by Nick Earls
So instead of telling Frank what Ron spent to buy his teeth their second-last lunch, I tell him he should be fairer to that family. But he doesn’t see that he’s being unfair. He doesn’t see that fairness has anything to do with it.
If this gets out, Ron will fall apart. That’s my prediction. Ron will fall apart, Zel might openly be with Frank until that falls apart, World of Chickens will fall apart and I can’t imagine how Sophie would struggle through it all.
But that doesn’t occur to me until later, when I’m in my bedroom in the dark. Lying here, not sleeping, having eaten far too much today. Lying here, being quietly angry with Frank for saying things like: ‘Look, it’s not such a big issue. Shit like this happens all the time.’
Low moonlight comes in through the window and glints from the black plastic underside of a Wellington bomber on a night raid to Bremen. Clearly, my mission has at least two objectives, and must remain covert. Ron is freaking out about the teeth, and it’s up to me to give him some support. At the same time, I have to work on Frank. I have to chisel away at his affair with Zel until he sees it’s not right, and ends it. I am the moral guardian of the World after all, dammit.
First, Ron. I go to the pay phone in the kiosk at lunchtime on Tuesday and I give him a call to wish him luck with the teeth. It doesn’t go so well.
I tell him if he keeps breathing like that he should sit down and put his head between his knees. He writes that on a piece of paper as a two-step process. He asks if he can have a contact number in case of emergencies and I tell him I’ll be home by four-thirty.
*
At four twenty-eight I’m walking in the door and my mother’s on the phone. She’s scribbling something on a piece of paper. An address, other details.
‘Hold on a moment,’ she says. ‘He’s here now.’ She puts her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Mister Todd. Not so good after his dental procedure. This is the receptionist I’m talking to. They’re wondering if you could catch a cab into town and drive him home in his car. He says he’ll pay for the cab there, and the cab home later, after dinner. Is that . . .?’
‘That’s fine.’
‘Fine? Really?’
‘Yeah.’
She lifts her hand and says, ‘Tell Mister Todd he’s on his way . . . Yes . . . Yes. Thank you.’ She nods at the phone, and hangs up. ‘Philby . . .’
‘Sorry. I should have told you this might happen. Ron’s having a full dental clearance today. He’s going to end up with dentures. He’s been having a lot of problems with his teeth.’
‘And you’re . . . he’s calling you?’
‘I said he could call if he needed any help. It seemed to be a pretty foul thing to be going through, that’s all.’
‘Oh. Well, that’s . . . very nice of you.’
‘Don’t look so surprised. I can be nice sometimes.’
She offers me a lift but I tell her it’s okay, we’ll stick with the plan. There’s no need for her to put herself out.
My mother has a nose for a story, and I have to keep this one from her. I can’t let her lure me into her car for twenty minutes, and then crack under questioning and tell her I’m putting in an effort with Ron because Frank’s sleeping with Zel. It’s the people with story noses who are the worst with secrets, and I have to take the no-risk position on this one.
In the cab on the way to the city, I know I’m right.
When I get to the dentist, Ron’s lying across three seats in the waiting room with a towel on his face. The receptionist says, ‘Mister Todd,’ and he sits bolt upright, like a vampire from his coffin in an old silent movie. The lazy dribble of blood from the corner of his mouth doesn’t help. She dabs it away with a tissue, and he blinks his heavy-lidded eyes at her, not sure what’s going on.
‘Numb,’ he says on the way to the car, squeezing his mouth. He slumps into the passenger seat and struggles distractedly with the seatbelt until I sort it out. His lips move, he’s working at saying something. In the end he gets there, precisely and slowly. ‘I’ve been very heavily medicated.’
Then his head swings to the side and clunks against the window, and I don’t hear much more from him.
‘Anything I should know before I drive the car?’ No response. ‘Any tricks? I’ve never driven a Merc before.’
