Zigzag Street

by Nick Earls

  He went away to France (1916).

  He came back (1917).

  My mother was born (1936).

  With nearly twenty years in there that I didn’t seem to use in reaching my understanding of them, as though anyone can go from mid-teens to mid-thirties without incident. As though this whole time was some kind of pause where nothing happened but the house and the selling of insurance. But it was far less simple. It wasn’t easy for him, at least not at the start. And why no children? Why no children for years, when it looks like they both wanted them?

  We always thought it was just going to be the two of us.

  So was my mother an accident, or an unexpected gift? I wonder if she knows.

  Jeff calls. Tennis is on for tomorrow.

  26

  I should talk to my mother about this, the letter, the cigarette case, my questions. But I don’t. For the moment it’s all just mine.

  Sunday morning is busy with phone calls, all to do with tennis. This is the Sunday morning we all dread, when the numbers are wrong, and it happens every second or third week. This is best explained by one of the less acknowledged laws of nature.

  The Rule of Three and Five

  Tennis is a game to be played by an even number of people, but for which only an odd number of people will ever be available, usually three people or five. (The Rule of One only applies to complete losers.)

  Today it’s the Rule of Three. We have Jeff, Veny and me. Freddie and Gerry are in Sydney for the weekend for some gathering of romance writers and Tim, a large-familied man, has one of his frequent Sunday barbecues.

  After a series of unsuccessful phone calls to a mixture of workmates, squash players, confirmed cheats and people we don’t really like, we’re getting desperate and Veny says he could try his friend Jordan.

  He’s pretty hopeless but at least there’ll be four of us. It’s better than cut-throat, maybe.

  Maybe. Jordan, like me, is in the state of imposed freedom that occurs between relationships. The only time he played with us before, Veny agreed to pick him up and found him lying face down on his polished wooden floor, having a bit of a rest after reading Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. And he played like someone face down on a polished wooden floor, as though nothing existed beyond his own nose. But just before Veny makes the call, Tim phones Jeff and says his family barbecue’s been cancelled.

  I arrive early and stand near the tennis centre window, swishing my new racquet but trying to do so unobtrusively.

  Alone on the concrete in this ball-free sport of the mind, I am champion and the racquet is the racquet of the gods.

  On court, I am not even the champion’s bodily wastes. The racquet of the gods hits the ball fearsomely hard, and almost anywhere. Jeff tells me it shows about as much judgement as my previous racquet. People almost fight to be on my side only because it’s less dangerous (as long as my serve doesn’t take them in the back of the head). After Tim and Veny win two quick sets we all agree it would only be fair to Jeff if we rotated partners.

  In the end I go home about as vanquished as is presently usual.

  27

  I don’t feel like dinner. Or really, I don’t feel like the hassle of making dinner. It even seems like too much trouble tonight to go down to Baan Thai or to order a pizza. So I prepare myself a straightforward two-course meal. Barbecue chips and flavoured mineral water, followed by Tim Tams and coffee.

  I read through the letter again, but they know each other too well for him to need to say much. It won’t tell an outsider any more than it has.

  At nearly twenty-two he’s been through a lot, and he’s getting over it. Not getting it completely out of his head, but managing well enough to be ready to commit himself to moving on. This young man, coughing but not yet stooping, wandering the west with his crowded head. And some days make sense to him, some don’t. People are kind to him mostly, let his sheep stay alive by giving them a day or two on their dead grass, probably out of some sense of debt. This soldier settler whose land turned dry, who shouldn’t be abandoned now.

  So how did he get over all this? How did he clear his head? Did he work through it till it made sense to him? Did it just fade slowly further away, allowing him to notice there were other things around? There is no sure sign of the answer here, just a man deciding he must move on. Deciding there is more to him than just the past.

  I look for more letters, more of anything. And if my mother came over now she would see me sorting through boxes and she would be happy with me. I don’t want to tell her this yet. I don’t want to talk to her. She wants to change this place.

