by Peter Marks
He felt more comfortable with animals (again my dinner parties would have been heaven to him). Max, poor deluded man, felt he could match wits with his four footed friends, or his two legged acquaintances. Or his six toed cock, the prize winning False Alarm, a much decorated but pompous bantam rooster who persisted in crowing every morning at the crack of gloom. About 3 a.m. (And about to face the axe from irate neighbours).
Sadly, even this imagined intellect advantage was wishful thinking (ask the rooster if you have any doubts).
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Once, too stingy to pay others to freight his produce, Max made a three thousand mile round trip in the company of his prize pet pig Gerald Marmaduke the Third, a huge pink balloon with the belly of a pregnant rhino and the brain of a sea anchor. Or so said Max who subscribed to the “dumb animal” theory (was indeed living proof of it).
Little did he know (and indeed he knew very little) that this vast grunter knew more than Uncle Max could ever hope too. More than most in fact for the pink porker was a genius, was Sir Isaac Newton reincarnated, knew that a Newton was the force required to give an acceleration of one metre per second to a mass of one kilogram; was the derived SI unit of force. Max, at the other extreme, didn’t even know his shoe size.
During this particular excursion, twenty miles outside of Bathurst, Max got hungry. But couldn’t afford to eat so had a barbecue instead. Grilled the pig. Started asking it questions like - What do pigs dream about? What do pigs wear to the beach?, Do pigs have orgasms? Do pigs pay income tax? Do pigs fly ?
Are you ever an arse-hole Gerald thought. Gerald Marmaduke the Third, Sir Isaac reactivated, rolled toward the side window, grunted displeasure but said nothing, refusing to divulge anything. Gerald knew the truth, knew Max was pig ignorant so closed falling fat eyelids and tried to sleep.
‘Bloody swine,’ Max chuckled (ample evidence that his humour was as developed as his intellect), ‘...roadhog!’ he squealed at a resting Gerald Marmaduke Newton in vacuous delight.
‘Ever read Animal Barn,’ he asked, adding literary insult to comic injury. George Orwell turned in his grave. Max laughed and laughed. Pig Newton slept and dreamt.
But I digress, back to story one. Back to the chooks and that fateful day. The Ute sped, Max shone, his almost bald dome shining like a peephole in a dressing room. He was bored. He gazed out the window and reviewed the barren landscape. Began reciting a poem he’d learnt in a now distant childhood (a phase of life most believed he’d never escaped, none-the-less distanced).
Wiping his dry lips, wetting them with an eel tongue, he cleared his throat and began.
‘I love a sunburnt country,’ he waved at the sunburnt country, ‘a land of sweeping plains,’ he swept the ash from his cigarette to the tinder dry roadside, ‘of rugged ...of...rugged..?’
‘Of ragged mountain ranges,’ Sir Isaac chimed in, awoken by the racket, grunted the next couple of lines at a bewildered Max.
‘Of droughts and flooding rains. I love her far horizons, her,’ Max coughed and looked blankly at the pig who was grunting nervously at him, ‘...and jewelled seas,’ Isaac offered. Max frowned, didn’t understand a single grunt, was left with the one lonely line from his memory and so for the next two hours sat there reciting: ‘I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains.’
He repeated the line over and over, giving each recitation a different voice, or altered inflection, or awful accent. Dorothea Mackellar turned in her grave. Sir Isaac turned to God and was granted deafness.
The poet Maximilian kept himself entertained for miles but kept the chooks bored shitless (which is no mean feat if you’ve ever seen the bottom of chicken cages).
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Anyway, to cut a short story even shorter, Max, Poet Laureate and Pissed Lunatic, suddenly decided to acquire the personae of his chooks and play chicken with the 7.15 Freight from Warragul which was ambling along the tracks to Max’s left minding it’s own business, heading for the granaries at Yumbuck.
