Zigzag Street

by Nick Earls

  Yeah.

  So the conversation ends.

  I try to look at the work, starting with the list of questions raised in Sydney. In twenty minutes I’ve contemplated only the other Sydney issues, then Hillary walks in. I want to tell her things straightaway. Seeing her for the first time since yesterday I want to tell her this meant something to me.

  She turns to Deb and says, We’ve got to do some work on this thing for Monday, so we shouldn’t be disturbed unless it’s an emergency, okay? And she shuts the door, sits down. About Monday, she says. Stops and nods, looking past my right shoulder. About Monday. Another pause. Peter said he missed me. That it made him realise he’d been taking me for granted, that having Dan around had meant he’d focussed on him. He said he hadn’t been fair to me.

  So what did you say?

  Nothing. I didn’t know what to say. I don’t know what I’m going to say. I think I’ve hurt all of us.

  It’s not that simple. But let’s not have that conversation again.

  Rick, you’ve got to know, I’ve got to be honest, I was having a bad time there, and maybe I should have handled it differently, but the way you’ve treated me has made me feel good. That’s not how it’s supposed to be, but it’s how it is. And I hope I’m not missing the point here, I don’t want you to be hurt by this. I don’t know what you’re thinking at the moment, but I think we both know that what happened shouldn’t have.

  Yeah.

  And that’s it. That nothing else will happen.

  Yeah.

  I think we both know that.

  Sure.

  I have no idea how to say what I think I’m trying to say here. Two things I suppose. We’ve got to put it in the past, that’s the first thing. And I don’t think it’s fair if this hurts you in any way. You’ve been hurt enough. Am I missing the mark here? Is this all stupid? Are you not thinking any of this at all?

  No. You’re not missing the mark.

  I don’t want you to think you don’t mean a lot to me. You do.

  Thanks.

  I think it’s fair to say we both had feelings for each other.

  Yeah.

  And that this didn’t happen lightly.

  Yeah. Hillary, you don’t have to say all this stuff. I don’t think this could have happened lightly for either of us, okay? But obviously we have to move on, I think we’ve both worked that out.

  Yeah.

  So do you think you’ll tell Peter?

  I don’t know. It’s really not that easy. I think I should. But even when I try to think what would be the best for him I don’t have the answer. Does that sound like I’m rationalising my way out of telling him?

  I don’t know.

  I go out for a walk, since the coffee and the crap in my head and a night spent pacing seem to combine to have me hovering in a very ineffective state between awake and asleep. I don’t know where I walk and I don’t care. It’s a hot day, so I sweat till I stink, and I keep walking till I end up back at work and realise I should be doing some.

  I forget to get out of the lift at my floor, and at the next floor Barry Greatorex gets in.

  Hi, he says, as though doing so makes him sweat too. As though doing so might reveal something. And he looks nervously around the lift.

  How are you Barry?

  Good. Why?

  Just asking.

  Right. How are you?

  Good.

  Good. How’s that thing?

  Fine. What about you?

  Oh, good.

  And now we’re both looking nervously around the lift. Barry reaches into his pocket for a handful of chocolatecoated coffee beans and crunches on them, his eyes all the time flicking from one thing to another as though there might be danger.

  It’s only when several people have come and gone that I realise neither of us has pressed a floor button.

  Which floor Barry? I ask him.

  What? Oh, doesn’t matter. Oh, sixteen I suppose.

  So I get off at fifteen and leave him in the lift alone.

  And Deb tells me Hillary’s gone out to lunch, with Peter.

  37

  Tonight I can’t cook. I can’t even face ordering takeaway from Baan Thai and going through the Hiller shit. And I don’t want to walk up to Waterworks Road for Lebanese cause it’s uphill. I get in my car, thinking I might drive till I find something that suits me. At West End maybe, somewhere interesting. Somewhere cheap and Vietnamese and all by myself.

  The car doesn’t start. I’ve flattened the battery by not shutting the door properly and leaving the inside light on last night after tennis.

