Joel & Cat Set the Story Straight

by Nick Earls

  ‘Watch the DVDs.’

  ‘Well, exactly,’ she says. She puts her spoon down and gazes out the window, maybe at the CityCat gliding up to the Regatta stop. ‘Not that there are many movies from El Salvador, but there are plenty of Spanish movies.’

  ‘Has Jorge shown you any movies from El Salvador?’ Perhaps he was using the phrasebook in reverse, looking something up in Spanish to translate it into English. I’m not so sure, though. ‘It’d be good to see some.’

  ‘Yes. Assuming they make movies. Every country does, though, probably. Eskimos make movies.’ She scoops up another spoonful of muesli, but stops before it reaches her mouth. ‘It’s nice that you’re interested.’

  She eats the muesli, moves on quickly. I can’t say I’ve been too positive about Jorge, so she leaves my interest at ‘nice’, doesn’t overplay it. There’s no ‘I’m really glad you’re interested’. Better still, there’s none of the ugly ‘How would you feel about Jorge spending more time here?’, though that day may not be too far off.

  I’m interested, but not in the way she’s hoping. Not because I’m slowly warming to the idea of having Jorge in our lives. I’m interested because I’m beginning to wonder if Jorge might be a liar. I could fantasise about that – about Jorge the fake Salvadorean being unmasked as a ponytailed charlatan and run right out of here – and perhaps I have done, because it helps sometimes. But beyond the fantasy, I think I can see things that I genuinely doubt. See a man playing at being Salvadorean, like an extra sent from a casting agency and told to be generically Latino. Slap on this sombrero, run at the Alamo.

  But I have to be ready to be wrong, and to brace myself for the possibility that he might in some way make her happy.

  It’s best if I say nothing to Cat Davis at school. Her paragraph is undiscussable, and she seems to be in some kind of mood. Prue Wiseman avoids the seat next to her in Extension English and sits across the aisle. I hear Cat say something like, ‘I’ve never even been to Asia…’ She snuffles and her eyes look puffy. Mr Ashton asks her a question and she hardly seems to notice.

  Luke nudges me and says, ‘You’ve obviously broken her spirit with your story, man. She used to look okay till she got your paragraph.’

  Mr Ashton looks over our way. ‘I hope that’s not tandem-story talk,’ he says, putting on a deep fake frown. ‘We don’t talk about the tandem stories, remember? That all happens by email. We want these lively exchanges documented.’

  Cat blows her nose and groans. There’s no lively exchange in her today. Not that I’ve broken her spirit with anything. She already had more snot than spirit on Monday, and my paragraph doesn’t exist yet.

  ‘Oh, wait, she started, didn’t she?’ Luke says, and then clamps his lips together and slaps his hand over his mouth, as if the words had forced their way out against his will.

  Mr Ashton gives his raised-eyebrow look, then moves on.

  Luke picks up his pen and writes on the corner of a page, ‘Did she A M A Z E you?’

  Cat gazes blankly at the whiteboard, mouth-breathing, looking like some dopey fish trawling for plankton. I am not amazed.

  ‘All right,’ Betty says. ‘Since you’ve put it out in the open, I have to admit to my doubts as well. I’ve even got out my photographs – the ones from my Central American tour – and I’m not sure he’s quite right.’ She looks into her teacup. Some leaves have escaped the strainer and are clumping at the bottom. At Betty’s place, tea is always made in a pot. ‘Granted, the lack of sightings of Jorge in traditional costume doesn’t make it easy, since most of my photos seem to be of after-dinner cultural entertainment. And you can’t expect everyone from El Salvador to be the same shade of brown, but…’

  She leaves it to me to take it from there. ‘Did I tell you about the time when I asked him where his family had come from, and he said they’d lived in a village at the foot of a volcano? I asked him what it was called and he said it was just “the volcano”. They only had one, so there was no need for a name. And I pushed him a bit and he got tense and he said it had an old spiritual name, which he could not speak.’

  Betty puts her cup down onto its saucer. ‘Well, there you are,’ she says. ‘Very clever. He says something like that and then you look like a good old-fashioned racist if you try to make him tell you. Maybe it’s true, though. You can’t draw Mohammed, so maybe you can’t say the name of the volcano.’

