A request that Jocasta should prepare soup is normally greeted by a hollow laugh, and seconds later a well-aimed copy of The Universal Cookbook will come flying though the air. Already, the children know the drill: after shouting out any food request to either of us, they momentarily duck.
But here was Jocasta, fussing around my bed like a nurse from a Carry On movie, leaning over me with health-inspiring bosoms and a kindly smile. The disease may have rendered me asthmatic and thick-headed, but it has turned Jocasta meek and sweet. Now that’s a virus.
Truth is, most women are powerless against a pale and sickly man. It’s a remarkable effect to witness, which may be why so many men, over the years, have become skilled at milking it. Some even making use of the Bambi Eyes (wide open, beseeching, injured). It’s rotten that a person has to go this far to get a little sympathy. But, over time, I’ve found it’s necessary.
My mother, for example, has always been of the view that illness is a sign of moral decay and misbehaviour. It deserves no sympathy, and certainly no treatment.
Report to her that you went to the doctor and that he said your illness is serious, and suddenly she is concerned. ‘What? You went to a doctor?’ (Incredulous pause on other end of phone.) ‘Well, no wonder you’re sick.’
She thinks most illness is caused by consuming over-rich food and indulging in disgusting, modern practices, such as the eating of garlic and going outdoors without germ-repelling white gloves.
In terms of parenting, she always believed her main duty was to remind me how generally lucky I was. As in the exchange:
‘Mum, Mum, it’s terrible, I’ve just fallen off my bike and gashed my leg, which is now bleeding horribly.’
‘Well, just think what a lucky boy you are to have a bike from which to fall.’
(You’ll notice: more effort placed in achieving the proper grammatical construction than in fetching a bandage to staunch the by now Amazon River-like bloodflow.)
Meanwhile, there is my doctor friend Simon — perfectly pleasant I’m sure to his own patients, but utterly unsympathetic to family and friends. One day I plan to decapitate myself in front of Simon, just to hear him look up from his newspaper and mumble: ‘Oh, Richard do pull yourself together.’
So no sympathy is on offer without a bit of theatrical effort — which luckily is not beyond me. Perhaps these same performances have been spotted in your house?
The John Wayne
I’m in bed, and Jocasta has come in with some aspirin. My aim: to subtly indicate the Massive Extent of My Illness, without revealing that I’m a whinger and malingerer. I take John Wayne as my model. For instance: the moment when he gets a tomahawk through his skull, and just does one of those tight, brave smiles. The Courageous Little Smile That Masks Indescribable Pain. I flash one at Jocasta — letting it wobble a bit on my face, just to show the depth of the pain — and suddenly her brain explodes in a hormone storm. With a squawk of pity, she runs off to make more soup.
The Lord Byron
Day Two, and the Duke’s losing his power. As her footsteps approach, I fall wanly backwards — and reveal ‘The Lord Byron’. Pale and interesting, head lolling loosely, the eyes focused on the middle distance. Death from consumption may be rare in the inner west, but it’s clearly what I’ve got. Jocasta runs off to starch my collars.
The Camille
Day Three, and the illness gets really bad. So bad I find myself unable to face alcohol of any sort. ‘Bugger,’ I think, ‘I didn’t know I was that sick.’ Shaken, I return to my bed, and commence enacting the death scene from Camille. ‘It was terrible,’ I report to Jocasta. ‘I looked into the fridge, and I felt … I felt nothing. I wasn’t interested.’
DIARY NOTE: ‘The Camille’ does not work. Expected sympathy does not eventuate. Patient greeted instead with torrent of abuse. DO NOT ATTEMPT AGAIN.
The Brando
Day Four, and I unveil ‘The Brando’. Lying around unshaven in my white singlet, I yell up the hallway: ‘Stella!’ Finally, Jocasta responds and I give her the works: self-pity, morose introspection, shambling gait, and a complete inability to articulate simple thoughts. ‘Ah,’ she says brightly, ‘you seem to be almost completely back to normal.’