There’s a loud spluttery snoring noise and he half lifts his head, quarter opens his eyes and says something that sounds like ‘incoming’ and clunks his head against the window again. From then on, it’s up to me. I check mirrors, I check the seat position, I check where everything is. I do all the checking I possibly can and then there’s nothing to do but drive. Ron slips into fidgety drug-addled flashback dreams beside me as we pull out of the parking station and into the evening traffic.
The Merc, it turns out, isn’t hard to handle.
‘So, Ron, are you up to giving me directions?’
Apparently not.
At the first red light, I take a look in the glove box and find registration papers with his address, and a street directory which I open in his lap. I wedge his fingers around the edges to hold it to the right page, and I discover that there’s a special passenger-seat lap light for navigating. That’s the kind of car this is.
The traffic moves slowly, bumper-to-bumper as we make our way to George Street. There are tapes in the glove box too, and—having never been a big Mantovani or Herb Alpert fan—I go for The Animals, some kind of ‘best of’ album. I push the tape in, turn the volume up a little and wind my window down. From outside this must look like me and my coma buddy on a road trip. At the very least, it’s my turn for a scene from a frat-house comedy, so I decide to play it the way any reasonable free-spirited frat-houser would and I’m singing along to ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’ as the Merc cruises down the freeway and the wind blows into my face.
In your hands, the Merc positively glides around the freeway’s curves. Night sets in. You glimpse the city, the light-stacks of its buildings, in the rear-view mirror. Sometimes you take lunch there, three courses with bottled wine. Sometimes it’s you and the Merc and this endless open road. You wonder what drugs your coma buddy is on, what he could possibly have taken that could shut his brain down so completely. When you laugh, he can’t even hear you. When you sing to the music, you sing well. Where would the road take you if you were not to leave it now? What is there, past the lights of the suburbs? Where does the world begin? Somewhere, probably, beyond Mount Gravatt.
In my psych term, I would have called this denial. The meeting at the Rec Club last Friday week was a lesson about keeping the parts of my life separate. Soon tonight it’ll be me and all the Todds at once—three of my worlds colliding. My drugged-out toothless new pal Ron, my back-stairs chicken-sharer friend Sophie and the white-clad Zel with the dark secret she doesn’t even know I know. Carindale, though it’s quite a way out of the city, arrives long before I’m ready for it.
Ron stirs as we turn off the main road and into the recently-planned winding streets with their very English names and oversized brick houses.
‘Number seventeen,’ he says, pointing to a nearby chateau. ‘That one over there.’
We park in the driveway, and the front door opens. Zel’s hair volume is silhouetted by the hall light in a very ‘Charlie’s Angels’-at-fifty way and her harem pants are back-lit like the Lady Di kindergarten shot. I don’t even notice at first that Sophie’s following her out.
‘Oh, you poor thing,’ Zel says to Ron as he clambers out of the car. ‘I’ve got a big packet of Kool Pops like you asked me to. Now, come on in.’ She takes his arm, and then half turns to me. ‘Thanks so much for driving him home, Philip. Sophie, why don’t you give Philip a tour of the house while I get your father settled.’
‘Hasn’t he been here before?’
‘I don’t think so. When would he have been here before? You haven’t, have you, Philip.’
‘No. Hi Sophie.’
‘Don’t forget downstairs, Soph,’ Ron mumbles as he’s led a
way. ‘He’ll want to see it.’
‘Sorry about this,’ Sophie says. ‘But it’s my job. Everyone gets the tour. It used to be a display home. It was one of the first houses in this bit of Carindale.’
Sophie, here in bright light and in her own home, isn’t the same as she is out the back of World of Chickens. She’s more subdued, and she sticks to the script most of the time. It’s odd for both of us, walking through these rooms. Things feel much more normal at the top of the back steps of the World, between the storeroom and the train line. Much more normal when one of us is dressed like a chicken, peering out of a beak to do poetry or speculate about whatever comes to mind.
The house is everything it should be—sunken lounge, exposed beams painted mission brown, a feature wall. Why is it that the ‘feature’ aspect of feature walls never seems to amount to more than a simple absence of plaster? If anyone doubts how smart decorators are, they should talk to the person who came up with that concept.