  But we’re not going to let it rest. We keep trying to sound like cautious decent people, but we’re each charging on, thinking, believing, hoping that Jorge is a liar and we’re going to bring him down. Okay, maybe that’s just me. Is it any of my business to go after Jorge like this? Yes, dammit. It’s my life he’s hovering in. What is my mother thinking?

  We go next door, to my computer, and we google El Salvador. Someone there is studying the mysterious deaths of some rare turtles. Sad, in other circumstances perhaps intriguing, but no good to us today. We find the CIA World Factbook entry on El Salvador, and it’s got to have the kind of material we need. The country phone code is 503 and, no matter how much I think it through, that’s one fact I can’t see slipping seamlessly into conversation. The population’s 6.7 million. ‘So, about how many of the six point seven million people in El Salvador would you say you knew, Jorge? Why don’t you give one of them a call right now, just for old times’ sake?’

  ‘Oh, look at that,’ Betty says, pointing to a line on the screen that tells us the currency became the US dollar in 2001, having previously been the Colon.

  ‘Hardly a surprise it didn’t take when they named it after a bowel.’

  ‘I think it’s their name for Columbus.’ She laughs. ‘The explorer. I could be wrong, though.’

  ‘Colon? Seriously? And what’s Pisarro? Pancreas or something?’

  She laughs again, and her jewellery jingles. ‘I think they pronounce it Co-LON.’

  ‘Co-LON. That’s how you pronounce it for coLONic irrigation.’

  ‘It was a different world in fourteen ninety-two.’

  I’m sure she’s right. I’m sure Columbus had more on his mind than sluicing toxins out of a troublesome bowel. And as he saw the islands rising out of the sea and took them to be the Indies, did he think they’d be naming money after him in that part of the world in years to come? And that the name they would give it would be Colon?

  We make a few notes, and a plan.

  ‘So, when the man with the hat moves his arm that way, it is how many score?’ Jorge says, without looking away from the screen.

  ‘Four. Four runs. If it hits the rope it’s four, and that’s how he signals it.’

  He takes another mouthful of his beer. My mother hovers, hoping it’s bonding that she’s witnessing – Jorge, me and the one-day cricket. The South African bowler comes in, the ball thumps into the batsman’s pad and there’s a loud appeal.

  ‘No way,’ Jorge says, almost in a shout. ‘He’s outside off and he was playing a shot.’ The umpire agrees, the appeal goes nowhere. Jorge looks at me. ‘I learn that one before. Another day. Remember? Outside off, playing a shot? Not out.’ I don’t remember it. I don’t remember it because it never happened. ‘I learn quickly with beautiful wide screen.’

  He lets out a small laugh and nods to me, wanting me to laugh too. He looks into his beer bottle, which is almost empty. He can ask a question like someone who has just walked in on cricket for the first time, then offer a sophisticated interpretation of the LBW laws. Hmmm. That wide screen’s a good teacher.

  ‘So how was the school today?’ he says. He looks back at the screen for the next ball, and picks some olive from between his teeth with a fingernail.

  ‘Good. I was reading about El Salvador actually.’

  He turns halfway back to me, says ‘What?’ and doesn’t see the ball.

  ‘El Salvador.’

  ‘Really, how interesting,’ my mother says.

  She’s poured herself a second glass of wine in the kitchen. She sits down next to Jorge, looks at me, l
ooks at him. She’s hoping we’re on the brink of conversation. Maybe, in our own quiet way, on the brink of a breakthrough.

  ‘I saw that Independence Day is the fifteenth of September, from when the people won independence from Spain in eighteen twenty-one.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says in a very guarded way, like someone who could really use a phone-a-friend option.

  ‘I just wondered what you did to celebrate it.’

  He blinks, looks at my mother, looks at me. Looks back at the TV and says, ‘Those lines on the grass – what are they?’

  ‘Fielding restrictions,’ my mother says briskly. ‘But tell us about Independence Day.’ She’s nodding, smiling, keen.

  He’s clutching the beer with both hands, stuck.

  ‘Did you have the ceremony with the pig and the chicken?’ I’m making it up. There is no ceremony with a pig and a chicken. It’s a big ugly bear-trap of a question, but I try to say it like an innocent, fascinated eight-year-old.

