For Everyone Concerned by Damien Wilkins Read Free Book Online Page A

tie, I could now see that the skin on the man’s face was badly scarred. His shirt and tie had not been covering up in any way the scarred skin but it was only when he took off the shirt and tie that I could see the scars. Also I imagined that I washearing his speech deteriorate across the three hours. Just as the man’s skin had deteriorated, so his speech had deteriorated, I thought. So that the man who had started the seminar in a shirt and tie, speaking very politely about selling imitation leather credit card-holders door-to-door, was, I thought, by the end of the seminar, only half-dressed, coarsely spoken, and, I imagined, moving his arms in such a way as to make his tattoos show exaggeratedly large.
    During the three hours of the seminar I sometimes felt exhilarated that I would not have to pretend on this day to my brother when he came home with the tall bottles of Fosters beer that I had been outside and that I had not been sitting in the same chair all day wasting my time reading while, in the woman’s words, my debt ticked over . I felt pleased and triumphant to have something of interest to tell the woman when she came home from work to ask me again about the beer in the fridge.
    While the man taking the seminar spoke, I was already forming in my mind the sentences which I would say to my brother and to the woman. I remembered thinking, as I watched the man’s tattoos, that the woman, after all, had been perfectly right about my laziness, my wastefulness, and my complete inability to move from the chair and pay off the debt of several hundred dollars which I owed my brother. I was, after all, I now recognised, a parasite on my brother ’ s good nature , and that what I had done was simply to move from the chair I had been sitting in in Wellington, fifteen hundred miles to the chair in my brother’s flat in Melbourne.
    I now realised that until this day I had paid no attention to the actual sky outside the window of my brother’s flat but only to the skies which filled the pages of the works of fiction into which I sometimes imagined myself being lifted under the power of my brother’s blue-coloured cans of Fosters beer.
    During the three hours of the seminar I sometimes thought of the work of fiction I had been reading and had put aside on this day. And I thought of how much I hated the woman who had made me do such a thing and who had made me see myself in this way. And I thought of how much I hated my brother’s weakness in living with the woman.
       
    Several months after I received the phone call which is mentioned in the first sentence of this story, I was sitting in the same room as the American writer mentioned in another part of this story who had spoken of getting even through writing. The room was not in the house of the writer, though I had, at an earlier time, looked in the pages of the phone book and walked past the house which is listed as the writer’s address.
    The writer was giving a lecture in this room on the subject of Philosophical Classics. I can recall noneof the details of what the writer said about this subject, except an example he was giving as to the part Reason played in the life of our minds in which he mentioned a visit to the horse races. Say I go to the races, the writer said, and this is unlikely and indeed the Greeks would say I had lost my Reason by going to the races, that it was a waste of time , but I am at the races and how am I to pick my horse?
    While the writer was speaking about picking a horse, I was thinking of the names of two horses, Gin Rhythm and Impressionism, and also of my brother who, for two years, had followed a system he had read about in a book on betting. It was a complicated system which involved entering in long, thin columns many numbers and then calculating mathematically a percentage figure which translated into that horse’s chances, with that rider on board, on that track, under those skies, of winning or placing in the race. After