hesitated. “I didn’t specifically tell him, but I think he figured it out. When I rang him to tell him I was in Perth, he just asked me how the operation went.”

There was a shitload of tension in the car. I was feeling anxious about going to a strange house, but Ambrose had to be feeling twenty times worse.

“Thanks for driving me,” he said in the thickness of the atmosphere. “I couldn’t ask an Uber driver or a taxi driver to take me. They’d probably blab to the media, and that would be the end of that.”

I could see his point.

The house we pulled up to was old and somewhat rundown, but the lawn out the front was mown and there were a variety of children’s toys left carelessly out on the green. Ambrose exited the car with difficulty, and I dashed around to his side of the car to pull the crutches out where he could use them. By the time he was upright and steady, the front door had banged open and a woman stood in the doorway with a toddler clinging to her leg.

We approached with some trepidation, but when I got closer, I saw her eyes were sparkling with welcome.

“Hi. I’m Helen. I’m your aunty,” she said with a shy smile. “Dad’s been on hot coals all morning, knowing you’re on your way.”

Ambrose navigated the single step up to the front door and held out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Helen.” Helen hesitated a moment and then took the hand, and I wondered if Ambrose had been somehow impolite offering to shake hands with his aunty. “This is my friend Shane.” Ambrose indicated with his chin in my direction. I held out my hand too.

“Nice to meet you, Helen.”

After we shook she reached down and hefted the child to her hip. “This is Kyle. He’s my grandson. Come on in.” She held the door open for Ambrose. “The room on the right. Dad’s in there.”

I followed Ambrose with a polite nod in Helen’s direction. In the room, an older man rose from the couch, his eyes fixed on Ambrose. I was struck by the resemblance between them. It wasn’t their skin color—Joseph’s was a lot darker—or their hair, which was actually styled similarly. Joseph’s face was also lined with deep wrinkles, and his eyes had a slight watery look to them that denoted his age. But when Joseph stood, their body shape was similar. They were the same height, and I could see that, once upon a time, Joseph had been an extremely fit man. He had the same long legs Ambrose was known for.

Joseph came forward and embraced Ambrose in a hug that spoke of deep affection. He repeated something, over and over. To me it sounded like “ky-oo, ky-oo.”

Only then did I appreciate that this old man perhaps spoke a language that was foreign to me. I stood awkwardly and watched as they hugged. Finally Joseph pulled back, and Ambrose introduced me. Joseph nodded politely and gestured to the lounge behind us.

“Welcome, welcome. Come. Sit. Be at home. We’ll get you some drink. Do you wanna cuppa? Helen will bring some in. Sit.”

His voice was quiet and soft, but he spoke rapidly in short, sharp sentences. Ambrose sat on a lounge with two places, making sure there was enough room for me to sit too. I silently took the seat beside him and offered my presence as support.

For a moment Joseph stared at Ambrose. Then he gave a satisfied smile. “You have the look of your father.”

“I never met him.” Ambrose’s voice was flat.

Joseph nodded and grimaced. “Yes. Your aunt Wendy told me that. That be bad business. Your dad never told me about you. He told Phil. My other son. Phil told Wendy. So when you got in touch with Wendy, she knew who you were. It was a good thing.”

Until that moment I hadn’t realized the aunt Ambrose had spoken to on the phone wasn’t the aunt who had answered the door.

“I’m not angry at you,” Ambrose reassured Joseph. “The past is history. Water under the bridge.” I gave a small smile as I heard Ambrose repeat Tracy’s oft-mentioned line. “I just wanted to meet you and… find my roots.”

Joseph nodded as though he understood and there was nothing strange about an adult male still looking for his roots.

Helen popped her head in. “Coffee? Tea? Water?”

Joseph asked for tea, but Ambrose and I both asked for water. We’d had coffee on the way, courtesy of the drive-through Muzz Buzz.

Conversation was a little awkward, but Joseph asked about Ambrose’s injury, and Ambrose asked Joseph about his family, and the visit limped on. It turned out that Joseph had five kids, of whom only three were still alive. Including Ambrose, Joseph had eighteen grandchildren.