  I call the RACQ.

  They tell me half an hour at least.

  I have almost no food. I wonder how a can of Greg’s Prime Beef and Turkey would be on toast. I’ve already eaten all my biscuits. I realise it’s Thursday and I should be at Toowong late night shopping. But I can’t. And even when the car’s sorted out I won’t.

  I sit out on the bonnet with a big pile of toast with Vegemite on it and I drink tap water. So much for the idea of driving till I found something that suited me. Heading off into the night uncertain of my destination, a pointless non-plan that I think I wanted to romanticise into something more deliberate: me and my old Laser and just a hint of road movie. Me and my flat battery and toast on the bonnet at home. Me and the smells of other people’s cooking and the slow pathos of slide guitar, when the wind blows gently from the west.

  It occurs to me that this might be the sort of thing I deserve. That I should suffer in a succession of pathetic ways like this, and all by my own thoughtless hand.

  I finish my toast and I find I’m singing along to the slide guitar wafting down from Kevin’s kitchen louvres. This is not something I want to do, and I don’t find my familiarity with the words at all reassuring.

  The RACQ mechanic arrives and jump starts the car. He tells me the battery might survive, and that I should drive around for a while to try to re-charge it. There is no point in explaining to him that I have eaten my fill of toast, and I now have nowhere to go.

  I drive. I drive and I sing along to Triple J. This is becoming a habit, and it’s not a good one. Even people who sing in cars think people who sing in cars are losers. Jeff and Sally are at some family dinner tonight, so I drive past their house without stopping and out around the uni campus, still singing, past pre-season football training and the tennis courts, past the colleges and back out onto the road, through St Lucia and Toowong and then towards home. And I wonder if I’ve driven long enough yet. I realise I’m close to Tim’s place, so I drive there and leave the car outside with the engine running and sit with him on his front verandah drinking coffee.

  When I go to his toilet my constipation still gets the better of me so I do a lot of sitting and not much else. It occurs to me that this may be the price I am to pay. That I will never shit again following the Sydney incident, and that I will grow progressively more uncomfortable until I explode. I wonder if the same will happen to Hillary. I wonder if the same is happening to Barry Greatorex. Maybe he isn’t obese at all, just in an advanced stage of faecal retention because of some indiscretion that precedes my own. This might explain why his eyes are beginning to bulge and his concentration is so poor. The idea of Barry Greatorex exploding is very unattractive indeed.

  In Tim’s toilet, where most people might have an old Who Weekly or two, he has a copy of Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me. Having nothing else to do but wait I read the first few scenes, then I realise I could all too easily spend the whole evening with my pants around my ankles engrossed in one of the less famous works of Elizabethan theatre, so I skip to nearer the end, and there surely is a lot of tragedy in this play.

  A few short notes on The Spanish Tragedy

  Many’s the quiet ten minutes or so I have sat in Dr Murray’s smallest room, attending to the necessaries and whiling away any moments of waiting with a scene or two from Mr Kyd’s most excellent play, The Spanish
Tragedy. The room, with its artful consideration of the acoustic, gives pleasing echo to the more declamatory lines, and yet shapes admirably the deceits among the lightest whispers. The play begins …

  Interesting toilet reading, I tell him when I’m back on the verandah.

  It’s a great play, he says, as though this makes it reasonable to keep in a toilet. I read it all the time to my eighteen-month-old nephew and he always asks for more.

  You read it to him in the toilet?

  Yeah. Well, when there’s no-one else here and you have to go, he has to go too.

  You have to take him with you and read The Spanish Tragedy?

  Well, the play’s probably optional, but he is a bit of a fan.

  Are you in the habit of taking children to the toilet and reading to them?

  Only very young children.

  I’m not sure that makes it all right.

