Joel & Cat Set the Story Straight

by Nick Earls

  – Saturday

  ‘I don’t think I can make it this afternoon. I’m scheming.’ Luke and I had movie plans that I’m now breaking. ‘My mother has this thing for a new guy, and it’s my civic duty to stop it if I can.’ Okay, I’m not giving him the whole story. No need for that, no need to be specific about the names. ‘It’s wrong in more ways than I can count, and right in none.’

  ‘Bring back the crazy Salvadorean,’ he says. ‘Or whatever he was.’

  ‘North Queenslander, of Italian extraction.’

  If Cat had lived up to her part of the deal, I wouldn’t be on the phone now having this conversation. But if she’s put as much effort into torpedoing the date as she’s putting into the tandem story, it’s no surprise it’s all up to me. I was halfway to liking her for practically a whole day there, now I’m not so sure.

  My mother has walked into the room without me knowing, and has heard me say ‘North Queenslander of Italian extraction’. She’s pretending to tidy, while easing her way back out of my field of vision, ears as keen as radar dishes, intending not to miss a word.

  ‘That guy from North Queensland who wrote the play about the mafia-style activities among some Italian families in the thirties,’ I tell Luke.

  The mystery hangs there for a few seconds before he says, ‘Say hi to your mum for me.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Hey,’ he says, struck by a new idea that interests him a bit more. ‘You, Lucy Dawson – what’s the deal there?’

  ‘There’s no deal there.’ Even when I’m being completely honest I’m starting to sound defensive. ‘I had a badge on. An anti-domestic-violence thing. She wanted to talk about it.’

  ‘That X-shaped badge?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s a white ribbon, looped around.’

  My mother’s interest is abating. She says something to herself about newspapers piling up, and she grabs an armful of them from the coffee table and dumps them by the front door. She goes into the kitchen and puts the kettle on.

  ‘I thought it was some new school club you weren’t going to mention,’ Luke says, in a typically nonspecific attempt to stir up a little more story. I bet when Luke was eight he turned over every rock to see what bugs were hiding under them.

  ‘Since when do I do clubs? Or secrets? And what did you think it was? The maypole-dancing club or something? It’s from my mother. About men saying no to domestic violence. It’s to do with her support group in some way, I think. And Lucy’s older sister had some issues, so she knew what it meant.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘So, there you go. A lot less interesting than you thought.’

  My mother is waving a tea bag at me, swinging it around to catch my attention. I nod and mouth ‘thanks’ as the kettle clicks off and steam billows out from under the high cupboards.

  ‘Yeah,’ Luke says, and then he sparks up again. ‘Tell me about the maypole dancing. You had me with that. I bet that’s with Cat Davis, right?’

  ‘Of course it is. Nude maypole dancing.’ My mother’s head whips around at ‘nude’, then she forces it back towards the tea, radar reactivated. ‘By the light of the next full moon. You know kids these days. They start with tandem storying, and look where it ends up.’

  ‘There’s nothing happening at all, is there?’

  ‘Nothing at all. Her most recent email is best described as terse.’

  It’s true. I think it’s true.

  Luke has work to go to, and as soon as the phone’s down my mother’s next to me with two mugs of tea, saying, ‘Now, that nude maypole dancing, that was a joke, right?’

  What did Cat’s email say? It was a nothing sort of one-liner followed by a filler paragraph. I thought she was taking the story somewhere with the film angle. Apparently not. But it’s not just the email. I got brushed off at the library, big-time. Maybe it was something I said about The Art of War or something in my last bit of the story. I can still see the look on her face. I don’t know what went wrong. For about two seconds I thought we were having a conversation, and then she was reeling away from me, stuffing her book in her bag and lurching towards the library like an over-acting extra in a horror film.

  And the looming parental date fiasco is over to me now, dammit, and I don’t have a plan. I can’t even drag Betty into it, since she’s staying the weekend with her son and his family at the coast.

  At lunchtime, my mother goes out to a day spa for a facial and hot-rock massage. ‘When you next see me,’ she says, voucher in hand, ‘I’ll be glowing and supple.’

