by Nick Earls
‘Oh, yeah. Yeah, that’s good. We could save that up for next time and get a cartoon done and put it on a flyer. You’ll be there won’t you? You guys?’
‘We’ve got exams next week, actually.’
Ron looks crestfallen, like a kid facing the prospect of a wrecked birthday party. ‘There’ll be pizza. And a keg.’
‘We’ll be there, mate,’ Frank says. ‘Don’t worry.’ What is this? Guilt? Some attempt at a fresh start? Frank making good for the Zel affair by accepting pizza and beer as some kind of peace offering? ‘We just won’t be able to make a big night of it. We’ll have to leave and get back to the books at some point.’
‘It’ll be good, you know. Actually, there’s more news as well. Some of those things we were discussing, Phil. Come out the back and I’ll show you something. We’ll take a look at the figures. You don’t mind holding the fort do you, Frank?’
‘Consider it held.’
Ron, a bad actor always, doesn’t convince any of us it’s to do with figures.
‘I’ve talked to Zel,’ he says when we’re in the storeroom. ‘I’ve talked to the doc, and I’ve talked to Zel, like you said I should. And things are looking up. Early days there too, but they’re looking up. We haven’t talked like that in ages. We started talking and then it was going so well we got a bottle of Mateus Rosé out of the fridge and fired up the jacuzzi.’
‘Ron, it’s okay, I . . .’
‘No, no mate. It’s all down to you. Credit where it’s due, and all that. Just talking mind, but it’s a lot better than not talking.’ And he claps his hand on my shoulder and says, ‘Mate, if this gets any better, I could start getting erections again,’ just as Barb waddles in to change.
‘Sorry,’ her muffled voice says inside the chicken head as she turns awkwardly, thumps against the door frame and waddles straight back out.
‘Leave it to me,’ I tell Ron, before he can even guess what the problem might be.
I catch her at the end of the corridor.
‘No. Not my business,’ she says, and keeps going, straight to the toilet. Before I can stop her, she’s in there with the door shut, and possibly locked. ‘Let’s just get on with the job.’
‘But to get on with the job, the first thing we’ve got to do is straighten that out.’
‘Whatever,’ she says through the toilet door. ‘You and Mr Todd, you know, whatever. Not my business.’
‘You don’t understand.’
‘Listen, there’s a lot of shit I don’t understand. So what?’ She opens the door to hand me the suit and, with a clear change-of-subject face, says, ‘Hey, does your mother do things at the Arts Theatre? I think my mother might know her.’
‘Right, that conversation with Mr Todd before, that was medical, okay? In confidence. It should have happened in a different environment, but it didn’t and I’d be grateful if you could make sure it went no further.’
‘Oh, yeah, of course. Not that I heard it anyway. Everything sounds fuzzy in this head.’
‘Medical-in-confidence,’ I tell her, rather too sternly. ‘So it wouldn’t even matter if you did hear it.’
She backs off, and I don’t care if she’s treating me like a mad person. There was a message there that I needed to get across.
Ron stays around for the next half hour while I’m chickening, bothering Frank and Barb at the counter and telling customers he’s the owner. I’m not even inside the building and his performance works as a long-range mime.
Barb’s still wary when we go to change again. I’m sure I hear the toilet door lock each time she goes in there now, and she’s never anything but fully dressed.
The door opens, she shuffles out, I zip her up. I ask her if she knows why Ron’s still here and she says, ‘He was telling us he wants to talk to you about a video he watched last night. Annie Hall. I’m thinking man porn, some kind of trannie thing and—surprise—it’s a penis in there under that skirt. But I don’t want to know.’
‘It’s Woody Allen.’
‘Knew it.’
‘You’ve got no idea. You’ve got no idea about Woody Allen, have you?’
‘Woody. That tells me all I need to know.’
‘You should watch it.’
‘Hey, I’m not part of that scene.’
‘There’s no scene.’
‘Whatever.’
‘Stop saying that. Okay, let’s pretend this never happened. Let’s pretend I’m just turning up to work now, and we’ll begin like normal people. How was your day, Barb?’
‘Fine.’