DIARY NOTE: strategies no longer working. Jocasta has hormones back under control. Last soup came from kitchen days ago! Toast soldiers all gone! What can be done?
The Last Gasp
Notice Jocasta referring to my illness as ‘the flu’. Frankly, it’s an insult. I’d be better off seeing Simon. Or even my mother. What I’ve got is some sort of unusual virus. Probably a medical first. Doesn’t she realise men never get anything as commonplace as ‘the flu’? That’s for women. For instance: Jocasta.
Actually, just as I’m getting better, Jocasta is coming down with something pretty similar. Only not as bad. For instance, she’s not moaning or whingeing much, and is sitting quite pluckily in bed. Remarkable, isn’t it, how the strain of a virus can weaken so sharply in the space of a few days.
Part of the problem, I think, is the lack of an objective pain rating that could separate the malingerers (i.e. women) from those Struggling On Despite Enormous Odds (i.e. men).
I’d like a pain thermometer: pop it under the arm, and be able to announce that I’m suffering an ‘8’. After all, women have this. As in the phrase: ‘It was worse than childbirth.’ Notice how they choose the one scale of measurement in which we can’t compete — leaving themselves luxuriating on the illness highground.
‘Actually, I’m pretty sick myself,’ says Jocasta, a day later, lying prone across the hallway, and groaning. ‘It’s pretty close to childbirth; I’d say eight-tenths of a childbirth. I may need a little looking after myself.’
She looks up with beseeching Bambi Eyes, and suddenly there seems nothing for it but to pull myself together, pop her in bed, and make soup.
Luckily, that’s when my mother rings.
‘Can you talk to Jocasta, Mum. I think she’s been eating restaurant food again and going outside without her gloves.’
Killers in the Kitchen
There’s now good evidence that someone is trying to poison me. For instance, every night after dinner I experience blurred vision and swelling. And all I’ve done is drink a bottle of red wine and eat twenty-three sausages.
Perhaps this is why Jocasta has instituted a weekday program of strictly-limited alcohol and low-fat food; a program which has done nothing except focus my mind firmly on the kitchen cupboard.
As I stand there, quietly whimpering, I consider the strange rules of food and drink. Isn’t it time someone catalogued their eternal laws?
Food, if eaten straight from the cupboard, with the cupboard door still open, and no attempt to sit down, doesn’t count in any calorie-control program.
Beer tastes worse with every additional glass, while red wine tastes better.
Broken biscuits, found in the bottom of the Tupperware, contain no calories.
Encouraging others to eat heartily is not only good manners. Over time, you’ll start to look thin in comparison.
There is no point to the Brussels sprout.
There is never any room in the fridge, but nothing worth eating in there either.
If oysters weren’t so expensive, people would realise they look like snot.
Every food cupboard has one obscure cooking ingredient in massive oversupply. You ran out of it once, and now buy a fresh packet on every supermarket visit. In our house, it’s slivered almonds. We now have six small packs, enough to last, on current use, the next fifteen years.
UHT stands for Ultra Horrible Taste.
The favourite recipe of the serious cook always demands ‘¼ glass of good-quality white wine’, thus forcing the opening of a bottle well before the arrival of the guests.
A watched bottle of white wine, slung in the freezer, never cools.
Eating healthy vegetables provides negative calories, allowing you to eat extra junk.
With every kilometre
you drive further from Sydney’s trendiest suburbs, the definition shifts of ‘rare’, ‘medium rare’ and ‘well done’. Ask for ‘rare’ in Balmain, and they’ll wipe its arse and plate it. Ask for ‘rare’ in Broken Hill and the cook will come out of the kitchen and give you a long hard stare.
When cooking for friends, put the most effort into the starter. They’ll be too drunk to notice the dessert.
Left-overs of Chinese take-away should never be thrown out on the night. They should be put in the fridge for three weeks, and thrown out once they start growing.
