Zigzag Street

by Nick Earls

  Later I recall a guy at uni, a guy who hasn’t crossed my mind for years, who epitomises Jeff’s argument because we all thought he was such a loser.

  The day they make me play Sir Toby Belch

  He was mid-thirties, in no hurry with his biochem PhD, and he loved uni. Even though the students he tutored had, as far as we knew, never gone to bed with him. So, failing to score in the biochem department, failing even with the drunk girls at the Rec Club, failing to win the love of all but his own two hands, he joined the drama society. And he worked bloody hard on sets and on committees, so that by the time I got there he was actually appearing in the plays, because they owed it to him. We did Twelfth Night and he was Sir Toby Belch. Not Sir Toby Belch because he was one of the great character actors of our time. Not Sir Toby Belch because of his magical gift for comedy. Sir Toby Belch because he was old and fat. And his comedy was ham-fisted and, clumsy and forgetful, and he took to his lines with all the grace of a man holding them down and taking punches at them through a pillow. And the cast party was at his place, a place he lived in alone and that looked just like the student hovels we lived in. It’s all very sad now. As though he lived in this crap place, well past his time, just to impress us. Grew two small marijuana plants to impress us. Stubbed cigarettes into his landlord’s carpet to impress us. And I’m sure if we’d said, ‘Hey Trev, why don’t you drop a turd on your sofa’, he would have done that to impress us too. And of course, he stayed in costume for the whole party, putting on that jolly, rolling laugh as we trashed his house and then went home. And the whole time he looked like the happiest man alive, cause he was still one of the kids. Problem was, he wasn’t. And I’m not one of the great character actors of our time, and my gift for comedy is limited. And perhaps one day, in my desire to grasp a moment that may be long gone, they might put on Twelfth Night and tell me I’m the one for Toby Belch.

  Sal calls and says I’m always welcome at their place, says I can have their spare room whenever I want.

  23

  On the way up to our Friday meeting with Barry Greatorex, Hillary tells me he’s still not smoking, but that he has a bowl of chocolate-coated coffee beans on his desk instead.

  And it’s not working out well.

  She’s right. He doesn’t look good. He looks very large now, seriously larger than the already excessive largeness of ten days ago, his beady, sleepless eyes set further back in his head, sweat glistening among the grey flaps of his jowls and creeping into broad circles under his arms, despite the air-conditioning. His buttons are straining and a couple are missing, or at least undone, and he is losing his trousers beneath the broad mass of his abdomen, which sits across his thighs like a Stable-table, kept in place by a pair of thick red braces that end somewhere beyond view, as though two mountaineers have just abseiled down his front. He is clearly biology gone wrong, a system without the usual checks and balances, a victim of his own rebellious chemistry.

  So, he says, craning up the big sweaty flaps of eyelids, so, rocking back at a perilous angle in his chair then cannoning forward again, as threatening as a medieval battering ram. Fill me in.

  Well, I tell him, feeling really sane, I’m trying to keep everyone involved at all stages, trying to make everyone part of the process, so it’s not quite as quick as I’d like it to be. But it’s under control and they’re with us so far.

  Timeframe? he asks, opening his hands into a chubby kind of question.

  End of next week probably, before I hear back from everybody and have some kind of response together.

  So we think we might go to Sydney the week after, Hillary says. The timing’s not a problem and it gives Rick a chance to shore things up a bit.

  He nods and then looks as though he is distracted by something out the window. He stares at the sky for a while then jerks his attention back to us and nods again. Hmmm, he says, and goes through a series of apparently purposeless facial movements. He scoops up a handful of chocolate-coated coffee beans and tips them into his mouth. Fine, fine, he says as he crunches, showing us a snarl of brown-stained teeth, and it appears we are free to go.

  It’s hard to be sure if he trusts our work, or if he’s adopting a more hands-off management style, or if he’s just losing it.