  I find no letters, just a few things from my own past, when I was twenty and twenty-one.

  The Dogs play Wembley Stadium—June 1,2,3, 1987

  I still have the poster, the A3, black and white photocopy of a crap photomontage of four boys looking like they’re trying really hard to be Velvet Underground. But The Dogs played nowhere. The Dogs were a fantasy that long preceded tennis. They were one of those university bands made up of intense, middle-class young people who got together to thrash instruments under each other’s houses. And like the others. The Dogs never got a gig, cause they never played covers. So no-one could say The Dogs sold out. And no-one could say they played Wembley Stadium either. We played nowhere. We told ourselves it was because we never played covers, but it’s possible, indeed likely, that we managed to combine this reluctance with an incredible lack of talent. I was on one of the guitars, though I had no gift for it at all. The only thing that held the band together through its three months of hope was the bass player who was a graphic artist and did the poster that made us think we had credibility; that if we stuck with it then, well just maybe, Wembley was ours. I think we also believed that since one of us had something to do with the visual arts we were a bit like the Beatles, at least in our early history, if not in our music. It’s probably good it didn’t work out for The Dogs. I expect I was destined to be their Pete Best, or, worse still, their Stu Sutcliffe. No, I would have been Pete Best. I wouldn’t die young and beautiful of a brain haemorrhage. I’d be dumped cause I was too dumb to notice that haircuts were changing, that I just wasn’t part of The Dogs any more. I don’t know who played Wembley on June 1,2,3, 1987. It wasn’t The Dogs. Nor was it my subsequent band. The Darrells. Nor the band after that, The Big Pants (planned album title: Wearing the Big Pants), though we did play some girl’s twenty-first, each with several pairs of football socks down our trousers. We had to stop playing when her father said that if we didn’t leave he might have to call the police.

  This is not, in any sense, archeological, genealogical or otherwise, a big find. Nor is the video The Importance of Fruit in Art, a protracted extemporised exploration of almost nothing, involving a banana, a mandarin, an old brown turtleneck jumper and a beret. Or its sequel (and companion in the archive), Bedroom Bondage, a re-make of a Bond movie, almost any Bond movie, shot entirely in one person’s bedroom, using only everyday bedroom items as props. In the end, Blofeld is fatally wounded by a Walther PK thong.

  I think the theory behind all this is that the more you restrict the range of props, the smarter you have to be to pull it off. And I think we thought we did pull it off. But these are clearly the documents of a far less critical age, and we all look young and hopeful and uncluttered by any sophistication. Each time I watch these videos I feel stranger than the last. Back then it all seemed very satirical.

  So I think of my grandfather, the poor, wandering, war-shattered bastard with his starving sheep and I wonder, if he was in his twenties now, would his life still be documented with simple poignant letters, or would he leave a disturbing legacy of video-crap? I can’t answer that, of course. Video has now been invented, he isn’t here, and none of us fought at the Somme. And it’s quite possible that he might have picked up the banana and the beret and talked importantly about fruit. Or played guitar badly in some appalling non-band that didn’t quite get to Wembley, but at least they’ve got
the poster to prove it.

  Who knows what awful ideas he might have had in the age of irony, how he might have run amok with his risky notions of comedy? How he might have suffered the stresses of purposelessness and trashing, rather than those associated with being face down in mud for a year while a million people die nearby and wondering if you’re next.

  These are different worlds, and he was always a generous man. He would not compare our experiences. This is what I hope now as I live in his house.

  And besides, if Edna had trashed him back in ‘23, I don’t think it would have been easy.

  28

  On Wednesday evening the Westside Chronicle calls.

  Kevin Butt has nominated me for their Neighbour of the Month Award.

  I’m no sure thing, but this month’s Neighbour will be decided on Monday and I’m a definite contender. The journalist asks for a work phone number so I can be contacted to organise a story, if necessary.