  ‘That’s not my business,’ I tell her. My mother, supple, Sleazy Pete. ‘Supple is really not my business.’

  ‘We’re just friends,’ she says, feigning annoyance. ‘And I got the voucher for Christmas and it’ll expire soon. Today’s as good a day as any.’

  ‘Four hours without texting. Are you ready for that? I think it could kill you.’

  ‘You’re right,’ she says. ‘Maybe you should come and field my messages. I can dictate replies. You can send.’

  ‘Maybe I have a big, big assignment to do,’ I tell her. ‘I’m afraid that might have to take priority.’

  I’m pacing as soon as she’s gone. Pacing, but no nearer to a plan.

  What’s the issue with Cat Davis? And why is Lucy Dawson so uninteresting that it took a bread commercial to bring the most out of her? For thirty seconds on screen there’s at least a certain perkiness. In life there’s not much. Yesterday was the closest we’ve come to conversation, and that was about her sister’s foul ex-boyfriend. Why don’t I find myself running through my conversation with Lucy fifty times to see where it went wrong or right?

  Lucy has one of those looks that girls call stunning, but that doesn’t have much impact on guys. There’s the pixie thing, and the thing about luxuriant wavy hair – both of them girl-stunning looks, with Lucy going for the former. I think my mother tries for an older person’s version of the pixie hair, but it ends up somewhere between practical and frightening. Add glowing and supple to the equation, and she’s ready to strike.

  I have no plan to deal with the parental date, absolutely no plan. I actually do some work on an assignment, and still have no plan once I’ve stood up from that and done some more pacing.

  The best I can do – all I’ve got – is to be overcome by a disease some time in the next few hours. A non-drastic, reversible disease, but one that would mean my mother would have to stay home. I don’t know enough, though. I need a disease that makes you look wan and in pain, but which has no actual lumps or bumps.

  I go online, but it’s confusing. I need good disease information, something straightforward, believable. Something out of a textbook, without the overlay of online debate and snake-oil merchanting.

  I email Cat.

  ‘Appendicitis.’ That’s the word that comes out of the phone in a whisper when I pick it up an hour later.

  ‘What? Cat?’

  ‘I’m in my father’s study,’ she says, still in that whisper. ‘I’ve looked through a few books, and I reckon appendicitis. People believe that for days sometimes, as you know.’

  ‘They sound like pretty gullible people.’

  A laugh breaks through the whisper volume she’s trying to keep to. ‘Don’t say things like that or he’ll work out I’m in here.’

  ‘So tell me more. What do I need to know?’

  ‘Okay. First, symptoms. You get a pain that starts in the middle of your stomach, that’s the umbilicus, then it goes down lower and to the right, where your appendix actually is. It gets worse then, and more constant. You almost invariably have anorexia, which actually just means loss of appetite – I’ve looked it up – and you really shouldn’t be vomiting.’

  ‘Thanks. I don’t plan to.’

  She goes on, hoarsely. ‘That’s why I picked it. There’s nothing gross. Also, there’s nothing you can’t fake. Your pulse and temperature should be normal.’ Frankly, I’d be lying if I said this conversation was completely without an erotic di
mension. If you tune out the content and just focus on the voice… ‘If anyone examines you, you’ve got tenderness and local rigidity low down on the right. There’s some other signs named after dead people, but you only really need to test for them if there’s any doubt. Okay, now some background about causes.’ A page turns.

  ‘You know, in that voice, I could see some people…’ I’m trying to pull it back, but it’s already well on its way out, ‘… paying five bucks a minute for this.’

  ‘I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,’ she whispers. ‘Unless you’re offering cash, of course.’ Where’s the Cat who ran away from me yesterday? This is so much better. She clears her throat. ‘Okay, this is the bit about causes. Let me see if there’s anything… It’s often caused by a faecalith. Maybe you’ve got one of those. Let me look it up.’ There’s a pause as she picks up another book and flicks through it. ‘Oh, gross, it’s a stone made out of poo.’

  ‘Well, I don’t do that. I don’t know who does but, for the record, I don’t.’

