Joel & Cat Set the Story Straight

by Nick Earls

  ‘Excuse me?’

  I turn around, momentarily excited at the prospect of serving a customer, only to be faced with Ann-Maree – one of the floor supervisors.

  Ann-Maree is in her forties and has the looks of an aging Bratz doll with a personality to match. I’ve started to think that if she ever does smile her face will crack. She has a size-six body, which struggles to balance her oversized head, bug-like eyes and big Bratz doll hair. Plus her breasts are so big they kind of resemble a boob-shelf.

  Ann-Maree looks me up and down and then stares at my name badge. Despite the fact that I’ve worked here for a year she never seems to remember who I am.

  ‘Cat-tree-oh-na?’

  I nod to confirm that she is in fact literate and has managed to read the eight letters correctly, even though she’s actually pronounced it phonetically and wrong.

  She looks me up and down again.

  ‘What is rule number four in the employee handbook?’

  I shrug.

  Ann-Maree’s forehead creases up, or at least it would crease up if she hadn’t had so much Botox injected into it.

  ‘It’s about appearance, Cat-tree-oh-na. Did you happen to come to work this evening without ironing your clothes?’

  I feel my neck and face heat up.

  ‘I would appreciate it if, in future,’ – she struggles to raise her eyebrows at me – ‘you made a greater effort with your appearance.’

  She says the word ‘appearance’ as though it’s distasteful. Especially in relation to me. I push my hair behind my ears and run the palms of my hands down my black skirt in a desperate attempt to iron myself out on the spot – push out any wrinkles or crinks – like that will make a difference.

  ‘Cat-tree-oh-na, this store has a reputation,’ she says in a tone full of underlines and bolds. ‘And we expect our staff to maintain the dress standards that are set out in the employee handbook. I think it might be a good idea if you re-acquaint yourself with the handbook before you do another shift on my floor.’

  ‘Right,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry. I just, um, I did iron it, but…’ I trail off. All I can think is that this is Mum’s fault. She said she’d have my work clothes ready to go this afternoon. And she didn’t. They weren’t. She wasn’t even home. Again. So I had to organise for Mark to hang out at the Christiansens’, then pull my white work top out of the clothes hamper and try to hand-wash it, get it in the dryer and iron it in the space of ninety minutes before walking up the hill to Westfield Indooroopilly where I work. As if I don’t have enough to do without having to be a mother to myself as well.

  But Ann-Maree doesn’t care about any of that, and it’s none of her business anyway. I stop looking at my feet and look up at her. As a muscular size ten I feel fairly sure I could snap her like a twig. And I feel like saying something back to her. Something like, ‘Eat hanger, bitch.’ Except that Skeletor here doesn’t look like she’s eaten anything at all since last October.

  But I don’t say anything, of course. Instead I stand there and take shit from someone who looks like a praying mantis in drag.

  Ann-Maree, oblivious to the thoughts whirling through my head, gives me a self-satisfied smile and says, ‘Right, well, just tuck your blouse in and then you might want to serve those customers over there.’ She says this in a tone that suggests that I, in all my crumpled glory, am letting the store down, that I should have noticed a customer approaching my counter behind me while she was telling me off.

  I nod and walk away, thinking that in my world the devil doesn’t wear Prada, she wears Rockmans and a scrunchie.

  It’s not until I’m on my fifteen-minute tea break, sitting on one of the benches outside HMV, that I get a chance to properly work on my next paragraph for the tandem-story assignment. It’s good to finally have a clear head. Disgusting as it was, I have to say that nasal spray did the job.

