by Nick Earls
In the car, I’m feeling pretty traumatised. My father has spent the entire journey going on and on about how Sandy is just a friend and how was he to know that they were being miked by some sneaky Sizzler waitress?
‘I don’t want to hear it,’ I snap at him when he tells me for the umpteenth time that they were simply reciting lines from a Gilbert and Sullivan musical.
I feel like my world has officially come apart. And the worst thing is, I caused this. This is my fault. I try and get my parents back together, and somehow my father ends up dirty dancing in a restaurant with Joel Hedges’ mother.
For once I’m actually grateful to have to sit at my computer and write the next paragraph of our tandem story. At least it will take my mind off my dysfunctional family. I re-read Joel’s paragraph.
When I read it this morning I was incensed. I still can’t believe he turned Elizabeth into a man. But I suppose it is kinda funny. And I guess I did kill off his character and cut off his tongue…
Joel,
Let’s talk tomorrow, re: a plan. We can’t have them turning up to the tandem-story Presentation Night together. Surely a love of cheese-bread isn’t enough to build a relationship on?
Cat
Elizabeth adjusts her wig and smooths out the wrinkles from her Laura Ashley dress as she watches the grenade roll towards her feet. She bends down and prepares to peg the grenade back in the direction of Eislander. ‘CUT!’ The director appears out of nowhere, chewing on a pen, a troubled expression on his face. ‘Guys, can we try that again? I know we said we’d try it this way, but it’s just not working. David?’ He looks over at David Spade, who is still peeling latex off his face. ‘David, I think we need to stick to the original script. This is a modern-day love story, after all. Pride and Prejudice meets XXX. I’m not sure the audience will go for it if we kill off Elizabeth Benetton within the first twenty minutes.’
– Thursday
I touched Cat Davis. Next to the salad bar, in Sizzler, I touched Cat Davis. While she stood there telling me about her mother, stacking her plate with two kilos of seafood extender. Then she looked down and saw it there – all that faux crab – and shuddered, startled that even that was out of her control, even her own dinner plate and the tongs in her hand.
Then my hand was on her shoulder. And then it was stuck on her shoulder, since I have no idea of the etiquette with that. How long should it stay there? When should you take it away? What’s the deal with hands on shoulders? Why did I put it there in the first place?
I was steadying us both, maybe.
My image of the Davis family was nothing like this. Cat’s mother gone, a brother whose eyes never left his Game Boy but whose stomach hoovered away independently, her father all bright-white teeth and a highly suspicious tan.
Peter Davis, with his playfully patterned shirt and his sleazy pageant-host demeanour. Peter Davis and my mother, frolicking with fruit and veg – forty-something and publicly smutty with asparagus, adlibbing the opening scenes of a high-fibre X-rated movie for old people. In Sizzler. Children could have been scarred for life. Including me. Suddenly the Presentation Night – the Presentation Night that already looked like a bad idea – looks far worse due to their likely pornographic take on the meal.
And my strange meeting with Cat at Indooroopilly now makes sense. It was years ago when things went wrong with my parents, but I won’t forget it. I made up lots of stories, telling them to myself and to everyone else. Stories to patch over the truth, to cover up. Stories to tell myself it would all be okay. If it had happened this year, I would have made up stories too. I know I would. You’ve got to cover your tracks – their tracks – until you’ve said it to yourself enough times that it doesn’t shock you anymore. Then you can tell people, maybe.
There was no way back for my parents, but sometimes there is. Standing there at the salad bar, I couldn’t tell Cat what’s going to happen. It’s not for me to tell her that maybe they won’t get back together and maybe that’ll be for the best. All I could see, that I was sure of, was the stress in the muscles of her face, the signs of the sleep that she’s been losing. And some dumb line about seafood extender was the best I could manage. Then the hand on the shoulder, and then we seemed to be a team, getting through it as a team.
My mother and I face each other over bowls of cereal. She’s cut up some strawberries and a kiwifruit and put them on top. She picks up her spoon, but she waits, hoping I will say something. Hoping for me to say something like, ‘Thanks for being a wonderful, thoughtful mother and cutting up fruit for me,’ as if it’s a special treat that erases all of last night’s misdeeds.