The dessert stomach is a separate stomach. The main stomach may well be full after a huge main course, but the dessert stomach will still be empty, and demanding food. Indeed, some Sydney gourmands are equipped, cow-like, with at least four separate stomachs. The entrée stomach, the main meal stomach, the dessert stomach, and (hence the term) the petit-four stomach.
Hard-cover recipe books with titles like Recipes from a Tuscan Garden, equipped with gorgeous photos and exquisite prose, are never used. All your actual recipes come from a magazine-style compendium called Bog in Quick.
Milk tastes best when drunk straight from the carton at two in the morning.
Yuppie ‘premium lager’ beer such as Cascade and James Boag should not be consumed while watching Rugby League. Remember the rule of etiquette: ‘It is offensive to drink from a bottle with a longer neck than the footballer you are cheering.’
No-one wants to eat the last stale handful of cornflakes in the box, yet no-one is allowed to throw them out either. Most families ban the opening of a new box until the old is finished — forcing all family members to sullenly eat toast for four weeks until Mum relents.
Up the back of every kitchen cupboard is a sad stack of Indian spices from four years back when you bought an Indian cookbook. Throw them out now! Go on! Do it!
Recipe books always give a cooking time that is far too short. They also claim a given recipe will feed ten, when you would be lucky to get a meal for two wafer-thin monks. Either all recipe writers are extremely thin people with faulty ovens, or the rest of us are fat greedy pigs with faulty ovens. The oven manufactures must investigate.
Squares of chocolate, broken off the bar, are rounded down to include only the full squares.
In the search for that final bottle of beer, late at night, it is common to get up from the couch and search the fridge at least five times — in the hope that, in the two minutes since you last lifted up the bag of carrots, some sort of miracle may have taken place. This has never been known to happen.
And, finally but crucially: whiskey is always a mistake.
The Fall Guy
Friends can be cruel. At Jocasta’s birthday party, they’d all combined to buy her a folding wooden chair, a lovely thing, which she could use when sitting outside in the sun, dreaming of what her life might have been. And so she sat on the chair and laughed at how great it was, and the friends smiled and drank her health, and then, yes, I too was invited to sit, and relaxed into the slatted frame, my drink held high.
Which is the point at which the whole thing collapsed. Not just broke. Shattered. From Elegant Chair to Pile of Splintered Firewood, it made its journey in half a second, leaving me sprawled on the floor, limbs akimbo, the drink flung from my hand, the friends caught between horror and laughter.
It was Jeff who broke the silence with a droll whisper: ‘Meet Richard, the Man Mountain.’
A few of them laughed, which instantly warmed Jeff, a natural show-off, to his theme. The chair was made in Vietnam, and as I staggered to my feet he was busy painting a word picture of the moment of its construction — the villagers summoning the fattest man in the district to test the thing out, perhaps perching a child or two on his lap, the timbers taking the enormous weight without complaint, the package being stamped for export.
‘They’d have never dreamt of a bloke with an arse like yours,’ Jeff said with a quiet, sad shrug. ‘Not in their wildest dreams.’
It was most unfair. Later, after they’d all had their fun and left with their cheeks aching from laughter, I reconstructed the shattered mess as best I could. Obviously, this was not a case of an overweight passenger, but of inadequate gluing and poor design.
Yet still I have to face Jocasta, as she examines the almost inconceivable collapse — not so much that of the chair, as that of her husband’s once-svelte body.
What’s worse? Is it the way she weeps over the broken present, or the way she now flinches each time I lower myself into a chair, expecting the engineering to be unequal to its task? The standard of Vietnamese glue has a lot to answer for.
In an effort to save my battered dignity, I begin a campaign: all modern furniture is made of the thinnest pieces of wood and plastic, and all of it is portion-controlled and miserly. To prove my point, I take Jocasta on a tour of the flat-pack, build-yourself, furniture which we bought just months ago at Cheap and Nasty World — all of it already trashed, the melamine peeling, the drawers sagging, the chipboard swelling. Other people’s surfaces may be distressed; ours are merely distressing.