  When I checked my email this morning at home there was the usual batch of unfunny forwards and the requisite chain letter from Gemma B, an email from Brodie with a link to an article about Orlando Bloom, the school swim-team newsletter, an email from Joel Hedges, and two emails from Emma. The first announced that she can’t see a movie on Friday night as we’d planned since she’s being forced against her will to have a bridesmaid’s dress fitting for her cousin Sofia’s wedding. The second contained a link to Oprah’s ‘Suburban Mom Prostitutes’ episode. I opened Joel’s email last and initially thought his paragraph was meant as a joke. But as I sat there, staring at my inbox, looking for another email from a certain J Hedges, I realised that he was entirely serious. Joel has responded to my opening paragraph with complete and utter boy’s-own-adventure-style crap. I mean, he’s clearly ripped off Matthew Reilly. And it’s a bad rip-off at that. It’s not like I didn’t give him ample material to work with. Understanding that he wouldn’t want to write a female character, I deliberately introduced Charles. He could have taken Charles anywhere, but he just disregarded him. Disregarded all of it for some Mad Max or Mad Eyes or whatever-the-hell-his-name-is character who parachutes with a knife between his teeth and a gun strapped to his back. And, hello, only a total dickhead would parachute with a knife between their teeth.

  Which is why I raised all of this today with Mr Ashton. And I tried to raise it in a general sort of way since I know that we’re not allowed to discuss our tandem story specifically. But clearly this had to be flagged. I mean, Joel isn’t taking this seriously and I needed Mr Ashton to know about it. I can’t afford to have Joel’s bad attitude screw up my grades.

  So when Mr Ashton started rambling on at the beginning of the lesson about something in last week’s episode of Lost, I put up my hand and said, ‘Hypothetically, what do you do if your partner is plagiarising the work of someone else?’

  Okay, perhaps plagiarising was too strong a word. Perhaps using that word was a bit of a mistake because Mr Ashton looked bemused and Joel turned to me and said, ‘WHAT? What are you talking about? I haven’t plagiarised anybody, but you’re about to know what the word “slander” means.’

  Then Mr Ashton told me not to worry about it and to leave decisions about plagiarism up to him, and Luke (a.k.a. Chlorine Boy) mumbled something that included the words ‘such a bitch’. Joel just glared at me in a way that makes me think that things are about to go from bad to totally screwed between him and me.

  So I’m sitting here on this bench, sipping on a Gym Junkie Boost Juice, wondering what to do now. Since Joel is not going to be made to rewrite his paragraph, I need to figure out how to work ‘Mad Eyes’ Eislander into Elizabeth’s world. How to work Joel’s words into mine.

  When I walk in at nine twenty-five I find my father – shirt sleeves rolled up, tie loosened – sitting at the kitchen table drinking a glass of red wine in the dark. The only light in the house is the one I’ve turned on in the hall. His eyes are underlined with dark clouds and his unshaven face and messed-up hair belong to someone else. Not my father – the upbeat, wise-cracking GP everyone adores.

  ‘Ah, Cat,’ he says, running his right hand through his hair before draining the last of the wine into his mouth.

  ‘Why are you sitting in the dark?’ I flick the light switch on, which betrays the scene around him. The unstacked, unwashed dinner plates. The discarded serviettes. The wine-in-a-cask thing he seems to have going on. The Tina Turner background music that I’ve only just noticed.

  ‘Geez,’ I say, looking at the kitchen. ‘Has Mum seen this mess?’

  I don’t wait for Dad to answer. Instead I’m heading for the fridge in the naive hope that maybe there’ll be some leftovers from tonight’s dinner. A serving of roast or spaghetti bolognaise that Mum might have cling-wrapped for me, knowing that I’d be hungry when I got home. A few months ago I would have been guaranteed a dinner waiting for me after work, but lately Mum hasn’t been doing so much cooking.

  ‘God, don’t tell me you didn’t leave me anything,’ I say over my shoulder. ‘I’m absolutely starving.’

  My fat
her sighs. ‘Your mum left beef stroganoff for us all. Your serve is in the back, behind the Polish sausage.’

  I immediately spot the blue Tupperware container, but I continue pushing jars and containers around on the hunt for more goodies. ‘I thought Mum said she was going to get me some low-fat Frûche thingies this week. Emma’s been having them at school and they are totally –’

  ‘Cat.’ He pauses. ‘Cat, sit down. I need to talk to you.’

  I groan. ‘Dad, I just walked in from work. Can’t I please just have something to eat?’

  I’m still busy inspecting the use-by date on the Polish sausage when he says, ‘I don’t know how else to say this… Your mother’s gone.’

