Green

by Nick Earls

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did anyone ever come here?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Did you drive past?’

  ‘Sometimes, I guess. It’s a main road.’

  ‘Was it ever busy? Did it ever look busy?’

  ‘Not that I noticed.’

  ‘Okay.’ He takes a big breath in and blows it out again, like someone lifting something heavy. ‘Again, for the sake of morale and a lot of other things, this is just between you and me. I’ve got a three-year lease on this place, with options. I bought Max out based on a certain set of figures and there’s not one day we’ve been trading that’s lived up to them. And Max hasn’t been returning my calls, and today whoever answered the phone said he’s not in Australia at the moment, and she’s not sure when he’ll be back. And I went to the dentist and he says the whole lot has to go. Clearance.’ He waves one arm, as though summarily dismissing his teeth. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

  ‘About which? The teeth, or . . .’

  ‘About the lot of it. The teeth, the World. Mate, I was so sure this was the right move, you know? There I was thinking how well things were going with the mowers and thinking, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, Ron, so of course it was chickens that came into my mind. Now it’s bloody all on the line.’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Bloody all of it.’

  ‘It’s not over yet. We’ve got customers. Not a lot, but more than when we started. A few more. We’ve even got some regulars. Frank attracts a certain kind of crowd, and we work on being a friendly crew. Friendly, hygienic and prompt.’

  ‘Good, good. Of course you do. I should say that to myself more often. Friendly, hygienic and prompt. You are, aren’t you? You’re a good crew.’

  ‘We do our best. And we’ve got a good product, and parking. I mean, I don’t know this business, but we must be doing a few things right. And Sophie’s an asset, of course. We’ve got a good team thing happening here, and I think we’ve got to keep that going.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right. I’m letting you down. That’s the problem.’

  ‘I’m not saying that. That’s not it at all.’

  ‘No, I’m not showing enough belief in you.’

  ‘It’s not about you and it’s not about us. We’ve just got to keep plugging away.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, we have. With our “friendly, hygienic and prompt”.’ He’s fighting to come around. ‘And pretty keen prices too, I might add.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Oh, these teeth. Do you do much on teeth?’

  ‘No. We sort of leave that to dentists.’

  ‘I’m on Panadeine and some antibiotics for an abscess. What do you think of that?’

  ‘Sounds sensible if you’ve got an abscess. Of course, if you’ve got an abscess, you wouldn’t be feeling too good at the moment, and that wouldn’t be helping. You could be feeling tired and listless, and getting headaches and things.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. I am.’ Finally, he starts to brighten up. ‘I feel . . . like crud.’

  ‘Okay. Well, at least some of that might be down to the abscess. So, you and the dentist work on that, and we’ll all work on the World.’

  ‘Good. Good idea. Full clearance, hey? Do you reckon I should go ahead with the full clearance?’

  ‘Well, I’m no dentist.’

  ‘I’ve already got a plate,’ he says, and takes hold of his front teeth, about to pull it out to demonstrate.

  ‘No, it’s okay, you don’t have to . . . Sometimes, I think, if you get a problem with the teeth the plate’s relying on, your options can be pretty limited.’

  ‘That’s it. That’s what I’m looking at,’ he says, reality sinking heavily back into him.

  ‘It could be the end of abscesses, though. It’s not all bad news.’

  ‘No. True. It’s not all bad news. So, um, keep up the Panadeine for now, and the antibiotics?’

  ‘I think so. If that’s what your dentist says.’

  ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Right. Better sell some of that chicken for me before it goes off, hey? We’ll just keep plugging away. We all have days like this, I guess. Don’t you reckon?’

  ‘Sure. I have them myself. I’ve got all my own teeth and it doesn’t seem to stop them.’

  *

  The big question in Wednesday morning’s lecture: when did I become Ron Todd’s dad? I don’t know. But Ron ‘acted in good faith’ when he bought Max’s Snax. I think that’s how the expression goes. He deserves better.