‘Looks great,’ I tell her, as if the conversation’s about to go her way. ‘Can I assume you’re going to be able to hold back and just eat it, or do you have something more inappropriate in mind?’
‘Come on, we were just messing around,’ she says, frowning, her spoon still hovering. ‘Those were lines from Gilbert and Sullivan, you know. We both did musicals at school.’
‘They sounded like lines from a one-nine-hundred number to me.’ She’s not getting off the hook so easily. ‘You and Sleazy Pete…’
Did I actually say that? Did I actually say Sleazy Pete?
‘Dr Davis?’
‘That’d be the one.’ No backing out now.
She laughs. ‘Sleazy Pete. Oh, I wish you hadn’t put that in my head.’ She scoops up a piece of strawberry and some cereal. ‘It’s not what you think. He’s new to this. He hasn’t quite found his balance yet. Think how long they were together. It can’t be easy. I’m being supportive, being a good support-group member.’
She stops before she overdoes it, just.
We eat our cereal and I say, ‘Good for you,’ and she laughs and says, ‘Sleazy Pete. Hah!’
‘Well, really, every item of food was some new opportunity for the dance of lurve. It was pretty nauseating.’
‘He was kidding. It was Sizzler.’ She sips at her coffee, which is still too hot. ‘He was kidding.’
‘And you were being supportive.’
‘I’m glad that message is getting through. You’ve got to admit he does have lovely eyes, though…’
‘If I lose my breakfast, it’s not bulimia, okay?’
‘That was me kidding,’ she says. ‘Though, really, objectively, his eyes… Well, they are very blue. Some people go for that. And he’s funny. Funny’s good. But, you know, that’s not how this is. It’s not about whether he’s any kind of catch, or not.’ She blows on her coffee, takes a mouthful. ‘Really.’
She looks at her watch, says she should be hurrying up. She has an eight o’clock meeting. She’s cramming folders into her bag when I go to my room and check my email.
And it’s a film now. That’s Cat’s latest move. And David Spade is Eislander. Or Elizabeth/Heckler (a.k.a. Hands of Doom). I’m not sure which. She’s turned the latex trick on me, and recruited David Spade to do it. Dammit. Why David Spade? How can I top David Spade?
I’m walking to school when it hits me – David Spade in Joe Dirt, a one-dumb-joke film that coasted along on perhaps the worst mullet in history.
Emma, Cat and I went to the movies once. I can’t remember what it was that Cat wanted to see, but I was up for it, too, and Emma vetoed it. ‘I don’t want to see a movie where I have to think,’ she said. And then she saw a poster for a David Spade movie that wasn’t playing yet and said, ‘Hey, guys, there’s a new David Spade movie coming. How great was Joe Dirt?’ Cat and I laughed. Emma’s complicated eyebrows signalled something was wrong. Before I’d worked out that she was serious, that she’d actually liked Joe Dirt, I was saying, ‘I hear he’s linked up with Rob Schneider to do Joe Dirt Two: Dirt and Dirtier,’ and Cat was laughing again. Emma punched her in the arm. Quite hard, I think.
‘You’re smirking at each other,’ Luke says to me. ‘That was a distinct smirk.’
‘No, it wasn’t.’ We’re in Extension English and Mr Ashton’s fiddling around with the back of the D
VD player. ‘She’s just got a zit that makes her mouth move that way, and I was laughing at her.’
‘No, you weren’t. And the only zit I can see is the one she’s trying to hide with her fringe. That was smirking. From both of you.’
There’s a burst of noise, and a piracy warning appears on the TV screen.
‘Whatever you say, Lukey.’
It was a smirk, though, and why wouldn’t it be? Mr Ashton reappears and starts steering us through the menu with the remote while telling us what we should be looking out for. He talks at half-speed when he multi-tasks. Why wouldn’t we smirk, when the disgrace of last night is safely behind us and David Spade is all of a sudden front and centre in our tandem story?
An Irish voice speaks over footage of a Dublin hotel. An author starts talking about his character, the process he went through to think his way into his story and into the room he’d been given to write about, the times he wondered what would be going on in all the other writers’ imagined rooms, and how he told himself to imagine none of it, and to get on with his own room, his own story.