  ‘I think it makes itself.’

  ‘Just so long as you know I don’t actually have one.’

  ‘It’s okay, I won’t hold your poo stone against you.’ Suddenly I don’t even want to think about this being erotic. One use of the expression ‘poo stone’, and that’s it for me. ‘This is great,’ she whispers. ‘This is so going to work. This must be how Bonnie and Clyde felt when they’d planned the perfect robbery.’

  ‘Well, sure, except they died in a hail of bullets.’

  ‘Okay, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?’

  ‘Also died in a hail of bullets. Not that I don’t think we’re a memorable team. What about Beavis and Butthead? No one ever shot them, as far as I’m aware.’

  ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘But I can’t possibly be called Butthead. I’m a prefect, you know. I have to have some credibility.’

  There’s a noise in the background, Sleazy Pete’s voice on the other side of the closed study door.

  ‘Good luck,’ she whispers, and she’s gone.

  By the time my mother comes home all hot-rocked and rubbed and glowing, my pain’s already migrated from the middle down to the lower right. I’m looking very much like someone whose mother shouldn’t be going anywhere tonight.

  She talks about making me some soup to reheat for dinner. I tell her I’m not hungry. Not at all. No appetite. I give a weak, brave groan that says, plainly, that she must forsake any new suppleness and stay home tending to my ailments.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she says. ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘I’m sure I’ll be okay,’ I tell her, ‘but I really…’ I wince with pain, put my hand on my stomach, start rocking backwards and forwards. People do that in movies, and then their mother stays home.

  Wrong. Their mother gets help. And, when it comes to doctors, who does my mother have on speed dial? Sleazy Pete. My excellent plan skids away from me, out of control. I’ve pushed it too far. Damn that stupid rocking.

  ‘You can’t do that,’ I whine from my bed of too much sickness. ‘You can’t call him. It’s wrong. We know him socially.’

  ‘No, no,’ she says, waving her hand at me dismissively. ‘He’ll just tell us what to do.’

  Wrong again, as it turns out. Sure, he tells us what to do, but while we’re waiting for a doctor at the medical centre where he works, they’re overrun by sports injuries and screaming children. I’m moaning quietly, turning down all food, thinking about food and wanting some badly. I should have eaten more before I began this.

  I love the time we’re wasting, though.

  Sleazy Pete doesn’t. After the third call from my mother, he comes in in a Hawaiian shirt. He is, frankly, bright orange. A shade of personal orange that startles even my mother. A shade that doesn’t say health, it says Dulux.

  ‘I know, I know,’ he says to my mother, who’s seized up somewhere in the lead-up to hello. ‘I’ve been trying to tone it down. I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.’ Ships at sea could notice, but neither of us says a thing. ‘Look, I think Joel needs to be seen. They’re swamped here and it’s either send him to the Wesley or I’ll take a look at him in one of the spare rooms.’

  ‘Oh, would you?’ my mother says, and I appear to have consented.

  My mother waits on the sofa as Sleazy Pete and I retire to a windowless room, my crisp new file in his hand. He shows me to the patient’s chair, then takes his seat behind the desk. If his head was conical it could sit on a road marking out lanes of traffic.

  ‘I got distracted,’ he says, knowing just what it is that I’m staring at. ‘It was only supposed to be on for a few minutes, but I got distracted. Until the next day. It’s practically impossible to take off, you know. It worked really well the first time I did it. And it’s much healthier than UV exposure.’ Said sternly, as though I’m some reckless sunbaker and he’s even close to normal. ‘Now, about this pain…’

  The plan, I tell myself. Stick to the plan and all will be fine.

  He takes a history, makes notes. I’m covering it well, I know it. The date is trashed.

  ‘Right,’ he says rather stiffly, after some comprehensive questioning. ‘Right…’ The mood has changed, all of a sudden. ‘Better get you up on the couch.’

  I’m ready for it, and I wince and jump and groan in just the right way when he examines me.

  ‘Okay,’ he says, when I think he’s finished. ‘Just one more thing.’