  Good meeting, Hillary says when we’re in the lift. I thought he was a goner when he leaned back in the chair. I thought, if Barry hits the floor he’s a dead man. We’ll never move him.

  She comes with me into my office.

  So, end of next week then.

  Yeah.

  I’ve got to organise Sydney, okay?

  Yeah. It will be ready. I’m sorry it’s taken as long as it has, but I think it’s there now. I’ve done the work, I’ve liaised appropriately and now it’s out there and I’ve just got to get everyone’s views and do whatever I need to to take them into account.

  I hate letting her down. This should have been done by now, I know that. And this is the closest she’ll get to telling me. Saying the deadline with just a hint of doubt.

  I go to Jeff and Sal’s for dinner, and as soon as Sal opens the door I smell curry.

  It’s chicken tikka masala, she tells me. It’s been a big month for chicken tikka masala.

  I had a shopping problem, Jeff says from the kitchen.

  As you can see he’s slightly defensive about it, as men with his neglected planning skills are prone to be. We have seven cans of tikka masala sauce and, I have just discovered, no toilet paper.

  I’m really not appreciated, he tells me. I make the dinner, I make the lunches, I tidy up after breakfast …

  Yeah, yeah, we all know. Tidying up after breakfast, the most underrated domestic task.

  And your only job is the cleaning and you hire someone. One small misjudgement with the shopping and this is the thanks I get.

  Seven cans of tikka masala sauce and no toilet paper? What is the appropriate way to thank someone for that?

  She turns to me but just at that moment I’m not doing well. And it’s not because I’ve just realised I regularly seek detailed advice from a man who is set up to make a curry for twenty-eight people, but hasn’t the foresight to provide toilet facilities. I don’t have any theories about appropriate thanks just now. I think seven cans of tikka masala sauce and no toilet paper would be just fine. I want to tell them that. I want to say, Sal, don’t worry, toilet paper’s easy. You can always buy toilet paper. But I can’t say a thing. I try to breathe deeply.

  We eat the chicken tikka masala. We drink wine. I talk and they listen. I spill my guts and it takes who knows how long. I drink more.

  Sal says, You get through these things. They happen and you get through them. And you never know when it’s all going to change. When, suddenly, things are different. I didn’t think I was ready for anything when Jeff came along. I hadn’t gone out with anyone for months. I’d missed exams because of glandular fever. I hadn’t worked either, so I had no money. Things could have been better. And then it all changed. Suddenly, from this diet of potatoes and bread and cheese, there was this boy turning up, with wine. And you know what? I liked him.

  It gets late. I stay the night in their spare room.

  24

  The amount of junk mail astounds me when I get home in the morning. How many pizza deals can one household use? How can junk mail work when there’s just so much of it? I’m about to drop the whole pile in the bin when I notice an A-mart Allsports ad.

  And I go and pick up a tennis racquet for a Sensational!!! $100 dollars off. Maybe I think it’ll change my luck. Or maybe this is just emblematic of the change in me. From cautious contemplator to reckless impulse buyer, junk mail sucker, speeding through orange lights with my eighty bucks in my pocket and the flier on the passenger seat.

  In the store I weigh the racquet in my hands and it feels very special.

  Hey, sensational, I say to the guy.

  You obviously know your racquets.

  Yeah. What sort of poundage would this be?

 
; Yeah. Yeah, that’s the question isn’t it? Yeah. You’re right you know. With the hi-modulus graphite allowing you to have those non-linear offset strings, you drop five to ten pounds, you get yourself a bigger sweet spot and you lose nothing. So where would that leave you? I’d take you for about a sixty-five to seventy pound man myself.

  Yeah. Yeah, about that.

  And all this time I’m swishing to impress. I’m on the brink of telling him something about my experiences on the fringe of The Tour, about how I might’ve made it if my shoulder hadn’t given out. Then I realise that’s Jeff’s bullshit story, not mine, and I’m not sure if there’s an intellectual property issue at stake.

