Zigzag Street

by Nick Earls

  And you’re dancing naked.

  Yeah. And this is not just dancing. This is special. I’m putting a lot into this. This is probably some of the best naked dancing the fifteenth floor has ever seen. And it’s not over yet. The lift doors open again, and there’s Barry Greatorex in a dinner suit.

  This is a dream. This must be a dream. You can’t tell me this actually happened.

  Yes I can. So, he just watches us for a few seconds, and he says nothing, then he backs into the lift—you have to remember he’s got a hell of a turning circle, so it’s a lot easier to back in—and he goes.

  He goes, having seen you and Hillary at work at one am, and you totally naked.

  Exactly.

  He’s likely to get the wrong idea.

  Well, here’s the twist. I didn’t tell you there was a twist, but there is. And the twist is that, well, it mightn’t be such a wrong idea. Because, on Tuesday night, in Sydney …

  And I can’t go on now. I can’t actually say it.

  What? What in Sydney? He’s going to make me say it.

  On Tuesday night, in Sydney … Well, Sydney was tough. Sydney was very strange. It caught us both unawares. And we just, well, we just happened to have sex. It was one of those things.

  One of those things? What things?

  One of those things where neither of you means it to happen. In fact, you assume it won’t happen, so it does.

  You didn’t mean it to happen? You had sex and you didn’t mean it to happen?

  Yeah.

  How does that work? How do two people not mean sex to happen and then have sex? You were both willing I take it?

  Well, sure, but we didn’t mean to be.

  I’m not getting this yet. You didn’t mean it. Neither of you. I think it might have crossed your minds. Otherwise it’s a pretty bizarre accident, a real billion to one shot. There you were, the two of you in a meeting, and suddenly, you both realised your penis was inside her. It must have been quite embarrassing. And what did the other people do? Do they think that’s a Brisbane thing now? Do they think that up here we find our penises in each other all the time?

  It wasn’t quite like that. And can I just say all this penis-inside business is a very limited male view of intercourse.

  Right at the moment your hold on any high moral ground is at best tenuous.

  I’m aware of that.

  This is big. This is bad. Did you know this was bad?

  I knew it was bad. That’s why I assumed it wouldn’t happen. I don’t do bad things. I do crap things, sometimes insensitive things, but that’s usually as far as it goes. I really like Hillary. I think she’s great. And I must admit I’d had fantasies, but I thought that was fine, well, not a big deal.

  Fantasies are fine.

  Good. Well I have plenty of those, and I thought this was just another one.

  And then, through one act you go from the crumbly nobility of the Krapmeister to evil Schlong Lord.

  I think I still want to be the Krapmeister.

  Maybe it’s too late.

  I can’t deal with that. It just happened. We’ve both agreed it just happened, and that’s that. And it wasn’t the way you’d think. She’s been having a bad time. We both had needs. It was really intimate.

  And right now I feel, and I’m sure look, as though I’m going to cry, so he eases up on me. We don’t like it when I cry.

  This is a very strange time for you, he says.

  Very strange.

  You must feel quite out of control.

  Yes. And I don’t like that. I want things to be different. I don’t sleep, I can’t work, I can’t think straight and I feel like fucking Chicken Little, looking everywhere for some kind of affection.

  You feel like fucking a chicken now?

  Fucking Chicken Little. It was clearly an adjective. It was never a verb. But maybe you’ve got a point. Maybe not even the chickens are safe. Right now, I just don’t know.

  I turn down his offer to stay at their place tonight, and he says, Call if there’s a problem. Any time, okay? And I lie in the dark with my head spinning. I’m not sure any more if Chicken Little was the one who looked everywhere for affection or the one who thought the sky was falling, but either seems applicable.

  And tonight I’m angry with Anna Hiller. Tonight it’s easier to deal with if it’s all her fault.

  42

  And then it’s not her fault, and I don’t blame her. I just miss her.