And that’s aside from the trauma I went through putting the stuff together, connecting Bolt A to Sprocket B via Nervous Breakdown C.
Suddenly, in the middle of Batboy’s bedroom, staring at his stricken bedside table, I come over all philosophical — wondering why nothing’s built to last, how we’re increasingly living in a world built of lattice and Gyprock, of melamine and plastic drawer-runners, and how the throwaway society has finally engulfed our furniture and even our architecture.
My heart was full, my buttocks a-quiver, and I said it all. Jocasta endured the full oration, an eyebrow cocked in amusement. ‘Maybe you should hop down off your soapbox, now,’ she said finally, ‘before it splinters under your weight.’
This is what I get these days, my friends lying in wait to make some cheap joke; some one-liner about the killer bum; the man of the mighty beam, striding through life, making furniture-owners everywhere tremble.
‘Sit down, Richard,’ they’ll say, ‘we need some firewood.’
Or, ‘Richard’s coming over, better reinforce the porch.’
Or, ‘Just perch on the bed, mate — I’m trying to convert it into a futon.’
And so I dream of that glorious prelapsarian time, the time before my bottom became literally the butt of jokes. Back then, before the Fall.
Backyard Cricket
There’s a moment in the development of every great sport when the rules are written down and formalised, and surely that time has arrived for the game of backyard cricket.
The Rules of Backyard Cricket
There shall be no golden ducks. Here, if nowhere else in life, you always get a second go.
The wicket shall be constructed of any material, yet tradition prefers a garbage tin. It is noted: the arrival of the wheelie bin in the suburbs is already creating a new generation of bowlers — ones who’ll forever believe the stumps are shoulder height, and a good metre wide.
The pitch shall vary between 33 yards and 11, depending on the intoxication of those marking it out.
A batsman shall be deemed ‘Not Out’ if the ball hits the top of the garbage bin.
Younger players, defined as under eight years, will be permitted to weep upon getting out. They should then refuse to give back the bat, running haphazardly away, as their father chases angrily after them, shouting entreaties. This is known as the on-field entertainment.
The game shall consist of ‘hit-and-run’ — once the bat touches the ball, you’ve got to run. We haven’t got all day for this game: there’s still stuff to eat in the Esky.
The middle-aged uncle who was once the glory of the school cricket team is permitted one full-speed, lairy bowl during the afternoon — smashing the wickets of his eleven-year-old nephew — just to show he’s still got it.
The middle-aged uncle should not be criticised for this behaviour. Tomorrow’s herniated disc will be deemed punishment enough.
A ball bouncing off a roof must be caught one-handed. Fielders may wish to equip themselves with a plastic cup of riesling, held in the left hand, as protection from inadvertently breaking this rule.
Nanna, while fierce with a bat, shall be permitted to utilise a runner, chosen from the younger members of the group. Thus is speed combined with wisdom.
It shall be permitted for the bowler to soak the tennis ball in a nearby puddle in order to add both speed and drama, particularly when employing a Bodyline strategy.
Should a seven-year-old score more than twenty runs it is permitted to distract the child, claiming the sound of a Mr Whippy van can he heard in the middle distance.
If the ball is driven into a wire fence, becoming stuck, fielders may remove it one-handed for the ‘Out’. Who ever said life was fair?
Over the fence is ‘Six — and Out’. If the batter cannot locate the ball, he may be derided as a lair and a show-off by all present.
When playing with limited numbers, the system of ‘Automatic Slips’ may be instituted, in which any ball hit towards the slips will be deemed caught.
Some players believe ‘Automatic Slips’ removes human error from the game. Such players may prefer to play ‘English Team Rules’ in which every ball hit towards the slips is deemed dropped.
In Bed with Jocasta Page 7