I wanted to ask about Ambrose’s father—who I noticed was never named. He was only referred to as “your father” or “my son” when Joseph spoke of him. I knew the media never mentioned the name of a deceased Aboriginal person “for cultural reasons.” I wondered if that was the reason Joseph didn’t say his name.

There was a knock at the front door, and once again Helen came to open it. When a large man in his fifties entered the room, Joseph stood and embraced him. The man then fixed his eyes on Ambrose and grinned. I stood and helped Ambrose up, and the man came forward.

He spoke something in another language and then reached out and briefly embraced Ambrose.

“I’m your Uncle Phil. In our culture, I hold the same position as your father. You’re my son.” He was a large man, overweight and with large shoulders and a large girth. He wore a black shirt with the Aboriginal colors of black, red, and yellow embroidered on a white outline of an Australian map. “With your dad gone now, I take responsibility for you.” He clapped Ambrose on the shoulder. “In times past I’d take your mum as my wife too. She’d become my second or third wife. But these days, if that’s suggested, the women just clobber us over the head with the nearest stick. So we keep that to ourselves.”

I snorted at the thought of this man trying to claim Tracy as his second wife.

Another two men, this time younger, about my own age, entered and greeted Joseph. They called him Grandad.

“These are my sons,” Phil said, “Stu and Mikey.”

They were excited to meet Ambrose and shook hands eagerly. Ambrose introduced me, and suddenly I found myself being shepherded out of the room by Mikey. He took me to the back of the house and introduced me to a dizzying number of relatives. There was Helen, and her sister-in-law, Doris, Doris’s two daughters, a female cousin of some sort, and five children under primary school age. Helen said she was babysitting the two youngest for her daughter who worked, two belonged to one of Doris’s daughters, and I missed the connection of the last child.

Helen handed Mikey a plate that had a couple of pieces of chocolate cake on it, and then Mikey took me outside. We sat on plastic outdoor chairs while two of the kids rode around the paved area on scooters.

“So why did I get taken out of the room?” I asked Mikey idly as I helped myself to a piece of cake—free cake doesn’t contain calories.

“They need to talk about stuff.” Mikey ate his slice of cake as though someone were going to snatch it from him.

“What stuff?”

He shrugged. “Just stuff.”

“Can you be a bit more specific?” I asked. “Because Ambrose is not going to be happy with me. I’ll have to tell him I was lured with cake.”

Mikey shrugged again. “Laws and stuff.” I must’ve looked confused, because he elaborated. “Technically he’s Uncle Mike’s oldest son. Dad wants to talk to him about stuff. And family stuff.”

I noticed Mikey didn’t have the problem of naming the deceased. I also noticed he was named after Ambrose’s father. Something dinged at my consciousness. “You mean like Aboriginal laws? Customs and all?”

“Yeah.”

I hadn’t thought of it before. “Did your Uncle Mike have any other kids?” Did Ambrose have half siblings?

“Three,” Mikey said happily. “Amara died when she was only little, though. She had a bad heart and was seven, I think, when she died. They didn’t know about it until she got a cold, and it was too much for her. Justice is about sixteen now, or maybe she’s seventeen. Just finishing high school. Roy’s the same age as me—twenty-one.”

“Do they know about Ambrose?”

A grin split his face. “Nah. Not yet. I only found out this morning. How cool. My cousin’s Bro-Jak. Course I knew he was a brother, but I didn’t know he was my cousin.”

I realized he was using brother to denote another person of Aboriginal descent. We fell into silence as I wondered how long before I could go back inside. As a white man, I wasn’t welcome in their family talks, but Ambrose was my friend, and he didn’t know these people.

“How do you know Bro-Jak?” Mikey asked.

“We grew up next door to each other. Our mothers are friends.”

“So does he have a girlfriend?”

I frowned. “No. Why?”

Mikey sat back and looked at the sky with contentment. “Because when the girls find out he’s my cousin, they’ll all want to date him. If he’s single I’m going to be the most popular guy around.”