‘Good. Did I tell you I delivered a baby early yesterday morning?’
‘Look, I should probably be up front with you. I’ve got a boyfriend and we do it the regular way. I don’t know what you’re into with your woody and Ron’s problems and who you were delivering that baby to, but let’s keep it strictly business here.’
*
Frank agrees not to hurry at the end of the shift. I want my parents to be asleep when I get home.
My mother isn’t. She’s waiting, sitting in her usual seat and dressed for bed but with an airline carry bag beside her. My life so long ago slipped its moorings that for a second I genuinely wonder if she’s up for a go at the Star Trek drinking game.
‘I shouldn’t have talked to Celia,’ she says, without even saying hello. ‘I shouldn’t have got my head so stuck in that book she gave me. I should have talked to you. It all started backstage at Pirates. You know how things do?’
‘Not really.’
‘It started hypothetically. Other people started talking hypothetically, and some of what they were saying started to sound familiar, so I mentioned a few things as well. Always from the perspective of contradicting them and giving examples of things that could be misinterpreted, but were probably quite all right really.’
‘Rather ironic now.’
‘Yes, I realise that. And I argued with them. I know they thought I was naive, but I argued with them and I told them everything really was okay here.’
‘So what you’re saying to me is that it’s fine that they ended up talking you round and that you completely changed your mind, because you put up a bit of a fight early on?’
‘No. That’s when the photos arrived. They gave me a bit of a surprise at first, but when your father and I took a closer look we were reasonably certain it was a . . . food product in Frank’s bottom. Though we were thinking Polly Waffle or Picnic. But the feeling among the cast was that it might be something a little more . . . troubling. And suddenly all the conversation was about me, us. You. It wasn’t very nice.’
‘The feeling among the cast? You showed Frank’s arse photos to the cast of Pirates of Penzance?’
‘Only because they were a bit blurry and I couldn’t work out . . .’
‘Oh, so it’s all down to bad technique? My fault? That’s why you had to show them?’
‘I know it doesn’t sound very good now.’
‘Very good now? Can you tell me one time, ever, when it would sound good?’
‘You become close when you’re putting something on, a show I mean. Oh, mea culpa, mea culpa, Philby. It’s utterly indefensible, all of it. I know that, and all I can do now is apologise in the strongest terms. It won’t stop you coming to the opening, will it?’
‘You’re insane aren’t you? I’ve done psych. You’re insane.’
‘No, discreetly coming to the opening.’
‘Discreetly? The son who took the poo shot and slept with his boss for money? You can’t be serious.’ Then I remember Barb. ‘And if you hear something about tonight, tonight at the World, from someone in the cast whose daughter works with me, it was medical-in-confidence, okay? Ron was telling me about progress with a medical problem when she walked in. You shouldn’t hear about it but, if you do, that’s what was going on. And if you dare call Celia back in on this one . . .’
‘No, never, no. Never again. I’m sure I won’t hear anything. And if I do I won’t believe it. And it’s your business anyway,
whatever you were talking about tonight and whatever you do with your life. If you happened to be with Ron, or Frank and the biscuit, well, your choice would be your choice. It was the money side of it that gave me a little trouble. It’s not a very nice world, that world. The money, and the possibility that it wasn’t a chocolate biscuit, but I never believed that.’
‘Oh good. Well, everything’s okay then.’
‘Really?’
‘No. Not really. Not at all. Could you stop telling me about all the things it’d be all right for me to be and just let me be what I am. I couldn’t care about what you think, and where you draw your lines, somewhere between biscuits and money. Give me a break.’
‘Yes. Yes, you’re right. I just . . . it doesn’t matter.’ She looks down, notices the bag beside her, as though she’s forgotten it with the direction the conversation’s taken. ‘All right,’ she says. ‘Now, I know this doesn’t fix things, but I can only do what I can. And it’s only on loan, but I hope it’s better than nothing. It’s from someone I work with. He bought it to take on holiday and now he’s back so he won’t need it for a while.’ She reaches into the bag, fits her hands around something heavy and lifts out a video camera. ‘Just a loan,’ she says again, ‘but we are working towards our half of the real thing.’
