Joel & Cat Set the Story Straight

by Nick Earls

  ‘Yeah, but I just didn’t want him to think I was angry with him.’

  ‘Um, hello?’ I sit up again. ‘You are angry with him! Em, Aaron stood you up. This is why we spent all of Sunday talking about how you were better off having nothing to do with him ever again. Right? Remember that? Remember the “He’s a bastard, I can do better and deserve better” conversation? Em, the guy left you stranded at Chloe Belford’s party last week. Remember how Jade said he left with some total random? And then he made plans with you on Friday and never showed. He’s a tool, Em. A total knob. This is the guy who had dinner with your family and at the end of the meal actually used the expression “I’m as full as a fat sheila’s knickers”. He is beyond gross.’

  She sighs her Emma Marchetta sigh and says, ‘So I should delete Aaron’s number out of my phone.’

  ‘Excellent idea.’

  ‘And who cares anyway, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And anyway, I’m going out with Stuart on Friday night –’

  ‘Not Lisp Guy?’ I hear a yelp from outside. ‘Hang on a sec, Em.’

  I roll backwards along the floorboards on the caster wheels of my study chair and glance out my bedroom window. I see Mark, bike helmet askew, brushing dirt and grass and azalea petals off his knees. Not for the first time this afternoon I wish Mum or Dad was home.

  ‘Em, I’ll have to call you back.’

  I snap my phone shut and lean on the flyscreens of the open window.

  ‘You all right?’

  Mark looks up. Sees me watching him. Nods more vigorously than I would expect for a five-year-old who’s just stacked his bike, and gives me two thumbs up. Then he starts to reassemble a ramp out of some paint tins and plywood. It’s like he’s creating a primary-school version of Jackass. I roll back to my desk and watch out of the corner of my eye as he lines his bike up and begins to wrap one of Dad’s ties over his eyes.

  He wouldn’t.

  I watch in horror as he adjusts the tie so that his vision is completely obscured.

  Okay, so apparently he would.

  ‘Mark!’ I thump my window frame to get his attention. ‘MARK!’

  He turns his blindfolded head this way and that like some pathetic hostage on 24, trying to work out where my voice is coming from. Eventually he pulls down the tie, peeks over the top and looks up at me.

  ‘Hey, Johnny Knoxville, what have I said about doing stuff blindfolded? You’ll hurt yourself.’

  He rolls his eyes dramatically and says, ‘Whatever, Trevor. I’ll go and see Ben, Emily and Elouise instead.’ And with that, my little brother drops his bike on the spot, steps over it and heads to the Christiansens’ next door via the communal gate in the fence. The tie hangs loose around his neck. Now he looks like a dishevelled miniature office worker.

  I nod more to myself than to him, taking a mental note to make Mum aware of Mark’s current BMX stunt-riding phase. Things seem to have been getting past her lately.

  When our home phone starts to ring I make a great effort, as always, to catch it before it clicks over to our lame Davis Family answering-machine message. It was Mum and Mark’s idea that we each say a few words. I got stuck with ‘please leave a’. Frankly, I sound retarded. I get to the receiver before the machine kicks in.

  ‘Cat speaking,’ I say, holding the phone up with my shoulder as I glance through some of today’s mail.

  ‘Oh, Cat. Cat, it’s your mother.’

  ‘Oh, hi.’

  I toss the mail aside and lean on the marble kitchen counter, noticing an open Oreo packet on the table. I shake the plastic tray down so I can see how many of those little chocolate suckers are in there, only to be faced with a virtually empty tray. Looks like Captain Diabetes was here before me and he’s pretty much eaten an entire packet since he got home. I shove one of the two remaining biscuits into my mouth.

  ‘The thing is, ah, well, I can’t get hold of Aunty Fiona –’

  ‘You know, Mark’s started doing these crazy BMX stunt things in the front yard,’ I say, interrupting her while chowing down on the last Oreo. I figure this is as good a time as any to offload my concerns about Mark onto the person who gave birth to him. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t be letting him do that if I were you – not without elbow and kneepads or a full-face helmet or something. He’s gonna knock his teeth out. I just caught him trying to do some jump blindfolded.’

  ‘Jumps, right…’ She sounds distracted.