  And who said living in the late twentieth century was easy?

  Thursday it rains. I take the car to work.

  I almost tell Hillary about the letter. I want to tell someone, but I also want to keep it to myself. Instead I tell her what she wants to hear. Things are okay for our Sydney meeting next week. And she says this’ll be her first night away from Daniel and she even misses him sometimes when she’s at work.

  So if there are any times when I don’t seem the best you have to make allowances. Of course, I’d miss work if I wasn’t here, so I can’t win really. It is the impossible balancing act people say it is, but what do you do? At least he’s onto formula now.

  She then moves into a discussion of her early feeding problems, her use of a breast pump. And, you know, I’d be bringing it into work and milking myself like some bloody cow if it hadn’t dried up. How would that be if two or three times a day my door was shut for half an hour while I milked myself and then I ran out to the fridge with a bottle? Imagine if people started putting it in their coffee.

  Does it taste the same?

  And it seems to be this basic, practical question that brings us down. That makes us both realise that we’re standing here talking about Hillary’s breasts and a pump. And we’ve never talked about her breasts before, let alone milking them, and I think, although it’s just biology, we both fear we have crossed a line.

  No, she says. It doesn’t really. But maybe that’s just because I don’t have the diet of a cow. I’ll get Deb to sort out our flights. We’ll go first thing Tuesday morning. Okay?

  Yeah.

  When I’m back in my room I think of Hillary and her baby and how good they’ve looked when I’ve seen them together. And I think of Hillary and the breast pump and I try not to.

  She was nauseated most of the pregnancy but she became quite calm about it. This was fine if you knew her and you were prepared for vomiting at any moment, but I think she forgot that other people might not be. She would regularly interrupt our conversations in her office with a polite, Excuse me, and a lift of the eyebrows before sticking her head in her bin and bringing up lunch. At first I found this really stressful and I didn’t know what to do, but after a while we both relaxed. Hillary learned that if she was talking it was okay to regard such incidents merely as punctuation, and I worked out that if I was mid-sentence she expected me to pause for no longer than the vomiting noise, which echoes loudly in a bin, and then resume.

  We were only reminded that this might not be conventional when the two of us were at a whiteboard giving a presentation and she did the eyebrow thing. We both instinctively looked for a bin, but there wasn’t one, so she said her polite, Excuse me, and threw up in a large pot plant. She dabbed her mouth with a tissue, held up her hand to make everyone quiet, and went on with the sentence … and really it gets back to whether this should be thought of as legitimate hedging, or speculation. And the crowd of men in dark suits, I’m sure, had lost all awareness of the dilemma she was posing as they stared in some kind of fear at this small woman with a giant cue ball under her white dress and the neat glistening pool of vomit in the tan bark.

  I must admit I thought it was great. It was one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen, and she didn’t even know it. And afterwards she said to me, They had no questions. They sat there like a bunch of fucking stunned mullets and they had no questions at all. I’m the only person today who got no questions. I hate having to bore people by talking about such tedious topics. Was there a problem with what I said?

  All I could do was tell her that her talk was fine, and that her only problem was to find the right collective noun for stunned mullets.

  She ate almost all the time, and seemed to vomit for the rest of it, leading her to declare that she was in danger of suffering RSI of the oesophagus. She slept badly and said, Look at these eyes, I look like a raccoon. She took her shoes off and then couldn’t put them back on again because of swelling. And she worked efficiently until about thirty-seven weeks, when she went home and fitted out the nursery. Then she kept calling me on her cordless phone while she was weeding the garden or building the cot, and she’d ask me to check something and call her back. It’s not that I don’t trust you Rick, I just had an idea that’s all, and could you …

  Then one morning at work I picked up the phone and she said, Hey Rick, I’ve had the kid. And she gave me the stats, the way people with babies always seem to. Boy, seven pounds nine, two-twelve am.

  So when was that? I asked her.