21
‘Get one of these into you, my friend,’ Vanessa shouts over the party noise, before I’m even up the stairs. She’s standing in the front doorway, ready to meet people with a tray of drinks—green and crusty drinks in plastic cocktail glasses. ‘Frank made ’em. Brizgaritas, they’re called. I’m only supposed to have one. And what kind of birthday’s that, hey?’
She shrugs her shoulders and rolls her eyes at the injustices of the world and its mistreatment of seventeen-year-olds.
In the half-dark room behind her, Status Quo jumps into Suzi Quatro. The dancing in there is bouncing the needle all over a seventies compilation album, and I can’t wait till everyone gets the seventies out of their systems.
Ness leads me out the back, and I realise she’s taking me to the old people’s bit of the party. Frank, AJ, the parents, the neighbours, a cousin or two, Kerry from work.
‘I’ll leave you to it, hey?’ she says, as if my place has been found for me. ‘But I’ll be back later looking for you for a dance, all right?’
Ness has never seen me dance.
‘She’s a good one, that one,’ Kerry says, as Ness rejoins the indoor, interesting non-old section of the party. ‘A good-hearted girl.’
A good-hearted girl who, I now notice, is wearing exactly what she wore a week ago to Freebie Friday. It’s reassuring to know that we had special-occasion status, but maybe that was mainly because of Richie the Rat. Kerry is like a younger, less extreme Zel Todd. At least that’s how she seems to me, but Frank tells me, ‘No way, wouldn’t touch her.’ I don’t ask him why. If there’s some desirability difference between them, it’ll never mean much to me.
Small talk, small talk. That’s the next hour, but at least there’ll be none of last Saturday night’s photos and I’m not going to have to stay up until three to deliver a baby. It shouldn’t be called small talk, it should be called long talk. It’s not the amplitude that’s the problem, it’s the duration. However long it goes, it seems to go too long. And however small it is when it starts, it can’t get bigger. That’s the rule. Small talk can only dwindle into talk that’s even smaller. Unless it’s calm-before-the-storm small talk, and you’ve got photos to bring out, featuring a slightly blurry biscuit. But, no, tonight’s is much more like the talk I’m used to—small talk that’s slowly, witlessly killing time, another Friday night caught in dull company. If only a hundred bats would come along right now and shit on Frank and liven things up a little.
Chris, the carpet layer who lives next door, says, ‘Mate, I wouldn’t even try blue couch if I were you. It’ll never grow under your trees,’ and Dorothy’s brother Ted nods and hmmms, as if it’s a tough serious truth that’s only starting to sink in. Then Chris’s wife Narelle has a go at him about how many lights he left on before he came over and he says, ‘Yeah, sorry love. I didn’t have a free hand because of the beers.’
‘There’d be, what, six lights left on over there,’ she says. ‘What do you think this is—the bloody show?’
Six lights. And even if you scrunch your eyes up tight and block out all the words but let in the noise, you can’t come close to convincing yourself it’s any kind of substitute for one of those party scenes in a Woody Allen film. Witty, awkward balcony conversations, the view along the lights of Broadway. There isn’t, as far as I’m aware, one Woody Allen film that features a discussion about trying to grow grass under a Moreton Bay fig.
In Woody Allen films, No one is so suburban that they own a tree.
There are speeches, which is the Green family way. There are always toasts and speeches. Turn a little older, pass your exams, get a job—none of it goes unheralded. Big Artie asks for ‘a bit of shoosh’, and there’s the rather silly sound of maybe a dozen people tapping on plastic cups to help him get it. Vanessa stands next to him, grinning.