  So have I made no progress at all? On nights like this it seems more a descent into madness than any kind of progress. I should be okay now. I really should. I should be okay not in a relationship. I shouldn’t fall apart, and this does seem like falling apart.

  I have friends, good friends, a job, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Not to mention food, shelter, clothing and the consistent and reliable absence of torture. I can make a list that says I’m better off than ninety per cent of the world’s population, but that’s all meaningless. It doesn’t help. It only misunderstands happiness.

  So it’s dark and still and late and I’m missing Anna. And I thought I’d miss her less by now. I had expected to have moved on, to have swung like a single and not like a plumb bob. To have lived recklessly but harmlessly and without consequences. And my one and only reckless act doesn’t fit with this at all. Some people seem to be good at being single. I don’t seem to be one of them. I can’t work, I can’t renovate, I can’t remember things, I can’t be sure of what’s in my own head, and everything just takes such effort.

  So does this end? Jeff tells me it ends. Mister Security says things will be okay. He should envy my freedom, and I should piss him off by living wildly, but it’s not happening that way. I just make him feel much better about long-term monogamy, a much luckier man. I have days when I want to surround myself with girls, just to make him gnash his teeth, but every part of that’s ridiculous.

  I think I should go on one of those courses about being a male in the nineties. One of those ones where you get to shout a lot. I think shouting would be good.

  And I don’t want to change this house. I don’t want to talk to my mother, because she will talk to me about changing the house. It should be the Way it was. I want to ask her about my grandfather, but from what she’s said before I don’t know that she knows much more than I do. I think Kevin was right. I think he kept a lot to himself. Maybe my grandmother knew some things, but I missed out on asking her by a matter of months and that pisses me off too.

  I’m not sure why I need these answers. Why this has any bearing on the renovations, or on me, but it feels like it does. Maybe I think I’ve found a family history of periods of despair, and that somewhere in there is an answer. I want to know what my grandfather went through, what he did in the early twenties, what was in his head before he came here and they built this house. There should be other letters, other evidence.

  I think I’ve been attempting to move on through reconstructing some safe platform in my own past, something that includes the answers I need, particularly, I suppose, to the end of things with Anna. I need to be able to put that down to something in the past, so I can believe it won’t happen again. Then all this will feel less dangerous. I need to make some sense of it, instead of losing myself in purposeless, painful rumination. But I’m not kicking out of it. Nothing’s resolving. Some days there’s only more trouble.

  And then there’s Sydney. I want to sit down with Peter and Hillary and talk, and get whatever I deserve. I also want to run for cover, and pretend it never happened. But it did. And I’m looking at this in a very old-fashioned way, honest retribution, just desserts, as though my life can’t possibly be the consequence-free road movie I’d been hoping for the night of the flat battery, because it’s already an old western, and I’m now the guy in the black hat, the amoral, straight-shooting gun-slinger with nowhere to call home, pursued by vengeance as long as it takes vengeance to find him. And I hate those films.

  And I can’t accept that I’ve mad
e a mess of things with Hillary, that there was something great for a moment there, but I fumbled it. I blew it, and now things can’t even be the way they were, and all I’m left with of her is her appalling use of the cowboy movie as metaphor.

  Of course I’m thinking, has this been in me all the time? Did Anna know I was like this, and that’s why she left? Did she know that there was something bad about me, some unsalvageable flaw that I’m just not brave enough to face?

  Why all this guilt? Why this need for punishment?

  More questions. More questions. All this thinking and only more questions.

  43

  It’s strange. Giving up sleep should mean I have more time to do things, but I seem to have far less.

  I don’t even have enough time for bread to toast in the mornings, so I find I’m trying to convince myself that a glass of flavoured mineral water and a handful of Tim Tams is the breakfast of champions.

  I have bad feelings about today. Not that this differentiates it from any day in the recent past, but today has the visitors from Singapore, and maybe also some kind of consequences following Barry the Great’s brief appearance on Saturday night.