The place has been built only a few years, and Sophie says, ‘Mum’s still pretty houseproud,’ as an explanation for the plastic runners marking out where it’s okay to walk across the shag-pile carpet. ‘Of course, she does have a couple of toy poodles that shit on the carpet more than you’d expect, but humans don’t get to walk on it. Figure that out.’
‘See? Life even has mysteries in your own home.’
Zel, as Frank said yesterday, is ‘a true lady of the Dale’. I’d hoped it was sarcasm, but why would it have been? Zel and her home are ready and waiting for Vogue Living to ring the chimes at the front door, and it’d seem very unfair if she was left doing nothing more than dispensing a few hundred words of advice a week as the writer of a southside suburban paper’s style file (sorry, Style Fyle).
Sophie saves downstairs till last, and it’s everything in a room that my parents would never understand—the wet bar with jokey bottle openers and souvenir cork coasters from Tweed Heads, the tall Galliano bottle on a stand, a king’s head dartboard (featuring Henry VIII), a series of dogs-playing-pool pictures. She tells me that Ron knows the pictures aren’t quite a substitute for a table, but it came down to a question of size.
‘It’d be a squeeze even for a six-by-three,’ she says. ‘This’d be their dream home, if this room was as big as Dad had wanted. But that’s rock back there, so they didn’t go any further. It’s his territory down here, in case you hadn’t guessed. It’s Party Central when the Mowers crowd comes over.’ Two poodles run out from behind the bar and start jumping around her ankles. ‘And, to finish the tour, welcome to the world’s worst-behaved dogs.’
The dogs yelp and scratch and bite at the heels of her shoes. She says ‘sit’, several times and firmly, but it’s not a word or a tone that they recognise. She tells me she wanted to called them Ralph and Malph, but they were a present from her father to her mother so they ended up being Beau and Hope. She’d suggested Mork and Mindy as a compromise, but Zel hadn’t gone for it.
‘Dinner’s ready you two,’ Zel calls from upstairs.
Ron is sitting at the table when we get there, and he’s still managing to look like a propped-up dead guy.
‘Mate,’ he says, with a friendly wink to show that he’s picking up.
When he talks, we all try very hard not to look at his mouth and to pretend we can understand what he’s saying. Zel serves a casserole, which she’d hoped would be soft enough for Ron but it doesn’t work out that way. Ron dines only on Kool Pops and moselle. Quite a lot of moselle, and he rapidly becomes even less coherent. He starts rambling in a way that seems to be advice, mainly to me, or perhaps gratitude. Advice, winking, grinning, slurping at the moselle that’s slopping from the still-numb right side of his mouth. He sidesteps whatever he’s saying, moves into an analogy involving cattle on a hillside, moves somewhere else and gets lost in a conversation he’s never been to before.
‘Dad,’ Sophie says. ‘You’re home now. You could take it easy. You’ve had a big day.’
Ron pulls himself to his feet, calling out, ‘Speech, speech,’ and tapping his eyeball with his fork to get attention.
‘Dad,’ Sophie says sharply. ‘Hit the glass one, not the good one.’
He blinks, and gives his eye a rub. It starts to water.
‘Sorry,’ Sophie says to me. ‘He does that. It’s like tapping on a glass, you know? Usually he . . . it doesn’t matter.’
‘Hits the other one?’
‘Yep.’
‘He’s a good lad, this one,’ Ron begins. ‘A good lad when a fellow’s down. Like Atlas, with the weight of . . . history . . . repeating, repeating. Get it? And there’s the matter of . . . teeth . . . more on that . . .’ The pharmacology of moselle and medication and the chemistry of stress sweep across his brain like the waves of an incoming tide. He sits down, but still thinks he has the floor. ‘And you,’ he says, ‘my ladies . . . thick and thin, richer poorer . . . sickness teeth . . . well done all of you. Bloody well done.’
He starts to become tearful, but then falls asleep in his chair, the tip of his Kool-Pop-blue tongue slipping out of his mouth as his head lolls forward.