  My car battery, if it will ever be charged again, should surely be charged by now. I drive home and park, and I make sure I shut the door properly tonight. I want to try to start the car, to see if the battery has charged, but I’m not sure if this means I would have to go for another drive. I suppose I could always take in a few more scenes of The Spanish Tragedy. Maybe I shouldn’t have looked at the end.

  I don’t sleep. I seem to have stopped sleeping now, and to have replaced the process entirely with angstridden, guilt-ridden unproductive thought.

  At around two o’clock I walk up to Wee Willie Winkie’s on Waterworks Road (Open Twenty-Four Hours a Day, 365 Days a Year) and I buy a packet of Tim Tams. I stand outside the store eating them and watching the occasional cars speed past, heading out of town and down the hill into Ashgrove. An old man wanders up to me muttering something incomprehensible, so I give him a couple of Tim Tams and he wanders on. I watch him go, wobbling off down the hill in a long smelly coat all wrong for this hot night. He veers around things that aren’t there and shouts at them in a tangle of sounds that mean nothing to me. Just when I think he must have nowhere to go, he crosses the road to a hostel, and someone lets him in. Before the door shuts I can hear a voice saying quite clearly, Where have you been? and the gruff peculiar sounds of the man in reply.

  I buy a banana Paddle Pop and eat it on the walk home.

  38

  I watch TV, a repeat of ‘Grizzly Adams’ (who would have thought they’d repeat ‘Grizzly Adams’?) and a movie called September Gun (synopsis: A nun hires an aging gunfighter to help her move a group of unwanted Apache children). I think the three star rating the TV guide gives it borders on the generous. But who’ll be watching it anyway? Me and parents feeding infants and maybe some people on night shift. No-one expecting quality. No-one who stayed up just for this movie, or taped it for later. September Gun is just what’s on.

  After ‘General Hospital’ I change channels for the ‘ITN News’, ‘Daybreak News’ and the ‘Today Show’, which has a story about Liz Hurley scoring a multimillion dollar contract with Estée Lauder. So does this change her status from Celebrity Partner to the Helena Christensen category of Celebrity Partner (Supermodel)? Clearly the whole celebrity partner game moves far too quickly for me. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever be a part of it, despite the plan that recently seemed so clever.

  At work, Renee from the Westside Chronicle calls.

  The medallion’s ready. Could I drop in to give it to you and maybe take a few photos?

  She comes at around eleven with a photographer who takes about a dozen shots of me holding the medallion next to my face, grinning.

  Too easy, he says. That’ll do me.

  Renee says she’ll catch up with him later, and he goes. She turns back to me, looking not entirely comfortable, and says, My church group’s having a barn dance this Saturday. Are you doing anything?

  I think I might be working.

  And for a Saturday night it’s hard to find a worse lie than that.

  Oh, I’m sorry. Are you involved with someone at the moment?

  No. Well, no. I don’t know.

  Okay, she says, the complexity of my answer only making things less certain. Well, call me when you know, maybe. If you want to have coffee or something.

  Sure, yeah. Sure. That’d be good.

  Only if you want to.

  When she’s gone I call Jeff. I tell him about my medallion, and he says he should see it as soon as possible. And I tell him about Renee and the Christian barn dance win-on.

  She asked you to a barn dance? he says, as though he needs confirmation. On account of you and the stump?

  My act of Christian charity. She’s clearly very confused.

  What is it with Christians and barn dances?

  I plan never to know.

  So you turned her down?

  Hey, she’s got the Lord. She’ll get over me.

  At the counter in the coffee shop he makes me open the purple velvet box and take out the medallion, and the girl making our coffee watches it in my hand.

  Is that a medal? she says.

  Yeah.

  What did you get it for? If you don’t mind me asking.

  I tell her, quite calmly and for no good reason, I pulled a kid out of the surf.

  She refuses to charge me for my coffee and says, It wouldn’t be right to take money from a hero, would it?

  You’ll have to tell her the details before you go, Jeff says to me when we’re sitting down. I think she has a genuine interest in heroic deeds.