  I realise today is a day for an ironed shirt, but I don’t have time for that either. So I defer the ironing and I leave home wearing something crumpled and old, and carrying the best shirt I can find in a plastic bag.

  I borrow the travelling iron from the executive suite on the sixteenth floor, taking care to go nowhere near Barry’s office, and I go back to fifteen and start ironing the shirt on a towel on my desk. As a well-known master of crap, this seems very likely to end in disaster, but for once things go just as they should, and I’m admiring my work, thinking, Hey, maybe I should do this more often, when Hillary comes in. Of course, she catches me in the brief period between shirts and, as I am standing behind my word processor, she thinks I am totally naked again.

  Shit, sorry, she says and walks out slamming the door. Before I can do anything the door is open again and she’s saying, What am I acting surprised for? I get to see you naked about every third day.

  Pants on, I tell her. Pants on. I am not naked, merely ironing.

  That’s good. I could have sworn I heard ‘Girl from Ipanema’ on the Musak. You had me scared. I was wondering if you were the victim of a cruel hypnotist.

  Just don’t hum that tune. I can’t help myself.

  Anyway, I came in with a reason.

  Yeah?

  Barry. You haven’t heard about Barry?

  No.

  He’s gone. He’s out of here. Early this morning. The security guard found him in his office. He’d trashed the place. He was hallucinating, seeing naked people, they say. He was climbing the walls and vomiting chocolate and ground coffee. Apparently he was saying all kinds of crazy things. And the last thing he said as he was lifted into the ambulance was, ‘You have no idea what I might have been’.

  That’s good. That’s a very good line. Kind of grand and yet enigmatic. I’ll have to remember that for my breakdown. So, what’s the story with him? I guess he’s been weird for a while, but …

  Yeah. He’s been stressed out for a long time. All that bullshitting takes its toll, you know. He thinks they’re out to replace him in New York, which is not impossible. But it’s people like you who’ve got him scared. Under thirty and expertise he’ll never have.

  He only had to ask me. I could have told him I’m no threat to anything at all at the moment.

  Well, the man thinks you dance naked here at night. That must mean something mustn’t it? It’s a pretty bizarre hallucination.

  So everyone knows?

  Sure. Everyone knows that Barry the Great’s gone mad, and he thought he saw you dancing naked on the fifteenth floor. He even thought I was there too, but dressed. People think it’s very funny. It could be worse.

  It could. So did he say I managed to be both elegant and hung like a beast?

  I don’t think so. But he was mad, so who knows?

  She leaves me to put on my shirt and to work, and over the next couple of hours a fistful of e-mail messages comes my way from people asking if I do Rick-a-grams at twenty-firsts, questioning the closeness of my relationship with Barry the Great, saying they’ve cranked the Musak up and when can I be there? So everyone knows about my interest in nude office dancing, and no-one believes it.

  Even on my worst days I haven’t come close to Barry’s last few hours. But maybe that’s just a style thing. Maybe the uncompromising scale of his fall gives him the moment of unfettered greatness he has yearned for, and maybe my breakdown will be crap, will creep up on me unnoticed and crumble me down in a much less glamorous way. Or maybe my breakdown is just a worsening inertia, and I’ll be able to do less and less, until finally I’ll have no idea that I’m doing nothing at all and I’m stuck rigid at my desk drooling down into my keyboard as my sphincters ease lazily open. Some awful oozing kind of breakdown, if such things exist.

  Hillary’s getting tense. She’s pacing up and down, even though everything’s ready. Probably because everything’s ready and there’s nothing for her to do but pace up and down.

  Half an hour before they’re due to arrive it brings her undone. She snaps a heel on a brisk turn. I hear her swearing in the foyer and she comes into my room hobbling and holding a shoe in one hand and a heel in the other.

  What the fuck am I going to do? she says.

  We can sort it out, I tell her, though I have no idea how. My voice does sound nice and calm though.

