This is the Life. Alex Shearer

was the new and shiny blue one on the gas hob.

      ‘No. My kettle. My kettle.’

      ‘You mean the old burnt black and crusty one with no handle?’

      ‘My kettle.’

      ‘Louis, I didn’t think you wanted it any more. I didn’t think we needed it. As we have these nice new kettles. So I’m afraid – it’s gone.’

      ‘You threw it out? You threw out my kettle?’

      ‘Louis, it was dangerous, you could have scalded yourself, or set fire to the place, you had to wrap a tea towel around it. It was a liability.’

      He just looked at me through his milky eyes, now filled with infinite reproach, and I felt like some kind of murderer for what I had done.

      ‘Louis, I didn’t know it meant that much to you. I thought it was just an old kettle.’

      Without another word, he turned his back on me, and he went to his room and lay down on his bed. The mix of chemo and radiotherapy was very tiring and he spent a lot of the day asleep.

      I felt bad. I realised what I had done. It was part of Louis I had thrown away. For years Louis had been the man with the kettle with no handle. People had come round and he had made them a coffee or a tea or a herbal something. And he had poured out their drinks, first carefully wrapping the dirty, scorched old tea towel around the body of the kettle. And they’d watched him do so, and everyone knew that Louis was the man with the kettle without a handle. And so it had been for many years. There had been talk and conversation and many a long hour of putting the world to rights, there in that choked and cluttered kitchen that had seen neither floor cloth nor mop for a decade.

      But that had been Louis. That had been part of who he was.

      ‘You know, Louis, don’t you? The guy with the beard and the kettle.’

      Now he only had the beard left and that had been to the barber’s.

      I felt bad, like a tyrant, like one who had taken advantage of vulnerabilities. But I couldn’t bring the kettle back. It had gone to the dump and even if I searched I would never find it. It was there with all the other long-gone and inadequate domestic appliances. True, I had bought him a new one, but what use was new when it wasn’t what you loved?

      I don’t have much advice to give anyone; I’ve learned very little in my life; but here’s my gem of wisdom. Don’t take a dying man’s kettle away. You won’t be doing him any favours. Nor yourself either.

       7

       FRIED FISH

      Louis had a friend called Halley who was one of the bohemian types and who lived up in the hills forty minutes from the city, with trees for company and scrub turkeys and wallabies, and what sounded like perpetual wind chimes but which turned out to be bell birds – a kind of myna bird with a piercing call which would drive the overly sensitive to insanity in under a week.

      Halley made a living from picture frames and he lived in a shed that he had built himself on some land he had bought. This wasn’t like a European shed, it was an Australian shed, a far larger and more substantial thing. Louis had put the roof on it. Close to the shed stood a barn, which Louis had also put the roof on, and which contained timber of all sorts – at least all sorts suitable for the making of picture frames. The frames were fine and artistic things, skilfully crafted. But it was a hand-to-mouth game. Halley said his profits were small and his hours were long. He too drove a ute, but it only had a fifth of a million miles on the clock, so it was almost in showroom condition.

      The track he lived up was so steep and lacking in bite on a wet day that you would need someone to sit in the back of your truck to put weight over the rear axle, otherwise you’d be skidding back down again in a hurry or ending up in the ditch.

      Like Louis, Halley was also a man of some education, interesting CV, and of varied and floundered relationships. He was also one to whom the odour of the nine to five smelt unpleasant, and he would work eight to six or even longer to avoid getting tangled up in it.