  I hear a phone ringing and raised voices in the background of her call.

  ‘Where are you? I thought we were having shepherd’s pie for dinner. Because you promised you’d make it.’ I get the distinct feeling that something is wrong. ‘Mum?’

  And that’s when she utters the one thing I would never, ever have expected my mother, Mrs Vanessa Davis, to say.

  ‘Cat, I’m at the Roma Street Police Station. I need you to come and pick me up.’

  ‘Maybe she’s a cat burglar or something. A high-rise jewel thief. Living a whole other life you don’t know about, outside the law.’

  I look at Emma but she’s looking over her shoulder, preparing to merge into the right lane, accompanied by the sound of an indicator light that’s clicking twice as fast as it should.

  ‘You should get that fixed,’ I say, through a mouthful of apple, nodding towards the indicator.

  ‘And you shouldn’t change the subject,’ she says, now checking her eyebrows in the rear-vision mirror. ‘Oh god, I think my eyebrows are actually meeting up.’ She’s frowning. ‘But you shouldn’t change the subject.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘The possibility that your mum is in the slammer.’

  ‘Em, this is my mother. Mothers do not get arrested.’

  ‘Courtney Love’s a mother. Can I have a bite of your apple?’

  I roll my eyes, hold the apple to her mouth and watch as she takes an enormous bite.

  I look at the apple. I look at her. I say, ‘You have the bite mark of a predator.’

  ‘Hey, let’s just remember who is doing who a favour here.’

  ‘Whom.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  She does have a point, though. As soon as I put the phone down from Mum, I was hit with the realisation that I had the car key but my mother had the car. When I called Em she dropped everything to drive me to the police station.

  ‘It’s a left here. Up this ramp.’ I blow my nose for the fifth time since strapping on my seatbelt. ‘Now you need to get into the right-hand lane because this is Roma Street.’

  ‘Did Mum murder somebody?’

  ‘WHAT?’ I turn around and look at Mark in the back seat of Emma’s green VW Beetle. To be honest, I’d actually forgotten he was there. I look at him, but he’s concentrating on some Transformer truck/ monster toy thing and trying to get it to flip over or something.

  ‘Mark.’ His attention is still on the toy in his hands. ‘MARK!’ I half-yell, now clicking my fingers at him to get him to look at me. This time he does. ‘She has not killed anybody. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  I face the front and check the road map.

  ‘Then why is Mum in jail?’

  I look at Emma with a ‘happy now?’ expression and turn back to confront my little brother. This time Mark’s looking straight at me.

  ‘Mum is not in jail. She’s at the police station, probably because she did something stupid like –’

  ‘Will there be bars on her windows and on the door?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘Possibly,’ says Em.

  I elbow her in the arm. ‘You have to do a u-ey up here because that’s it over there.’ I point to the police station across the road. ‘She probably did something stupid like driving around with a broken indicator light on her car,’ I say, for Emma’s benefit, ‘or, or she was jaywalking – crossing the road but not at a crossing, you know? Something like that.’

  ‘Yeah, but they wouldn’t take you in for that,’ Em takes her eyes off the roa
d and glances at me. ‘They just give you a ticket on the street. No, this has gotta be something waaaaay worse. They don’t put you in the slammer for nothin’. You know what your mum might be?’

  ‘You’re not really asking, are you? This is rhetorical, isn’t it?’

  ‘A real-life desperate housewife. Maybe your mum’s hooking and she –’

  ‘What are you, drunk? There’s a five-year-old in the back seat. And, PS, you’re not helping. All she said is that she’s at the station. Not in jail. Now I don’t want to talk anymore about it.’

  Mark and I spend the remainder of the car trip in silence. Emma, on the other hand, takes it upon herself to sing every verse of It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp. Next chance I get I’m gonna confiscate her copy of Hustle and Flow and change her computer password from GEELOVE to MONOBROW.

  Frankly, the sooner we pick my mother up and get this whole thing sorted out, the better.

  Five minutes later and the three of us are pushing through the heavy, swinging doors of the Brisbane Watchhouse. A place that at six on a Tuesday evening looks like Little Nimbin – we’re the only ones wearing shoes.