  Okay, that’s not the big question. The really big question is Friday. Friday, and how to play it. What got into me at the Rec Club? I disowned the protest first chance I got, came up with some story about a library and two minutes later I was buying Jacinta a drink, then milking Ron’s imperfections for laughs and grappling for a place in her diary. And I’m the one he trusts, comes to with morale problems, looks to for advice. Advice, Ron? Don’t change a thing. Not even the old shirts. What would I do for material?

  ‘You could do worse than learn a thing or two in the kitchen, Philby,’ my mother once said while whipping up a jam-and-buttercream cake. ‘You see a whole new side of a man when you see that he can cook.’

  And I needed Jacinta to see a whole new side of me, so lunch didn’t seem like a bad idea. It’d seem like a much better idea if I’d taken the trouble to learn the thing or two in the kitchen first.

  *

  After the lecture, six of us have a session in the Special Care Nursery. We put on gowns and caps and it’s the kind of place that makes us automatically quiet. From the viewing windows it’s the machines that you can see, surrounding and towering over the tiny new babies in humidicribs as they lie there, splayed out like small beached sea creatures, each with their own history of a rescue in progress.

  Some are closer to routine cases than others, simply born very early and making the kind of progress that’s expected. One or two aren’t making much progress at all yet.

  We’re farmed out individually to nurses in the unit and we have twenty minutes to learn what we can, then we’ll present our cases. My nurse is Brian, whose beard is held in something like a neat surgical chaff bag and it makes his face look almost bottomless.

  He leads me over to his corner of the unit and he tells me, ‘This is baby Neil Armstrong.’ He’s already looking down and flicking a switch so I don’t see his face when he says it. ‘What we’ve got here, just to give you an idea of what you’re looking at, is a monitor for skin temperature—which should be in the low thirty-sixes—a cardiac monitor and an IVAC with an infusion going in through an umbilical vessel.’

  We talk through the machines first, then the baby—how he came to be here and how he is now. He seems fragile and very outnumbered, even though every machine is on his side. He doesn’t look fully human yet. He was born two days ago at twenty-six weeks and he looks like he’s still fighting to stop being something else and to emerge as a land-ready person. I can see, almost, where he’s come from, as though he’s a model of an earlier internal more aquatic life form.

  I make some notes about the fluids, and everything that has to be measured. Plus his mother’s history of recurrent miscarriages, no other live births and a damaged uterus. I wonder if his name is in the family, the Neil a grandfather’s first name maybe, or if it’s some hope that he’ll move beyond this rugged start and fly, make history. It’s so different to the fourteen- and fifteen-year olds in Antenatal Clinic six floors below, making babies because they haven’t learned how not to and carrying them for forty standard weeks.

  We reconvene outside the viewing window to present our cases. Frank goes first, and begins with, ‘Well, little Natasha should end up okay . . .’

  ‘Natasha whoever . . . was born whenever . . .’ the tutor says drearily, trying to pull him onto a more orthodox track, ‘at however many weeks . . .’

  *

  I’m going through the figures in my head while I’m out at the lights in the chic
ken suit. One more pay day and I think I can buy my half of the video camera. I could leave then. It is why I started working here. But it’d be bad timing for Ron, and I don’t think he’d take it well. His teeth, and Max, have already let him down. I guess I’m staying for now.

  Sophie’s putting a chicken in a bag for a customer when I go inside. ‘Family fries, large slaw,’ she says, verbally ticking off the order. ‘There you go.’

  The door swings shut, and it’s just the three of us again. It’s been five days since I saw Sophie at the Rec Club, and so far tonight it hasn’t rated a mention. She’s been swamped by her assignment ever since. I asked her about it when we arrived and she said, ‘I thought it looked easy and then it blew up in my face. But it’s done now. It’s crap, but it’s done.’