  I’m swishing backhand after backhand and taking a few slow-motion serves (but still dragging the toe). This racquet is great. This is probably the closest I’ve been to an erection in months. I want to tell the guy, because my first erection after all this time is going to be quite a moment, but I don’t think he’d understand.

  At home I toss the cover onto the table and the urge to practise (while in my mind revisiting the great Wimbledon men’s singles finals of the early eighties) is irresistible.

  So around the house I go. Swish, swish. Swish, swish. And it’s particularly fine for backhand volleys. Greg runs past and out, I’m sure thinking, Who is this dickhead? First the Whipper Snipper, now this. Did no-one tell him about Outside?

  Invigorated by the purchase of the racquet, but thwarted by the lack of opportunity to use it, I decide I should do something. I decide to renovate.

  But feeling none too inclined to renovate, I bargain it down to tidy before the decision is binding.

  I go into one of the bedrooms but there are far too many boxes.

  Before I’m put off entirely I grab a box and take it into the lounge room. Here it is the only box, so it looks manageable.

  It’s only when I open it that I realise it’s one of my grandmother’s and not one of mine. On top is one of her treasured possessions, her Scrabble set. Scrabble saw my grandmother at her least compromising. She thought little of losing at Canasta, so if any of her grandchildren were unhappy and needing something grandmotherly she’d usually get the cards out and allow them a thrilling, narrow victory. Scrabble was a different matter. If your cat got run over she’d still shit on you at Scrabble. It was one of those things. She had to. If you were convalescing from the flu and your cat got run over after eating your goldfish and you’d just done badly in something at school and it was someone’s birthday and they’d invited everyone but you (or realistically maybe you and Ricky bow tie Balaszwecki), if you were smart you’d say, Do you want to play Canasta, Nan? And soon you’d be feeling slightly better than you were before. If you were stupid you’d say, Want to play Scrabble, Nan? and she’d get that reluctant pained expression on her face, because she knew she’d still have to shit on you. And how was she going to explain that to your mother? The art of being a grandparent is to judge the most important times to engineer a credible loss.

  If there were ever any doubts about my grandmother’s win-at-all-costs attitude to Scrabble these were dispelled three years ago, when she was eighty-eight. My mother, sensing her first real opportunity since she’d won a narrow victory when my grandmother was distracted by severe gout in 1965, challenged her during a brief hospital admission to stabilise her heart failure. The game, as my mother tells it, had reached some kind of impasse, not seen for almost thirty years, and my grandmother fidgeted and gnashed her edentulous gums before breaking the deadlock by sliding the letters CUN in front of a T and glaring fearsomely at my mother and saying, Well, it’s a word isn’t it?

  Beneath the Scrabble set is something I have never seen before. It looks like an old cigarette case, and I’m not sure what it’s doing there as neither of my grandparents smoked. It contains a letter, with the envelope postmarked Winton, 21.11.23.

  The letter

  My Dear Edna,

  I know it’s been an age since I wrote (last winter I expect), and don’t think I’m proud of that. Please don’t think for a moment that I haven’t been thinking about you. I have. It’s just taken me a while to work things out. I won’t beat around the bush: I’m coming home. I’m coming home and I know now, more than I ever have, that it won’t be home for me unless you’re there too, and that’s for sure.

  This summer hasn’t been easy. It’s stinking hot and the rains just haven’t come. I left the land they gave me and I’ve kept the sheep moving, but there aren’t many left. While I’ve still got a few I’m going to sell them to someone up here and make my way back to Brisbane.

  I want you to know, though, that the drought hasn’t affected my thinking. I really do believe that if the land was green and five thousand sheep were mine, I’d still be selling up. I’d just be coming back to you a richer man.

  So what am I offering? It’s not much. I’ve only got a few pounds, but I’ll work hard all my life. That’s my promise. I’ll be there, richer or poorer, better or worse. I can make that promise now. I only hope you can accept it. I only hope you’re still some fool who’s waiting for me and who hasn’t done the smart thing and gone and found herself a man. If you have I’ll understand.