*
There’s no unravelling that, I decide later in the cab on the way home. But the teeth are gone now, and that’s progress. Next, we have to make World of Chickens work, and I’m not sure how we’re going to do that. And I have to pass obstetrics. It’s lucky that Jacinta and I discovered those political differences, or I’d never get any study done.
For the moment, Frank and I settle on something that could be described as an uneasy truce. I’ve told him what I think, I haven’t backed down and he hasn’t said what he’s going to do. It’s his idea that we go back to my place between our Wednesday early finish and our shift at World of Chickens.
‘We could take a look at antepartum haemorrhage,’ he says. ‘That’d be good.’
I assume he means we’ll be talking about bigger issues but, Frank being Frank, it turns out there’s no code involved and it really is obstetrics he wants to look at.
We sit at the kitchen table with Beischer and Mackay, my notes, two cups of tea and Frank’s half-baked ideas. We start to draw up lists of clinical features associated with particular causes of antepartum haemorrhage. Frank gets bored and develops an unhelpful liking for the term ‘Couvelaire uterus’ instead. He plays around with a biscuit until it starts to crumble on the table. He slurps his tea and hums. I can’t believe there’s any room in his life for this kind of boredom at the moment.
He experiments with the word ‘Couvelaire’ in an accent he probably thinks is French, and the list we draw up of clinical features is just about all mine. I tell him he won’t get far, throwing names around with abandon because they sound good, and we have an argument about it.
‘Well, we’re going to have to agree to disagree,’ he says eventually.
‘That depends on how much you want to pass.’
‘What’s that about? Ever since surgery . . .’
‘It’s not about surgery.’
We move on, to the degrees of placenta praevia and their implications.
Ron Todd calls before we’re too far into it, before we’ve found anything new to fight about. My mother hands me the phone and the first thing he says is, ‘Mate, you champion. Couldn’t have done it without you yesterday.’
‘No problem.’
‘The old mouth feels a bit funny today—a bit bloody roomy—but we’ll get there.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Listen, I’ve been thinking. It’s like you said. It’s not about chickens. We’ve got that covered. It’s about buzz. It’s about the customers feeling attached, like they belong. It’s about love.’
‘It’s about love?’
My mother looks up from her book.
‘That’s right, mate, we want them to love the World.’
‘Okay, well, we’ll work on it.’
And that undertaking—nebulous as it is—seems enough for now. Sometimes I get lucky.
‘Just
thought I’d put it to you,’ he says. ‘Just that one big broad brush stroke. We can get to the details later.’
And then he’s gone, a busy man in pursuit of something about love.
My mother’s still looking at me over her reading glasses. She’s never good when she hears half a conversation. I knew I was right to let her know nothing about what’s going on.
‘It’s just work,’ I tell her, and she maintains her look of unease.
She lifts her book up again and goes back to reading. ‘Me too,’ she says, as if she’s got plenty of stories she’s not telling. ‘Just starting work on a new module for next semester.’
*
A train pulls into Taringa station on its way into town. Sophie flaps a wing at the passengers, but they never see us up here in the half-dark. The carriages are too bright. It’s physics again, but I don’t go Bernoulli on her with the detail so she still waves sometimes.
‘Your mother,’ she says. ‘She’s working me hard.’
‘Are you doing her thing next semester too?’
‘The rise of the tabloid, or whatever?’
‘No, the thing about adolescence—adolescents in the media.’
‘I haven’t heard of that one.’
‘She was reading books for it at home before we came here. Your Child in Trouble, that kind of thing. About adolescence and how the media portrays it, and the new set of problems that creates.’
‘What? Why don’t I ever get told? I was sure it was something to do with tabloids. I’ve put my name down for it already.’ I can see her eyes in there, deep in the beak, imploring me to take my mother aside and talk some sense into her. ‘This is too hard. I’m going crazy.’
‘It’s next semester. Don’t worry about it. It’s nearly two months away.’
‘Why is nothing normal any more?’
‘Um, I didn’t mean . . .’
‘No. It’s okay.’
‘It doesn’t sound like it’s okay.’