  Two-twelve am. I just told you.

  Yeah, but what day?

  Today. This morning.

  But it’s only eight-thirty now. Shouldn’t you be sleeping or something?

  Are you kidding? On these beds? I’ve got him just next to me in a see-through plastic box thing. He’s sleeping. He’s great. He looks just like a baby.

  And she asked me how I was going with the trashing, I think. It was all quite recent then. The only real difference at work was that at that stage it was her job I was handling in a cavalier and arbitrary fashion, rather than just my own.

  She seemed so unimaginably happy. She still does. And sometimes I feel very separate from this happiness.

  On the way home, driving through rain, I see a woman with a cello, struggling along, getting wet. She’s wearing a grey plastic raincoat and it’s flapping around, doing nothing.

  I turn off Waterworks Road and circle back, but the traffic’s not easy and when I get there she’s gone. Maybe she caught a bus or a cab, maybe someone else stopped to pick her up, maybe she lives somewhere on this stretch of the road. I drive on home.

  I can picture her in my car, wet in the passenger seat, her black cello case wet in the back. Water running from the strands of her dark hair and down her cheeks. She flops back in the seat with the relief of being out of the rain. And we might have had a few minutes of conversation before we reached her house. And she might have said, Hey, do you want to come in for coffee? But maybe not.

  I should concentrate on the driving, get my head back into the real world. The last thing I need in my day is to go up the rear of the car in front, and to have to say that my mind was on a wet cellist I’ve never met.

  29

  Why couldn’t she wait until the rain died down?

  There was no way she should have been out there with that cello, even if she’s sure the case is waterproof. Perhaps it’s straightforward. Perhaps I turned up just after the bus had pulled away and she was only a few doors from home. But she looked too wet for that. So why didn’t she catch a cab? Didn’t she have any money? Why didn’t she wait?

  Friday on the way home she is not on my bus, she is not walking along Waterworks Road. I’ve never seen her before, and perhaps I won’t see her again.

  Around me people talk about weekends, and this weekend I’m actually doing something. Well, Saturday night anyway. Veny is going to live in a studio in Paris for six months, so he’s having a party.

  Mid-afternoon on Saturday I venture into a room of boxes to select a
n appropriate bottle of wine. Red I think.

  I can’t find red.

  I find one box full of my winter clothes and another with paperwork, receipts and warranties and old tax returns on top of a folder with phone bills, gas bills, power bills from my time in the flat with Anna. Her neat writing when she’s paid them at the bank, my scrawl when I’ve made a note about the cheque I’ve mailed, whatever.

  How could you make so many calls? I remember asking her, hassling her, now so needlessly. Why can’t you phone people when you’re at work like everyone else?

  Because I’m working, I think she said.

  But I can find no red wine.

  The next box is my grandmother’s. Cards from her ninetieth birthday, with a rubber band round them. This is unlike her. She didn’t keep things, didn’t keep cards. She didn’t even want to be ninety, the way she told it. Ninety’s just too damn old, she said to me. Your knees go and your hearing goes. You start to fall apart and you end up reading these flaming large print books where you spend all your time turning pages. People should be knocked on the head at about eighty.

  She said the last thing she wanted was to live to a hundred and get her telegram from the queen. I’d send it back and tell her to get herself a blinking job.

  But here are the cards from her ninetieth, bundled and kept, even though she said it was ten years past the last birthday anyone could want. I find the card from me, and then I see it’s from Anna too. Anna, writing her own greeting, sending her own love. And it reads like she’s part of the family.

  Under the cards is the nearly-finished front of the black jumper my grandmother was knitting for me last year. I’d forgotten all about it. It’s wrapped around a large ball of wool that has two knitting needles crossed through it, the whole lot rolled up and put away, probably only when she died. I last saw her knitting two days before that, and it’s a strange mixture of neat rows and horrendous dropped stitches. I’m sure she’d hate anyone to think it was hers.