  Yeah. Me too. And some bits of that root were pretty tenacious.

  So here I am with my medal, won in perhaps my crappiest year and for a singularly unspectacular act. Jeff sits turning it over in his hands.

  So how many Rs would there usually be in Derrington? he says.

  Two, usually in the middle.

  Not at the Chronicle. And he shows me the single R Derington.

  Oh, that Richard Derington. I think he’s the one who pulled a kid out of the surf. What a joke. What crap. And do you know what I’ve read these last couple of days? Shoshanna and Jerry are on. Helena and Michael are on. Liz Hurley’s signed a multimillion dollar contract with Estée Lauder. What do these people think they’re doing? They get my hopes up, give me some sense of purpose, then they change the rules of the game.

  No, no you’ve got it wrong. That is the game. Don’t be fooled. Celebrity partnering is ruled by falsehoods and shadow plays and temporary alliances. If you view anything, anything at all, as permanent, you just aren’t a player. Don’t be put off by reconciliation. Don’t even be put off by marriage. There are reasons for these things, reasons that are much smarter than any plan of lifelong union. When one of the players marries, you don’t forget about them. You just drop their name a little further down the list and wait your turn. It’s better if they marry. It makes you much bigger news when it’s over and your turn comes. You should look on this as just a hiatus.

  This is a hiatus? There I was thinking I was sinking and it’s just a hiatus. Can you believe they gave me this medal? I dug up a fucking tree.

  Sure. And they put your photo in the paper with your neighbour and it is truly gloriously bad.

  And the crap goes on, I tell him, because it does.

  You’re being unfair to your crap again. You just don’t understand it do you? Your crap is special. Crap defines you as an individual. Your crap makes you desirable, and right about now you must be one of the most desirable single men in the world. They all want you. You know they all want you. The girl making coffee, Renee from the Chronicle, the sixteen year old with a passing interest in books and a pleasing interest in trousers. Who knows how many more? They’re queuing up and you’re pushing them all back. Breaking hearts all over town. You and your penis pointing to the centre of the earth. And why do they want you? What is it that gives you this strange, crumpled desirability? Your job isn’t special, your law degree isn’t special, your soon-to-be-heritage-colours worker’s cottage isn’t special. It’s your crap that’s endearing. It’s the basis of any rela
tionship, way beyond even the choice of who wins on to whom. It’s crap that sustains things. The mutual vulnerability that comes from knowing each other’s crap. How shallow would we be if we only felt things for people on account of their successes? How likely would that be to survive? I don’t understand why this is making you so uncomfortable right now, why you think you should fight it. This time of glorious failure and perilous achievement is probably your finest hour, but it’s not as though it’s come out of the blue. I don’t know what kind of glamorous past you would like to have had, but you didn’t have it. Your life, like mine, is a series of conventional successes that don’t count for much, plus good times and crap. And we both know some of my best stuff is crap, and that’s why we like me so much.

  Some of Jeff Ross’ best stuff

  Best part-time job: Door-to-door salesperson for McGuigan’s Aerated Waters. Presented with a medallion by Lewis McGuigan, the seventy-eight-year-old son of the founder of the company (also Lewis McGuigan), for achieving the Highest Monthly Sales of Pashola on Record (January 1983) using the sales pitch, ‘A bottle of Pashola contains significant amounts of sugar, nature’s source of instant energy, and two-thirds of the body’s daily requirement of water, essential for life’.

  Best inappropriate use of semen story: The story of the student who woke in his own college room, stuck to his pillow with someone else’s semen. Apparently he had been out at the Rec Club while two other people had done the deed in his bed and had, according to Jeff, ‘Gone the interruptus and the guy let fly onto the pillow’. The student, having rendered himself senseless, returned to his now vacated room and slept peacefully with his head in someone else’s intimacy till morning. Jeff was always quite emphatic that this story was not his own, claiming he could have been no part of it as he had never lived in college. It is possible, though, that he visited the rooms there from time to time.