  He wants it. He wants to go for it, to say, ‘Yes, yes, that’s what we did. Many times. I love it.’ His foot is hovering over the jagged rusty teeth of the trap and I’m willing him to jam it down.

  ‘We didn’t do much in my part of the country,’ he says, bringing a weary melancholy back into his voice. ‘We didn’t feel very independent. There has been war, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I saw that. From nineteen eighty to nineteen ninety-two.’

  He’s back on solid ground now, sure of his footing. The TV cuts to a wild shouted ad about a clearance sale at the convention centre, bargains bargains bargains at high volume and by the cartonful. My mother reaches for the remote and mutes it.

  ‘Decent people,’ Jorge says grandly, ‘they no speak of war. Not at all, ever.’

  ‘So, um, what did people do in your village?’ I ask him as the cricket comes silently back on. ‘Just in a general sense. Did they grow crops?’

  For a second or two he just looks at me, then he turns back to the TV.

  ‘Olives,’ he says, in a tone that’s creeping towards surly and with his eyes fixed on the muted screen.

  ‘Really? I would have thought it would have been too humid.’

  ‘The olives didn’t do so well. Except for a local kind, which is small and you would not like and would never get here. Corn. What about corn?’

  ‘I’m sure there would have been corn. And coffee and sugar.’

  ‘Yes, both of them. And tea.’

  ‘Tea? Really? I wouldn’t have thought –’

  ‘Not so much tea.’ He glances my mother’s way. She makes no move to put the sound back on. ‘The tea was new and it didn’t do so well. Same guy as with the olives. Brave but a bit stupid. Not from my village. Trying all things not from El Salvador. We never liked him anyway. Idiot. Sandra, we must have sound for me to learn cricket.’

  There’s a knock on the door, as planned.

  ‘Probably Betty,’ my mother says, not because she knows the plan but because anyone coming from outside the building would have to use the intercom downstairs.

  She opens the door, and Betty’s holding two large jars, each with a handwritten label stuck on it and a piece of bright checked fabric fitted over the lid.

  ‘Oh, hello, Jorge, you’re here too,’ she says, looking over my mother’s shoulder. ‘How nice.’ She glances at me, and I give the smallest nod I can. ‘I’ve been making chutney,’ she says. ‘With the mangoes from the trees downstairs. I know they’re only turpentines, but they come up nicely in a chutney.’

  She hands a jar to my mother, who fusses over it, reads the label aloud and takes a good look through the glass at the mango chunks inside.

  ‘And I thought I’d bring one for Jorge as well,’ she says. ‘I’m sure he can use some chutney at his place.’

  Jorge looks trapped, then tries not to look trapped. Glances at me as if there might be a conspiracy going, which there is. He stands up, puts on a smile.

  ‘Oh, very good,’ he says, and puts down his empty stubbie. He takes two steps towards Betty, wiping the last of the condensation from his hands. ‘Thank you,’ he says, rather formally. ‘You are very kind.’

  Betty holds the jar out, and says, ‘It’s nothing. Just a little chutney.’

  ‘No, very kind.’ He takes it from her, holds it in both hands. ‘If I can repay…’

  He lets it hang there with no intent to repay. It’s meant as a reworded thankyou, one of those offers that slips through a conversation unspent. Not this time.

  ‘Oh, well, thank you,’ Betty says, as if pleasantly surprised. ‘That’s very nice of you. I was thinking just this afternoon how lovely it would be to try some Salvadorean food again.’ The smile on his face wires itself into a tight grin. ‘I had a very special holiday in your part of the world.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says, blinking, handling the jar as if it’s suddenly too hot to hold.

  ‘Yes,’ she says with a vaguely threatening sense of calm. ‘Some lovely memories.’

  She turns to my mother who goes, ‘Oh, yes, yes, that’d be great.’ She puts her hand on Betty’s arm, looks at Jorge and nods. ‘We’d all like that. I’m sure Jorge would be happy to…’ Still nodding, nodding at Jorge.

  ‘Happy to,’ he says sternly, and then makes himself smile again. ‘Happy to, yes.’

  ‘Let’s do it soon,’ my mother says. ‘Oh, I want to do it already and I don’t even know what food it’ll be. Friday? How about Friday? The day after tomorrow? How’s everyone placed?’