‘It’s a great device,’ he says, ‘giving each writer a room to set a story in in the same hotel, on the same night. But if Roddy’s two doors down the hall and his character’s there with a loaded gun, will mine hear the shot if it goes off? Do you need to know that kind of thing?’
I find Cat when Luke’s looking something up in the library at lunchtime. I ask if we can talk and she says, ‘Yeah, sure. Emma’s swimming. Not that that… It’d be good to talk. After last night. Who are those crazy old people?’
She laughs, and it’s been a long time, I think, since I’ve seen her laugh. We head away from the tuckshop crowds, towards the tennis courts. While we’re walking she looks down at her lunch, moving salad around in a bowl with a fork, looking for something better. It’s mostly iceberg lettuce and quartered tomato.
‘So what do we do about this?’ she says. ‘My father never had these hormones till now, I’m sure. I don’t know about your mother, but –’
‘I think it’ll be okay.’
‘Okay? In what way? Your mother and my father are about to… oh god…’
‘No, no. I don’t think they are.’ I almost put my hand on her shoulder again, but this is school, that wouldn’t be right. I don’t even know if it was right last night. ‘I talked to my mother, this morning. It’s okay. I hope.’ My hand is hovering halfway to her shoulder, purposeless, halfway also to some camp conversational gesture. I swing it down by my side. Now it feels robotic. ‘They’ve talked. She knows your parents’ situation. She’s being a friend. It’s a support-group thing. She even made a joke about him having lovely eyes and being a catch.’ Okay, mistake. Cat’s anxiety levels rise. She drives her fork through a piece of tomato and hits the bottom of the bowl. ‘Which meant she was kidding. That’s my point. I think I was wrong in Sizzler, thinking there was more to it. I want to be wrong.’
She stops, turns to me. ‘You want to be wrong? You weren’t wrong. You’re regularly wrong, but not with this.’ Then, slowly, taking time over every word and putting on a voice not unlike my mother’s, ‘Oh, you naughty, naughty boy…’
‘Please, I need to believe she just thought it was poor behaviour with asparagus, and a Gilbert and Sullivan quote that kind of went off track.’
My mother’s phone is beeping as she comes in the door. She’s rummaging around in her bag. She pulls the phone out, looks at the screen, gives a snort of a laugh and her thumb goes to work on her reply.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ she says, evasively. ‘Ah… work.’
‘And hello, by the way.’
‘Yes, hello, sorry. I was a bit caught up there. Excuse me just a second.’ She thumbs away, sends, smiling to herself.
‘So, work then? Work’s turned funny. That’s good.’
‘It has its moments. Sometimes even school turns funny, I’m sure.’ She goes into the kitchen, puts the kettle on. She stares at her phone, willing it to beep.
‘Just tell me it’s not Sleazy Pete.’ I wait for a reply, but there isn’t one. ‘Just tell me that and I’ll be happy.’
She turns around as steam surges from the kettle. ‘Dr Davis,’ she says, her hand in the canister of tea bags, searching for orange pekoe. ‘And…’ Her phone beeps. She drops a tea bag on the bench, next to her cup, and picks up the phone, reads the message, laughs again. ‘And we might be seeing each other on Saturday, just so you know.’
There’s fifty things I could say, but I decide to stare her down, wait this one out. If it’s going to turn bad, it’ll do it at least as quickly if I say nothing.
‘And you did like him, didn’t you?’ she says, just the hint of a tremble in her voice. ‘I know you’ve got that name for him, which is all very funny, but you did like him?’
Hi Cat,
You were right, I was wrong, simple as that. We have a big ugly parental situation here, you and I, and we’ve got to work together to do anything we can to stop it. Neither of us wants to think about the kind of support my mother may be planning to give your father as early as this Saturday, i.e. in two days’ time. I’m all out of stun grenades. Do anything you can. I’ll do whatever I can here.
David Spade cracked me up, by the way. I’m still not totally sure where to go with it, but here’s tonight’s attempt (below). Meanwhile, in the spirit of collaboration, I’m also forwarding an email from my father with quite a few tandem-story references that might help with the companion essay.