  ‘Remind me what we’re here to get – you know, apart from head lice and maybe tinea?’ I say to no one in particular.

  ‘Cat, we’re here to get Mum.’

  I look down into Mark’s anxious face and put my hand on his shoulder. ‘I know we are.’

  As if I could forget that we’re here to get my mother. My mother, who, I’m about to find out, is in a holding cell because her licence has been temporarily taken away.

  Not that I find that out immediately. There’s a queue. And just like the Coles deli, we have to wait our turn. And so Emma, Mark and I stand around looking like complete and utter losers. Emma and me in pinstriped maroon-and-white school dresses complete with maroon hair ribbons, white socks and black school shoes. Mark in the Spiderman costume he insisted on wearing. With slippers.

  Eventually it’s our turn to front the counter. I try to keep the embarrassment out of my voice as I tell Sergeant Cowen, a short, fat, bald, dim sim of a man, that we’re here to pick up my mother, Mrs Vanessa Davis. The dim sim coughs into a closed fist, wipes his forehead on his arm and says, ‘Hang on.’

  Less than a minute later My Mother the Felon rounds the corner wearing the pink dress she wore to last year’s Melbourne Cup lunch at the Stamford Plaza. Minus the fascinator.

  I begin to suspect she was arrested for overdressing.

  She walks sheepishly over to us, barefoot, pink stilettos slung over her shoulder, a ‘chicks in pink’ balloon tied to her left wrist, her facial muscles acting as scaffolding to the propped up, shaky smile on her face. She waves her left hand in the air and says, ‘Fancy seeing you here!’ Her balloon retaliates by head-butting her. Then she bumps into a chair.

  She fake laughs. I stare at her open-mouthed. She looks drunk.

  ‘You look drunk,’ I say. The balloon nods in agreement. So does the dim sim at the counter.

  ‘Oh don’t be ridiculush-lous, ridiculous,’ my mother says, hopping up and down on one foot while attempting to jam her left shoe onto her right foot. ‘I am not drunk.’

  And then, as if to prove her point, my mother suddenly spews into the pot plant under the Red Cross Give Blood poster.

  Suddenly I have Britney Spears for a mother.

  The dim sim shuffles round the counter and hands Mum a large glass of water.

  Then she’s dabbing the corners of her mouth with a tissue, pushing a lock of hair out of her eyes and saying, ‘Now, I think if we take Milton Road home we’ll miss most of the traffic.’

  I’m too stunned to say anything so I continue to stand there and stare at my mother in shock. Getting no response, my mother skulks over to the counter, hands the dim sim back his glass and says something about organising to get her car moved from Ann Street. Then she signs a form and hobbles past me – heading for the station door, as if she’d been in here selling Tupperware not on the verge of sharing a jail cell with some woman called Bubba who has personal-space issues, a face like a gargoyle and a thing for redheads. But no, my mother and her balloon are walking along complimenting Emma on her new caramel foils. It’s only once she reaches the double doors that she turns and realises that I’m still standing back at the counter.

  ‘You coming, Cat?’

  I march up, grab her elbow and pull her out of earshot of Emma and Mark.

  ‘Do you want to tell me what on earth is going on here? What have you been doing? And why are you drunk?’

  ‘I am not drunk,’ she says again, loudly, her arms flailing for emphasis. ‘I’m just…’ She pauses for a moment. ‘Merry.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  She brushes imaginary lint off her silk dress. ‘I was at a breast-cancer fundraising lunch and I miscalculated the number of drinks I could have and still be safe to dive.’

  ‘Drive.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she says, leaning into me, gripping my arm, as though I’m finally on her wavelength. ‘That’s right. And I couldn’t call a cab because I’d run out of cash and maxed my credit card out bidding on a certain celebrity auction item.’

  She gives a sly raise of her eyebrows, and I never want to know what that item was.

  ‘So thank you for coming in to get me,’ she says. ‘Much appreciated.’

  I watch as my mother straightens her dress and smooths down her hair and starts to push on the door that says PULL. As I stand there holding her handbag, shoes and balloon, I hear her mumble, ‘Now all I have to do is tell your father.’