  I turn and stare openmouthed at my father.

  He looks at his feet and says, ‘I’m so, so sorry. She moved out. Permanently.’

  At first I’m silent and I just stand there, one hand leaning on the open fridge door, the other hand holding a chunk of Polish sausage that expires in five days, staring at my father as though I have misheard what he’s said. She’s left us. But that doesn’t make sense. They ignore each other for a while, sure. Occasionally they sleep in separate bedrooms. Sometimes Mum threatens to leave and one time last year she took it so far as to stay a night at Aunty F’s. But she doesn’t leave properly. Seriously. That’s not what they do.

  ‘This is because of that police-station thing,’ I say, walking towards my father, pointing at him with the Polish sausage in a way that I was always taught not to do. ‘You kicked her out. You kicked her out because she lost her licence. She wasn’t even drunk, Dad. Not really. Okay? I was there. I’m the one who was there to pick her up. It was a miscalculation, that’s all. She was hardly –’

  ‘Cat, Cat.’ He’s standing up now, his hands out in a quietening gesture. He takes a step towards me. I take a step back. ‘I didn’t kick her out. This isn’t about the police station. Sometimes relationships just don’t work. No matter how hard you try.’

  ‘But you haven’t tried. There’s just you asking why we have to eat tuna savoury so often, and her complaining that you’re never here. I don’t call that trying.’

  ‘Well,’ his voice sounds strangled and that’s not how I want my dad to sound right now. I watch as he loosens his already loose tie and wipes sweat off his forehead. ‘Your mum feels that she needs a break.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Cat, I – I don’t know. I don’t have the answers.’

  ‘Well, it’s shitty.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’ He nods his head. ‘It’s shitty.’

  For a moment we both stand there in silence.

  ‘You’ve had fights before,’ I say hopefully. ‘You always get over it. Remember last year? She went to Aunty Fiona’s. Well, maybe you just need to go over there. Take her to a movie. She always wants to go to Gold Class and you…’

  Dad shakes his head. ‘This time it’s different. She’s not at Aunty Fiona’s.’

  He walks up to the kitchen bench and slides a piece of paper towards me.

  I stare down at the note. Flick it open with one finger. It’s in her handwriting. A phone number and address in Lissner Street, Toowong. So she actually stood in this kitchen and wrote out these details. And then packed her bags. And then left.

  ‘She wants you to call her.’

  I stare at the note, my mind goes forward and back and forward and back – trying to comprehend what I’m being told. What does she mean she needs a break?

  ‘You don’t get to have breaks. You’re not meant to want to have a break. There are no breaks.’ I’m not sure who I’m saying this to. I look at my father, but he just stares back at me. ‘And what? She was so desperate to get away from us that she couldn’t even wait for me to get home from work?’

  I crumple the note up in my hand and throw it to the floor.

  ‘She loves you very much. And the last thing we want is for this to impact your school work. Year Eleven is a big year and –’

  ‘I’m in Year Twelve, Dad.’ I say the words through gritted teeth and look at him with loathing.

  ‘Oh no, right, right. No, I knew that. I’m just –’ He looks at me with apologetic eyes. But it’s too late.

  ‘Whatever.’ I turn my back on him and start to walk out of the kitchen.

  ‘We both want you to know – it’s important that you know – that this isn’t about you and Mark.’

  It’s the mention of Mark’s name that makes me stop in my tracks and turn back around.

  ‘He’s staying the night next door.’ And then my father runs his fingers through his greying hair and says in a weary tone, ‘We have to find a way to tell him.’

  I abandon the beef stroganoff and head for the safety and familiarity of my bedroom. As I walk through the door, the first thing I see is my open laptop and Joel’s latest paragraph still there, staring at me. I look at my watch – ten o’clock. This is the last thing I feel like doing, but it’s my turn and I don’t have a choice. After my plagiarism allegation, if I don’t hand this paragraph in Joel will go after me for sure. Dob me in the first chance he gets. So I sit down, reread Joel’s ridiculous offering about a plummeting assailant who likes the taste of cutlery, and try to get this story back on track.