  He reaches for what looks like a tissue box, but pulls out a rubber glove and slips it onto his right hand. He takes a blue-and-white tube and squirts goo onto his index finger. I want to laugh, but I know I’ll laugh like a maniac. I want to laugh at the joke he’s making, since it’s pretty funny in a cruel way, but –

  ‘I’m going to have to examine you internally,’ he says, in a very steady, clinical, I’m-not-kidding voice.

  ‘No, but, the…’ I get stuck there. I can’t tell him about the book. I can’t tell him we’ve based this on one of the books in his own study, and I’ve already demonstrated everything he needs to make the diagnosis.

  ‘We have to be professional about this,’ he says, rubbing the slippery lubricant between his thumb and fingers. ‘So I’m going to need you to lower your pants, turn and face the wall and pull your knees up.’

  ‘No, no, you don’t –’

  ‘I’ve done this a thousand times.’

  The door is shut. The glove is on. My mind is blank. There’s no way out. I’m a thousand and one.

  I undo my belt, lower my pants, turn and face the plain, scuffed, off-white wall. Everything purses at the first contact, and then, oh god, it’s like he’s led with his elbow. I’m sweating now.

  He moves around, rotates his wrist. He’s going to stain my sphincter with that fake tan, even through the glove.

  ‘See. It’s not so bad,’ he says, almost whimsically, just as I’m thinking I should see his fingertip bulging through the skin near my navel. He gives another twist and says, conversationally, as if we aren’t conducting all of this with his finger shoulder-deep in my arse, ‘So, how long have you been going out with Cat?’

  The noise that leaves me is more like a yelp. I can’t speak. Too much finger, too much goddamn orange finger, too much shock.

  ‘That’s all I need to know,’ he says. ‘That tenderness right there. It’s almost certainly appendicitis.’

  He whips the finger out, hands me tissues, treats it all like business as usual and gets on the phone to the surgeon.

  My buttocks clench the whole way to the Wesley. Somehow I talk the medical-centre people out of an ambulance, and I gradually pull the plan back into line. My symptoms start resolving and, by the time the surgeon comes to see me, the dating hour is long past and I’m begging for a meal.

  There are no signs, nothing. The diagnosis has evaporated. It’s so obviously not appendicitis, he doesn’t even think about reaching for a glove.

  Instead he talks about constipation, says we could think about an enema.

>   I tell him there’s no way, no need, and I’ll take a meal, thanks, and get things working from the top end. I’m already standing, pulling my shirt on, picking up my shoes, looking as much like an untouchable civilian as I can.

  I’ve totally put my arse up to be violated by these people. Why couldn’t she have picked some kind of headache instead?

  It’s late when we get home with takeaway from the Bamboo Shoot. My mother calls Sleazy Pete, thanks him and says they should get together some other time.

  ‘At the dinner on Wednesday at the very least,’ she says, ‘if we can’t sneak something in before.’

  She scoops black-pepper chicken onto her rice and mine, and asks if I want to watch a DVD. But there’s no way I could focus on a DVD right now.

  I sit down to type. Even now it gets me. It’s as if that man’s finger is everywhere I go, and now he’s left it poking out of my seat. I can’t take my mind off it. I can’t get comfortable.

  Where did Sleazy Pete get the idea that there was anything between Cat and me? Did I hear him properly? I was filled with finger at the time. He can’t really think we’re going out because, if he did, my mother would be thinking it too. There’s been too much text exchanged for it not to have come up, surely? And she certainly wouldn’t be keeping it a secret if he’d said anything. She’d have been trying to wheedle the full story out of me right away.

  Tandem story. Concentrate on the tandem story. Where do I go with this tandem story I’m writing with Cat Davis, my girlfriend?

  Don’t think that way. No one in the world who isn’t bright orange is thinking that way. Remember that.

  Hi Cat,

  Well, the good news, as you know, is that the date didn’t happen. The bad news is… I can’t even type it, dammit. Let’s just say that I really took one for the team. Let’s talk tomorrow. I know my mother will be planning something. So call me. Story follows.