Let me know how things are with your father. All I can tell you is that texts are flying and they’re planning something for Saturday. No details yet.
Joel
‘I know, I know,’ Spade says. ‘But I’m struggling, Steven. Here’s my dilemma – do I connect with my inner Heckler or my inner Elizabeth? It was so much easier in Joe Dirt, when I had the mullet to work with. You get a lot of guidance from a mullet about where to take a movie. A mullet, some goofy bug eyes, nipples through a wet shirt. Those things are gold. Schneider taught me that. Here I’ve got the dress, and I’ve got the bad-ass assassin thing. I’m conflicted, Steven. Horribly conflicted. I mean, look at these hands. They’re fine working hands, but do they say “doom” to you?’ The actor playing Eislander shakes his head, but no one notices. It’s all about Spade here, all about the big star with his questions about his hands. Spade goes off with Spielberg, and Eislander can hear him making a joke of it, saying, ‘Who wrote this? Who put doom in these fine hands?’ as he walks to his trailer with a little-man big-star swagger, still wearing his torn dress, his hands gesturing famously above his head. Everyone laughs, even the guy screwing two poles together who can’t have seen a page of the script. Eislander smells food, heads off-set to the buffet. He needs a shower. He’s filled the death costume with sweat under the hot lights.
– Friday
‘When were you going to tell me?’
I spin around at the sound of Emma’s voice, bumping my knee on the library cubicle desk in the process.
‘Okay, ow.’ I clutch my knee with one hand and look up into Emma’s enraged brown eyes. ‘So, am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?’ I can already feel the bruise starting to form. ‘Shit, that hurt.’
Em doesn’t look sympathetic.
‘You know what I’m talking about. I thought I was your best friend and yet I saw a certain “couple” together. You’ve got some explaining to do.’
Oh my god. She saw Dad and Sandy. I knew I should’ve told her before now. I just didn’t, no couldn’t, okay didn’t, find the right time to tell her. Oh god. And now she’s pissed off about it. She’s always complaining that sometimes our friendship feels one-sided and that she tells me stuff, but I don’t tell her anything important.
‘Look,’ I say. ‘I wanted to tell you, but my head has just been so crazy and, I don’t know, I guess I just couldn’t find the words. I just didn’t see it coming.’
She purses her lips and t
ilts her head. ‘Really? Didn’t see it coming? Like he didn’t have it planned the whole time. He’s probably had it planned for years, knowing him. He’s such a sleaze.’
Huh?
‘Look, I know he can be a bit chatty with people, but I wouldn’t exactly call him a sleaze. I mean –’
‘So now you’re defending him?’ She shakes her head at me in disbelief.
‘Em, I think you’re overreacting. I mean, it was just Sizzler and he’s promised me that it won’t be happening again.’
‘YOU WENT TO SIZZLER WITH HIM?’ Her eyes are wide and her mouth is hanging open.
Okay, so now I’m officially confused.
‘I thought that’s what you were talking about,’ I say. ‘I thought you saw them at Sizzler?’
‘What do you mean them? I saw you. Yesterday. Walking near the tennis courts. Talking to HIM.’
‘Hang on. Him? Him who?’
‘Joel.’
‘Joel?’
‘Yes, Joel. Who did you think I was talking about? For god’s sake, Cat, stop stalling. I saw you on my way back from the pool, talking to him. And you looked really friendly. I mean, at one point I could have sworn he was going to put his hand on your shoulder.’
‘Really?’ Even I can hear the excitement in my voice when I say this. And for just a second I want it to be true. Was Joel really going to reach out and put his hand on my shoulder the way he did on Wednesday night? And what does it mean anyway – a guy putting his hand on your shoulder? Maybe it’s affectionate or, you know, brotherly or something.
I look up at Emma. She’s frowning at me.
‘Emma, you’re smoking crack. Seriously, you’re being ridiculous. We were talking about our tandem-story thing.’
‘I thought you weren’t allowed to talk about it.’ She shifts her weight to her other foot and continues to glare, arms now folded across her chest. Good point. I watch Dan Mear walk past carrying what looks like a book on Roman Empires. ‘Well?’