A bare foot, a few bloodied toes pressured the accelerator, the old ute shuddered lethargically before the V8 under the bonnet responded with a low growl. Max raced for the crossing, decided to beat the train across that crossing.
The train chugged, Max hurtled. E.T.A.’s intersected. Which would give way? Not my Uncle Max by Christ. By the time he decided he wouldn’t win the race, the results were in. Fatal accompanied. The train freighted Max, and the ute, and the chooks and their combined mortality for several miles. Free of charge. Free from several limbs. Stopped him and his Stirling Moss tendencies dead in its tracks.
Rest in pieces dear Uncle. Max was a dopey fucker and dopey fuckers deserve to die. I’ve known more than my fair share of them, too many of them, people who also deserve death, or an hour at the Opera, or at the very least leprosy, but no, pitifully they survive. Most are too consummate a fucker to achieve even their own demise without celestial intervention. Or my hexes.
Life is cruel. People are worse...
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Nathan lent back, said a silent prayer for the now departed Max then standing up, shook the pins and needles from his sleeping legs, wheezed some, gathered the pages from the desk and thrust them in the cupboard with the rest of his rantings.
A spreading frown gathered on a concerned face. He wondered what the hell Kelly was up to and why she’d gone mute. The moron decided it must be laryngitis, so he went downstairs to offer her some antibiotics.
Chapter Nineteen
SHOWDOWN AT THE
NOTHING WAS OK
CORRAL
NATHAN HAD LOST his sense of humour. So Nathan knew he was in real strife. It was Saturday and Nathan was smoking like a chimney, drinking straight Vodka, straight from the bottle, sitting in a white plastic chair on the balcony waiting for the telephone to ring. He was waiting for somebody, anybody to call and tell him if Kelly had been located. And if so, would she come and speak to him?
He was too sad and he couldn’t cope with not knowing any longer even though that, from bitter prior experience, he wasn’t the least bit optimistic about the outcome of any such meeting, or indeed the chance of it, but he had no option but to cling to any fleck of potential renewal.
Still, hope springs eternal (from the same fountain as no hope unfortunately).
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The shades were drawn. Every dark emotion hung like slate gloom shingles in the frightened room. All this was not new. Nathan had known the carrion atmosphere before and his weary heart the same abject desolation. He’d so hoped, so desperately prayed over the past years that the vultures of emotion had at last finished with him, trusting that finally they’d leave him in peace. And not in pieces as had happened every other time he’d found some-one he loved enough to die for.
Nathan had so hoped that the apocalyptic harpies had, by this time in his life, feasted sufficiently to go and locate some other depressed and decimated carcass.
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His stupidity appaled him. His abject failure to cling to what was really important in his life, sickened him. Sadly, Nathan’s stupidity was all too repetitive. Sitting in the gloom of his new flat, curled in a corner of the sofa, thin tears trekking down reddened cheeks, he wondered just what he’d done wrong. Was he being punished for something he knew not what? Was he innately evil? Had his past life been so delirious with parties, debauchery, fun, frivolity and all the things that made earthy existence bearable that this particular reincarnation was simply a pay-back for past misdeeds? Maybe. He could think of no other reason for his continued failure to hang onto those most important to him.
Kelly would be arriving soon and Nathan had a dreadful foreboding of what she was going to say. He’d not seen her for weeks and the rumours were beginning to circulate.
Nothing concrete, but enough to terrify him.
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Eight o’clock Saturday morning and Kelly received
a rather subdued phone call from Fionna saying how bad Nathan was. How he was missing her desperately and that, as no-one had dared tell him the truth about she and Graham, he’d been trying to reach her at home for weeks and as she’d not been there and so Nathan not being able to speak to her, was driving him and everybody else crazy (or more so than usual anyway).
He’d asked anybody who saw her to tell Kelly that he just had to see her. He didn’t sound happy or normal, or even stable Fionna said.
Sounds normal, Kelly said.