  I haven’t been good to you, and you’ve been very good to me. When you told me to go if I needed to go, and to come back when I was ready, and that you’d be waiting, I knew you were the girl for me.

  I’m better now than I was. I’m not perfect, but I’m better. There are still some nights when my eyes sting and I don’t breathe too well and I have to tell myself there’s none of that stuff out this way. There were still nights last winter when it was cold and I slept with a heavy blanket over my legs and I’m sure I dreamt of wading through the mud at the Somme all night. There are some things, some screams of dying men and some other things, that I’m sure I’ll never get out of my head, but I think you know that. I just had to know I could make room for other things, and now I know I can.

  I’ve spent the last few years running and I’m not certain what I’m running from, but it hasn’t caught me yet. Edna, I really want to stop running now.

  For the last few weeks I’ve sat and I’ve looked up at the stars and I’ve thought about us. I’ve thought about us, in Brisbane, buying some land, building ourselves a house, having a family. I can see us all, packing like sardines into a white wooden cottage with a red roof and the garden full of flowers of all colours. I think about this and I want it very much.

  I hope you do too.

  Please write to me soon, one way or the other. I’ll be staying in this area till I sell up, so the Winton PO is as good an address as any.

  Truly yours,

  Tom

  Later that year, the money had come from somewhere to buy a block of land at 34 Zigzag Street, Red Hill. And thirteen years later my mother was born, an only child.

  25

  This is all new to me, this letter in my grandfather’s hand, written when he was maybe six years younger than I am now. I look for others, but it’s the only one in the cigarette case, and the only one in the box.

  This is like finding one piece of a 3,000-piece jigsaw puzzle and knowing you’re a few months too late to find the other 2999. Is the cigarette case part of the same puzzle? It’s tempting to say that they mean something together. That maybe Tom came back from France in 1917 and brought the cigarette case, and Edna had it with her while he was away in the north-west. But I’m not entitled to such assumptions.

  I knew he’d fought in World War One. He died a while ago, when I was ten, and I can always remember him coughing, particularly early in the mornings, as if he started every day by clearing his lungs. He was tall and stooped and gentle and he had big hands and spoke quietly. He had a pen knife and when he peeled apples with it the peel fell off in one long green ribbon. That much I know.

  And my grandmother said once, You know, until your mother came along we always thought it was just going to be the two of us.

  Maybe these are more pieces, but of c
ourse they don’t fit. There are too many pieces still missing to think these might sit even close to each other in the finished picture.

  Tom sold insurance, I think. Before my mother was born and when she was young he travelled the state selling insurance, and by the time he retired he was state manager. But in 1923 he had nothing to do with insurance. He was a young man wandering with his dying sheep and a head full of war, even though the war had been over for years.

  His family came from the Darling Downs where they owned property. He was tall from an early age, and with the body of a farm boy probably, so he enlisted in 1916 when he was fifteen years old. He went to France soon after and was back here the following year. So what I knew was that he had missed Gallipoli and the end of the war, and I always thought of him as just having been away for a while in between. It only occurs to me now that he was at the Somme, that that’s what he did in the war.

  I wish I’d asked him. I wish he’d told me more. I wish I could know more than this one letter. This is years later, and he’s still not even twenty-two. A white house with a red roof and a family. He had done his wandering. He had sat under the stars and worked through what he had to, and now he was ready. And Edna had waited. Had waited in Brisbane, surviving on the occasional letter.

  I always looked on them as grandparents. As though they were born grey-haired, met each other grey-haired, as though we came to exist at the same moment, and while I grew up they grew old. It never occurred to me that they were young, or if it did my view of their youth and everything that followed was quite uncomplicated. They knew each other on the Downs. He went away to France. He came back. My mother was born. He worked in insurance. I have telescoped this, without thinking how they might have filled the in-between years.