  How? How? She will not be won by calm. She’s rapidly slipping into crazy. We’ve only got half an hour. I’ve checked. They’re landing on schedule. The car’s there to pick them up. I can’t go out and get new shoes. I can’t go out in case they get here. Deb’s at lunch. What the fuck am I going to do?

  Then I remember the man in Albert Street, the man who always fixed Anna’s heels (and she trashed a lot of heels, apparently due to the design of the pavers in the mall).

  I think I can get it fixed, I tell her. I think I know a guy who might be able to do it right away. Okay?

  Okay? Great. That’s great. What do I do?

  Leave it to me. You really should be here, just in case. And I know where to go. Just stay calm. Forget the heel. The heel is in my hands.

  The lift stops six times on the way to ground and blows at least a couple of my remaining twenty-eight minutes. I run. I run and I sweat any sense of crispness out of my ironed shirt in a second. I run and I manage to dodge everybody except the guy in the wheelchair selling things for the muscular dystrophy Bow Tie Day, but I only wing him, so I keep going. It occurs to me that I might bump into Peter at any moment, and that some innocent circumstance might be my undoing after all; as I collide with him, holding the pieces of his wife’s broken shoe, and raise his suspicions a week after the event.

  But I don’t, and other than nearly spreadeagling the guy with muscular dystrophy, I’m okay. Admittedly my knee is sore from that, and when I look I see I’ve torn my pants on his chair and I’m bleeding, but the limp doesn’t seem to slow me down.

  I get to the shoe repairer with twenty minutes to go, and the people waiting step aside as I push through shouting, This is an emergency, and waving the heel like a terrorist with a hand grenade.

  The shoe repairer stays calm. He addresses me as Mr Hiller. He asks how Mrs Hiller is. I say she’s in Melbourne at the moment, and he makes some lame joke about me coming in with another woman’s shoe while she’s away.

  No it’s hers, I tell him.

  And then it occurs to him that it might actually be another woman’s shoe.

  I’ve seen most of her shoes at some stage, he says. I’ve got a very good memory for shoes. But I don’t recall a pair like this.

  They’re new.

  This doesn’t look new.

  She doesn’t wear them much. She might have had them for a while, and she’s only started wearing them again lately. They’re new to me.

  Her feet, and now he�
�s really beginning to doubt me, he’s really starting to think I’ve been fucking the owner of these shoes and it’s not my wife, and I just can’t get into that now. This is so much more than just the usual attempt to get out of having to face telling the trashing story. I was sure her feet were bigger than this, by at least a couple of sizes.

  Yeah. They were.

  They were?

  Sure. She had a fluid problem. It’s sorted out now. Some women’s thing. This is her natural size. Trust me. And she needs them right away, please. Please.

  She’s in Melbourne.

  Yeah.

  But you need the shoes right away. She needs them right away.

  Yeah. Yeah. I’ve got to give them to someone who’s just outside in a cab and is about to fly to Melbourne. She and my wife are involved in a business meeting in a couple of hours and my wife says she needs these shoes.

  He looks at me, stares at me for what seems like a very long time, as though there is some morality clause involved in shoe repair, and then he says, Okay. And he looks at the heel, looks at the shoe, fiddles round for most of the rest of my life and says, You want a new heel, or you want me to fix the old one back on?

  Whatever’s quick. Whatever takes about three minutes.

  Okay. Fixing the old one back on is quick, but not as good. And I don’t like to compromise. I don’t like to think that people are out there walking on work that isn’t my best.

  Quick is fine. What I need is something that takes about two minutes and forty-five seconds and will last the rest of the day. I promise not to tell anyone it’s your work. I’ll tell them I did it myself, but that we’re planning to bring it to you to get the definitive solution from an expert. Okay?

  Okay. The quick fix, and when your wife gets back from Melbourne, she brings it back in and I do the job properly. Okay? And today I won’t charge you. Your wife is a good customer and I’m not going to rip her off by charging her for shit that I’m forced to do in two minutes forty-five seconds, okay?