‘For those of you who don’t know me,’ Big Artie says, ‘I’m Arthur Green senior, Vanessa’s father. First, I’d like to thank you all for coming to wish my little girl a happy seventeenth. And I do hope you enjoy yourselves—and make sure you get your share of the dancing and eating and drinking. Now, we’re pretty proud of our Nessie, here. As a lot of you would know, Ness and school didn’t always see eye to eye, but we always knew she was a good’n. She’s now in her second year at Garden City Blooms and her boss Kerry tells me she’s a good worker and the customers have nothing but compliments for her. She’s also blossomed . . .’ pause for wry smile at own carefully planned corny pun . . . ‘into a bit of a sign writer for the food business. So if you’re out Taringa way and passing World of Chickens, that’s our Ness too. And on top of that, she tunes young Frankie’s car, ’cause he’s a lazy bugger and never took much of an interest.’ Pause for everyone to have a bit of a laugh at Frank, Frank to raise brizgarita glass in good-natured acknowledgment. ‘But we’ve got a special presentation for her tonight, and this is more than just birthday. It comes with an announcement. And that is that we’ve had a talk and, starting tomorrow, on weekends and days off from Kerry’s, Vanessa is now officially a member of the family firm, Green Loppers. That mightn’t mean a lot to some of you, but it means a lot to Ness and me. Neville, the shirt please.’
Nev steps forward with a new black shirt, folded as neatly and solemnly as a flag on Anzac Day. Big Artie shakes it open and there, over the logo, is the name Vanessa. Ness’s grin starts to quiver as she realises this is actually happening. She wipes her eyes and takes the shirt and gives Big Artie a hug.
‘Hey, there’s none of that bullshit in tree lopping, love,’ he says, but at the same time clapping a Popeye forearm around her and grinning too.
She shakes his hand and clears her throat. ‘Any chance of putting ‘climber’ under the logo?’
‘Now then. Don’t want you getting ahead of yourself. This is just weekends and days off, you know, for the moment. And we’ll see how it goes. You might not like it.’
‘Dad, watch out. I’m pretty sure I’m going to like it.’ She looks down at her feet, clears her throat again and looks up. ‘Well, this is the big one. Seventeen and a Loppers shirt, and both of them on the same day. You sure don’t get a lot of days like that. Now, there’s a lot of people to thank, but you know who you are. Like Dad said—school? Not my thing.’ She smirks and a few of her ex-school friends laugh. ‘Yeah, righto. Some of you knew that already. But Kerry helped out. She gave me a job and she’s taught me a thing or two, and that’s always good. There’s been a lot of big stuff in the last couple of weeks though, hasn’t there? So I’d like to thank Phil and his team from World of Chickens for giving me my big break and for backing me when I needed it. Which is Frank too, of course, the hotplate chicken chef. Sorry, famous hotplate chick
en chef. But Phil’s the one who goes on those management retreats to the movies with Ron, and gets the big ideas happening, so thanks for that. And I’d like to say this has just been the best day. And it’s been the best for the whole day, apart from the middle eight hours when I was at work but even then it was pretty good. But before then, put it this way, guess who got the birthday call from Richie the Rat at the Bs this morning? Yep, it was me. I got the big burping birthday from the Rat Man himself. Thanks very much for that one, Frank. But most of all Dad. I’d like to thank Dad for tonight. Mum and Dad for tonight, but Dad for bringing me onto the team. And I won’t let you down, mate.’
She pulls the black Loppers shirt on over her blue top and the brooch at her neck shows through the undone collar.
‘Good on ya, Ness,’ Nev calls out gruffly, his rollie cigarette still sticking to his dry lower lip.
He starts to beat his hard work-chipped hands together in applause, and everyone else joins in.
‘All right, all right,’ Ness says, looking embarrassed and proud, waving her hands to slow the clapping down. ‘Let’s kill the lights and get the music back on, hey? Remember, Dad said he wanted some dancing.’
I need a new drink, so I head for the table we’re calling the bar. Before I get there, the main light in the lounge room goes off and Supertramp’s Breakfast in America starts to play.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ Frank says, ready to pour.
‘Anything other than one of those brizgaritas. Can’t guess where they would have come up with an idea like that.’
‘Oh really? I think they’re quite the thing on riverboats this time of year. Not that you’d ever get to benefit from that, Speedy.’
‘Better make it a Sprite. Don’t want to loosen my iron-clad self-control.’
‘Make mine one of those green ones,’ Vanessa says, coming up beside me. She holds the shirt-front out proudly, to show it off. ‘What do you reckon?’
‘Looks good. Looks like something you’ll be putting to good use.’