  Jorge grips the jar like a man caught in a tidal surge. There’s not a thing he can do.

  Once Betty’s gone, he tries to squirm his way out of it.

  I’m loading the dishwasher as he’s saying, ‘Sandra, is not so good for me.’ There’s a pleading edge to it, but the deal is done. ‘I’m very private person.’

  ‘Oh, it’s just the four of us,’ my mother says in the breezy voice you use with a three-year-old on the brink of making a fuss about nothing. ‘And, anyway, you know Betty. And she likes the food, clearly. I think it’s really nice that she thinks of you when she’s making chutney. She includes you.’

  ‘Yes, very nice, but –’

  ‘Jorge, her husband died just after that trip. That’s why the holiday was special.’

  I click the dishwasher door shut, push the button for a regular cycle and stand up. Jorge has his chutney jar under one arm. He sighs.

  ‘Please, another beer,’ he says to me. ‘I am sad with this. I am tricked into cooking for this chutney thing.’

  He looks at my mother, like a puppy wrongly scolded.

  ‘Light or full-strength?’ she says, and she laughs.

  He holds on for a second or two, but then his look gets the edge of a smile to it, and she pats his cheek.

  ‘You know me, Sandra,’ he says. ‘I am full-strength man.’

  It’s the ideal time for me to go to my room and work on the tandem story. The cricket is petering out, the love-talk, I suspect, may be ramping up, and my work and Betty’s is done for the evening.

  I sit at my keyboard with the door shut, and I stare at Cat Davis’s paragraph. I don’t know about Jorge now. I just don’t know. I don’t think I’ve heard one convincing Salvadorean thing from him. He talks about his village like a desperate fake who can’t see any of it. Or maybe he’s lived through something horrendous, and I keep dragging him back there. Maybe our plan is on track. Or maybe I’m a mean-spirited, selfish son who’s aiming to stand between his mother, her introverted war-damaged lover and any prospect of happiness.

  No, he has to be the fake. I can’t be some maladjusted bad guy in my mother’s melodrama. In the Spanish movie of our lives, if Jorge’s not a fake, I’m the messed-up manipulative adolescent who’s one step away from torturing kittens, setting fires and taking pot shots at people from the top of a water tower – a scene never known to end happily, not in any movie, anywhere.

  Cat’s story opening sits there, offering nothing. I take a look at my notes, and then at her pa
ragraph again. I’m so embarrassed for her.

  Cat,

  Um, thanks for this. Killer opening. So glad we’ve put the demon Tuesday behind us for this week… My para 2 follows.

  Joel

  Far above, Max ‘Mad Eyes’ Eislander, armed to the teeth, plummeted straight as a lance through the pre-dawn sky to earth. Ever since he’d shot his way out of the North Korean torture chamber and crossed the border in the wild forests south of Punchon, there had been only one motive keeping him alive. Revenge. Revenge would be his today, bloody revenge. Ten thousand feet below… nine thousand… it was as if not a damn thing was happening in the world. As the wind screamed past his facemask and tugged at the HK XM-8 experimental assault rifle strapped to his back, Eislander knew that was about to change.

  – Thursday

  There are only so many times you can dust a handbag display before you start to go a tiny, little bit mental. Especially when there’s no dust to begin with. But the rules are when there are no customers we have to keep busy, and in the handbag department that means two things: dusting the handbag display cases and tidying the purse table, which is usually a jumbled mess of 100% pure Italian vinyl.

  Tonight has been worse than usual, though. Tonight it’s been so quiet that Jacinta – the other casual – got sent to help over in Shoes. Jacinta wasn’t impressed and walked off grumbling that the last time she helped out in Shoes she smelt like feet for a week. So with no customers to serve and Jacinta banished to Bunion World the last hour has gone super slow. Plus everything is Stepford Wives neat. Tidy. Dust-free. But I have to continue faux-dusting and faux-tidying in an obsessive-compulsive fashion until nine when I clock off. Right now, at seven, I long for a customer to come in and trash the place just to give me something to do. Give me a chance to go wild and reorganise the purses – this time perhaps in descending order of ugliness, subcategorised by colour and brand. Or perhaps even divide the table up: the right side for purses with a zip coin compartment and the left side for purses with clasps that will be broken within the month. Or maybe –