  Frank stops halfway through eating a spare burger. ‘You know, whatever way I look at it, I still find Marcia Brady hair really attractive. Do you reckon that any chick could get that kind of thing happening if they brushed it two hundred times a night?’

  ‘In a word, no,’ Sophie says, like someone who knows it to be true, someone who has counted to two hundred with a brush in her hand, perhaps.

  ‘And in more words?’

  ‘Marcia, Marcia, Marcia.’ She goes with a Brady quote, though I know the word she’s fighting back is ‘lank’. ‘Another of life’s mysteries,’ she says on the way to changing. ‘How is it that I have no sisters at all, and still it’s the Jan Brady issues I end up identifying with?’

  ‘You know, I think that was something the producers planned. I think there’s a little Jan Brady in all of us.’

  ‘What about Frank?’

  ‘Almost all of us. Maybe even in Frank. But some of us deny our inner Jan Brady, and that’s not healthy.’

  ‘You did get that high mark in psych, didn’t you?’

  ‘And four hours a day of TV was pretty much the minimum to get me there. It’s your Jan Brady issues that are your identity issues. Greg’s the big man on campus and Frank tried to play that role, but not with absolute conviction. Frank’s more complex than that, he just keeps his Jan below the surface most of the time. He’s actually got plenty of issues. Marcia’s the prom queen, Peter’s as woolly as his haircut in the big hair episodes, the kids are just kids—with the exception of Cindy’s lisp, but that’s a can of worms and we’re not opening it tonight. It’s our Jan Brady issues that go right to the big stuff—our place in the world, that kind of thing. We’re all in Marcia’s shadow, every one of us.’

  ‘She’s out there, isn’t she? Marcia and her bloody hair . . .’

  ‘Jan’s the question mark. What’s she going to make of her life? Greg? He becomes a high-school teacher and gets sacked for having an affair with a student. Too easy. His life peaked early, and he couldn’t let go of the glory. Marcia?’

  ‘Has kids with great hair—long straight blonde hair—and she brushes it for them, two hundred times a night.’

  ‘That’s it. It’s a prison, but she can’t see it. More kids, more brushing as the years go by. Condemned to brush a thousand times a night.’

  ‘Sounds only fair. Peter?’

  ‘He’ll be okay. He’ll be some happy-go-lucky guy with tools on his belt. Jan? Mystery. What happens to Jan is up to all of us.’

  ‘You know what I think’s good?’ she says. ‘Jan’s got all that turmoil when Greg and Marcia look like they’ve got everything, but they’re just having their best years early. For Marcia, getting Davy Jones to the prom is the best thing she’ll ever do. And she’ll tell her kids about it forever, and she’ll say things like, “I was Miss Maroubra 1962 and that’s because I put some effort into my hair. If I’d left it like that I wouldn’t have made third runner-up”. Or things about getting Davy Jones to the prom. Or whatever. At least you’ve got your life together. You’ve got hardly any Jan Brady issues at all, as far as I can see. You’re most of the way through a medical degree, you’re juggling two girls . . .’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t say juggling. It’s . . . the situation’s a bit more complicated than that. And I might be most of the way through a medical degree, but I want to make films, remember? And I’m spending my time either as a med student or dressed as a chicken on the roadside at Taringa. Do I sound close yet?’

  ‘Okay, maybe one or two Jan Brady issues. As well as the girl-juggling, which is more a Greg Brady issue. But at least you’ve got an idea of what you want to do with your life. I’m not so sure. I think I’d like to be one of those people with acumen. Business or media maybe. I’d like my dad to be proud of me. Is that dumb?’

  ‘No, it’s good.’

  ‘He’s a sort of self-made man. He’s done really well. He’s not always like everyone else’s dad, I know that, but everyone’s parents are kind of weird, aren’t they?’

  ‘If you ever doubt that, come round to my place. But it’s all part of their charm, right? How interesting would they be if they were normal?’