  Elizabeth slipped out of bed, once again ignoring the pale-blue Versace silk robe and slippers that Christopher had bought for her as an anniversary gift last September in Paris. She sits at her dressing table, feeling the velvet cushion on her skin, and slowly caresses the antique fittings and solid gold handles. She stares at her reflection and begins to brush, pulling her mother’s ivory-handled brush through her long auburn hair. One. She lifts the brush and pulls it through her hair again. Two. This time she feels resistance, a knot. She pulls harder. Three. Her eyes wander over to the photograph of him. Christopher. She is beginning to understand the appeal of living in a fantasy world. The appeal of his complete rejection of everything real and sane, instead choosing to immerse himself in a world where he was the hero and never failed to save the day. The only time she heard the name ‘Mad Eyes’ Eislander these days was during the monthly visits to the insane asylum before the staff had given him his tablets.

  – Friday

  So, Elizabeth can count all the way to three. So glad we’re writing a story about a genius. About a hair brusher. There’d be a whole novel in that if we had the time.

  Elizabeth brushes her hair.

  Then nothing happens for a very long time.

  Elizabeth brushes her hair again.

  Then nothing happens for a much much longer time, other than a bit of gazing and contemplation about, well, nothing.

  Elizabeth brushes her hair again.

  Then nothing happens for about a hundred years in this goddamn story, though it feels like a million and a half, while the reader gets bored and dies and the reader’s children get bored and die and dozens of wars come and go and people live on Mars now if they want to and…

  Elizabeth brushes her hair, and after about a thousand years of deep deep penetrating thought comes up with a completely lame-o idea about drugs and a mental-health facility. Thank god she ignored the pale-blue Versace blah blah blah at the start or Cat would never have got to bed. Elizabeth could have contemplated that the whole night, her hairbrush rigid in her tiny claw-like hand. Imagine how long the paragraph would have been then. Was it cyan? No? Aquamarine? There’s a whole breathy chapter in that, surely? I bet Cat knows all those colour names and she’s barely holding back, perhaps already drafting paragraph three with the Versace shade quandary in mind.

  But I’ll take the moral high ground. I’ll let this play itself out, and consider it a gift in its own limp way, since it’s the analysis we’ll be marked on and I’ll be analysing Elizabeth with both barrels when the time comes.

  Is this Cat’s life? This hazy pointless introspection? Surely not. She’s too annoying to be as dull as Elizabeth.

  Or perhaps not – perhaps another day begins at the Davis house, and
it’s all Versace robes and ivory-handled hairbrushes. Cat’s mother feeds four oranges – one for each member of the family – into an expensive juicing device. She cuts grapefruit, pours bowls of toasted muesli. Cat snuffles in, fills the first of the day’s thousand tissues, bitches about something. Where’s the maraschino cherry on my grapefruit? When was the last time you polished this silver?

  Today we get through Extension English without any outrageous allegations. Cat seems to be less of a snot monster than she was earlier in the week, and Prue’s prepared to sit next to her again.

  ‘Why do you keep looking at her in class?’ Luke says to me afterwards, and I didn’t honestly think I had been.

  ‘Because I can’t believe how this piece-of-shit story can come out of her, and I’m just looking to see if there’s some kind of clue.’ That’s what I tell him, and he laughs.

  ‘Not going so well?’

  ‘Her character’s spent all week brushing her hair and mine hasn’t killed her yet. Other than those two narrative flaws, it’s fine.’

  My mother speculates about Salvadorean cuisine. She clicks her fingers and says, ‘Pupusas. I think they’re like thick tortillas, but classically Salvadorean.’

  ‘I thought they were Indian babies. Sorry, Native American babies.’

  She laughs. ‘No that’d be papooses.’

  ‘It’s a fine distinction.’

  ‘Hey, the minute he starts serving baby, it’s over.’

  She laughs at her own joke. It’s a good sign, a joke like this. And not the kind of thing she’d say to Jorge, I’m sure. Don’t change for these crappy men, I want to tell her. But that’s not the kind of conversation we ever have.