Kelly knew it had to happen sometime. It wasn’t cowardice or malice that had kept her from telling him the truth, well not in the beginning anyway. Then she simply hadn’t been sure enough of exactly how she felt about either of the men in her life but now? Now she was, so recently she had been less than frank, her tactic being to avoid the issue by avoiding Nathan.
God, she didn’t even think he’d notice. It had happened before, often it seemed to her, when he’d been too busy working to pay the slightest attention to her being there with him or being absent from him. Or so she’d thought.
Kelly, her eyes still heavy from to much sex and to little sleep, had hoped to avoid this final confrontation but she’d always known it had to happen sometime. She didn’t hate him, or bear him any real grudge, so she didn’t want him to suffer or be in pain because of her but she simply could not go back to him. Or be his girlfriend.
Hanging up, she told Fionna to tell Nathan she’d be at his place by eleven that night.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, wrapped only in one of Graham’s white business shirts, she sat quietly for a time before strolling to the window. Gazing out on the back garden, trying to regain control of the cacophony of emotions churning within, she turned to Graham. Subdued, her delicate, painted fingertips sweeping through the ruffled blonde hair, she quietly told him that she had to sort things out once and for all with Nathan.
Graham, lying leisurely but concerned between the sheets of the recently sex unmade bed, wasn’t too thrilled at the prospect of his girlfriend spending any time at all with this Wright character but he saw the resolute frown on her sun silhouetted face and knew he was being informed, not asked.
With her back to him now, her eyes sweeping the early morning horizon, she said Nathan was a bit weird saying one could never tell how well or badly Nathan would react to any given situation. Obviously, this time he’d decided to take her leaving personally and she knew how depressed Nathan could get when he put his subconscious to it.
She also knew that after two years she certainly owed him some sort of an explanation.
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It was 10.45 Saturday evening. The restaurant was crowded with laughter and bonhomie and Kelly didn’t want to leave either friends or Graham. But she knew she had to. Excusing herself, Graham waving her purse away saying he’d organise the bill, she strode reluctantly from the restaurant as if she were heading for her own execution, a mass of conflicting emotions racing through her suddenly tormented mind.
Would Nathan be angry, or sad, or just plain suicidal?
She knew she should have done this earlier, had it out with Nathan weeks ago when she’d first met Graham but she’d just not been able to. Why? Certainly she felt guilty about lying to him, about saying she had to work when she was actually going to meet, and probably sleep, with Graham but Nathan had never stopped her from doing anything. (Anything aside from this that is which he certainly would have had he had the slightest inkling).
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Nathan had always believed his work was no more important than Kelly’s so he never thought it strange that she seemed as obsessed, and as busy, with her career as he was with his. Nathan had two speeds full ahead or retarded. He was either working seven days a week or seemingly not at all and Kelly never had gotten used to it.
Her attitude to self was something he truly respected about her; her drive, her ambition to succeed and her willingness to build a life for herself rather than leech off men as so many women tended to do. For once, Nathan had thought, he’d met some-one not impressed by money, especially money owned by another.
Wright was wrong.
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She didn’t love Nathan any longer. Or at least that’s how she felt and that’s why she’d found Graham. He was no Nathan, but who could cope with another Nathan anyway? Graham was secure, calm, quiet although a little lacking in humour but he was so affectionate toward her, took her out everywhere, told her constantly how beautiful and wonderful she was so that her battered ego was now almost fully restored.
Climbing in the car, ensuring her black Chanel suit skirt was inside and not about to be guillotined by the door, she shut it and plunged the keys into the ignition.
For ten minutes, Kelly just sat there trying to think of what to say. How to tell him. Although she’d rehearsed the moment, considered the confrontation sentence by carefully chosen sentence, she was nervous and wondered if she’d get stage fright and every prepared explanation would vanish from her mind.
She looked at the gold Raymond Weil watch Graham had given her to celebrate their first month together. It was getting late so she started the car. And headed for Nathan’s inevitable anger.