  ‘Yeah. Well, I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I have to end up doing more than wearing a chicken costume and making burgers. Speaking of which, it’s probably my turn. So, a poem, then we change.’

  ‘Okay.’ I assume the position. ‘One of my finer eisteddfod pieces. It’s by Andrew Marvell. “To His Coy Mistress”:

  ‘Had we but world enough, and time,

  This coyness, Lady, were no crime.

  We would sit down, and think which way

  To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

  ‘That’s how it starts, anyway. And then there’s some line about the Ganges, or something. The poem’s more about time, really. It’s just got this funny start that’s designed to make you think . . . something else.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to remember the Ganges bit for next time, otherwise people could think it was all about some mistress.’

  ‘I was never so good with the Ganges bit. I mean, why the Ganges? Had he ever been there?’

  I go into the toilet to take the costume off. Why, when I read through the poem last night, did the Ganges bit not sink in? I happened to find my old eisteddfod folder, I happened to take a look. It made sense. I was starting to run out of material, and it gets dull out at the road. But, without the Ganges bit, the poem really does sound as though it might mean something else.

  ‘You know,’ Sophie says, when I pass her the costume, ‘if we both weren’t the right height to fit into this thing, we might have found each other in the crowd on Friday. There were way too many tall people with a lot to say about that honorary doctorate.’ She goes in and shuts the toilet door. ‘It’s all a bit depressing, really. I don’t know if it got us anywhere. All that shouting, and I copped an elbow in the face. And for what? Do you ever have those times when nothing is really going right? You probably don’t. Anyway, back to it I guess.’

  She bounds out of the toilet, in case she can fake her way to real enthusiasm. I zip her up and she strides for the door, like a superhero. Requiring theme music, I decide—since I can’t think of one useful word to say—and I begin to do percussion and horn noises.

  She starts to punch the air in slow motion with her wing tips and then stops and says, ‘Is everyone singing that at the moment?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘“Eye of the Tiger”.’

  ‘Oh. I didn’t realise it was “Eye of the Tiger”.’

  ‘You. Frank, my mother, me. I’m singing it now, it’s so contagious. At least Frank says he’s got the album.’

  ‘Yeah. I’ve got no excuse. I don’t even like it.’

  ‘It’s everywhere. Everywhere.’

  ‘Well, I tried “YMCA” out at the road the other night, but the wings don’t bend enough to do M. Don’t go thinking “Eye of the Tiger” was even close to top of my list.’

  13

  Friday, the plan: confirm I’ll have the house to myself, go to Toombul Shoppingtown, pick up . . . something. Enticing pre-prepared food?

  Friday comes along too early, before there’s much of a plan
at all.

  ‘It’s lunch, just lunch,’ I said to Frank when I explained why I wouldn’t be at Antenatal Clinic. ‘It’s nothing big. So, no advice. I think I can put together a simple lunch myself.’

  He asked me if I still had any condoms left after our night on the Paradise and he said that that was a health issue, which was exempt from the no-advice rule. ‘Cuisine and conversation,’ I told him. ‘Lunch. And I’ll tell you how it goes afterwards.’

  So, I’m flying solo on this one. If my mother leaves the goddamn house. She’s not usually home on Fridays. What’s going on? I’m out on the back patio with Beischer and Mackay’s chapter sixty-four, ‘Immaturity and Disorders of Growth’, in front of me, and she’s hovering not far away, being very annoying.

  ‘Three more to go,’ she says.

  She’s marking assignments in batches and allowing herself time away from the table after every third or fourth one. She could do that on campus, couldn’t she?

  ‘So, what have you got planned for the rest of the day?’ I ask her in a transparently agenda-laden way.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just asking.’

  ‘You don’t usually.’

  ‘Maybe I’m . . . Okay, I’ve got plans. Frank’ll be coming over to study. Antenatal Clinic’s cancelled for today. We’re going to be going through some notes. I wanted to make sure we wouldn’t be in your way. You’ll be gone before lunch, won’t you?’