  They argue into the night. About all the usual stuff. How my father’s never home and my mum feels like a single parent. How my dad has no choice but to work long hours since someone has to pay for the private-school fees. How frankly he’d rather be at work than at home being verbally attacked. My mum says, ‘That’s rich,’ and goes on and on about how she’s tired of having to do everything by herself and how she’s sick to death of having to ask for money and justify it when she just wants to buy ‘a bloody three-dollar New Idea’. I lie in bed and look at the clock – eleven p.m. – reassured that Mark will be sound asleep and hoping that this fight won’t end up with one of them sleeping in the spare room again. I think about how anxious Mark gets when Mum and Dad fight. How last year during a particularly rough patch, Mark started wetting his bed and playing up at pre-school. I hear some cupboard doors slam, the voices go quiet and then my father says, ‘What do you mean you were over the limit?’ And I hear him start to ask what my mother was doing drunk at four o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon. I hear my mum say that she was hardly drunk, and it was just a miscalculation on her part and god forbid she should have a life outside this house. She says that some days it takes all her energy just to get up in the morning and that it may surprise him but she didn’t harbour childhood dreams of making cheese-and-vegemite sandwiches every day of her life.

  My spirit wilts.

  That’s when I grab the earplugs to my nano and spin the dial until Augie March is all I can hear. I haven’t really listened to this album enough and now is probably a good time. And, anyway, I’ve got to stop downloading albums and then only listening to the one or two songs I’m familiar with. It’s when I’m propped up on my elbows that I notice the light of my iBook flashing. I haven’t sent Joel Hedges the opening paragraph of our tandem story.

  I contemplate leaving it and just getting up really early tomorrow and writing it then, but technically we were supposed to start today. Not tomorrow. And if I make one wrong move I just know that Joel Hedges is going to make a big deal out of it.

  I blow my nose as quietly as I can, push the covers back and move silently over to my desk, keeping my earphones firmly in my ears. I delete what I did before and write the paragraph from start to finish in just eight minutes. I’m too tired to care anymore about what he thinks. Then I type in my password, press Send and imagine my words hurtling through cyberspace.

  TANDEM STORY: Cat Davis and
Joel

  Hedges She wakes. Disappointment seeps through her body. For a moment she lies perfectly still, her breath low. Deep. Reluctant. She lets herself imagine that what actually lies ahead is blinding light. The feeling of pushing through the finishing-line tape. The sheer and utter relief that it is over. She imagines Christopher. But then the sound of a garbage truck begins. A car horn beeps. A child squeals. A distant phone starts to ring. Her eyes open as though of their own volition. Elizabeth always hated Tuesdays.

  – Wednesday

  Well, good for Elizabeth – Elizabeth and her fascinating eye-opening on this dreadful, dreadful Tuesday that starts our tandem story. A shred of narrative wouldn’t have gone astray.

  I’ve got a day to fix this, get some real writing started.

  Cat’s email is waiting for me in the morning when I wake up. Actually, I’m not properly awake when I look at it, so I read it through several times on the assumption that I’ve missed something. It turns out I haven’t. There’s a bit of seeping, some pushing, the sound of garbage. Some really short. Sentences. Excellent.

  My mother’s scooping homemade Bircher muesli into bowls when I get to the kitchen. She pushes yesterday’s paper and a rates bill aside, and the Spanish phrasebook and a pen fall to the floor. What was Jorge doing, making notes the night before last? I’m sure that’s what I saw.

  I pick them up and put them back on the counter. There’s a picture on the front of the book of a Spanish woman in a broadbrimmed hat and a stiff white-collared shirt. Her face is all in shadow and she looks pensive, even sad. Deep. Reluctant. Disappointment seeps. Stop. Thinking. Like. Cat. Davis.

  ‘So, how’s it going? The Spanish?’ I straighten the book up so that its edge is parallel to the edge of the counter. That’s as close as it’ll get to tidy.

  ‘Well, not quickly,’ she says. She throws some sultanas onto the muesli and takes two spoons out of the drawer. ‘I thought Jorge would want it more, would want to speak Spanish more. I’m a long way off speaking Spanish, obviously, but…’ She shrugs, as if she’s embarrassed to have had the idea in the first place. ‘He says speaking too much Spanish could become a bad habit. Not good for his English. But I think I should learn some. Understand the culture –’