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Nathan, being the ultimate screw up merchant he was, could only cope with separation from some-one he truly loved by moving. The house had been too full of memories, of love and of laughter for him to cope with.
Martin and Ceil were inseparable. They seemed to show no hesitation in demonstrating their genuine devotion to each other without either embarrassment or hesitation. Fionna was her usual cheerful self and even Jenny had become compassionate to Nathan’s sorrow.
What could he do but move.
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So he now lived in a small flat in South Melbourne not far from Kelly’s. It was one of two hundred units built around a central park and not far from the city and Albert Park Lake where he intended jogging as soon as this awful despair left him.
Nathan was grateful for the solitude and to be at last removed from the haunting reminders of Kelly the Asylum had consistently maimed him with. So now he lived alone, more alone than he could ever remember feeling. Kelly, what happened?
Sadly, his stupidity was all so repetitive because life was so repetitive. Each and every time his heart had smashed he’d reacted by growing less outwardly loving. He didn’t say what he meant, nor was he as affectionate as he would have liked to have been, trusting in some pathetic way that by not admitting or saying “I love you” even when he really meant it, that when times like this, times like Kelly leaving him, wouldn’t hurt because he’d never said the words or displayed any obvious emotion. Wright knew now what an idiot defence of the heart such a strategy was, how powerful were the emotions secreted within the devious substructure of every human subconscious.
Nathan was so angry with himself, disgusted with his behaviour, appaled by the lessons unlearned.
It was the ultimate Catch 22. If, because of some hideous past experience, you love some-one but never say or show it feeling this was some sort of protection against hurt they’ll leave.
They’ll go thinking you never really cared.
And you’ll still suffer appallingly Wright thought to himself wishing he’d done and said enough to hang on to his one love.
Kelly.
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Why was it that they always looked so absolutely stunning when he saw them after such a long time? He ushered Kelly through the door offering her a drink or a coffee as she sat on the sofa, her radiant face concerned and watching his every move.
‘Not for me thanks,’ she said.
Nathan wanted to pounce. He wanted to lock the doors, bar the windows, kidnap her. He wanted to hug her, kiss her, cry with her, convince her he was the right one for her until she was his again. But he couldn’t. She was a total stranger. She was no longer the Kelly he knew.
She was cold and detached and he knew from her chill eyes that she was utterly lost to him.
‘How have you been?’ Nathan asked, trying to hold back the tears threatening to escape into his wine glass and sitting a respectable distance from her on the sofa.
Kelly looked uncomfortable. ‘Good Nathan, how have you been?’ She asked knowing the answer. ‘The flat’s nice, how long have you been here?’
‘Since you and Graham have been an item. Why the hell couldn’t you have told me?’ Nathan was testing the rumour and the downward tilt of her head verified that it had been no mere speculation.
Staring at the floor she said: ‘I’m sorry Nathan, truly I am but I just didn’t know how to tell you. I know that’s no excuse, but every-time I tried I just couldn’t .. ‘
‘Ever heard of writing a letter? Dear John, sorry I’m off and you’re fucked..’
‘Nathan, I didn’t come here for a slanging match.’
‘I’m sorry Kel, I just don’t understand how you could be so callous after the years we’ve spent together. I miss you so much and I’m in so much pain that it’s almost too much for me...’
The tears started and Nathan just couldn’t control the flow. Nor could Kelly help or console him, it had taken months to bury the love she had for Nathan so deeply within her that now it was beyond her to raise it to the surface. She saw how he hurt and she wished she could do something but it was too late.
‘Kelly,’ he sniffled, recovering slightly, ‘why didn’t you talk to me before you left? Why didn’t you explain how unhappy you were and give me a chance to either defend myself or reform?’
‘I did tell you Nathan. Perhaps I wasn’t obvious enough but in so many ways I did try and tell you.’
Where have I heard this before? Nathan sniffled.
