‘I think he’s losing it,’ she repeated about her colleague with the lurid ties.
‘Perhaps he’s having a style makeover?’
‘I don’t think it’s funny,’ my friend answered crossly. ‘So like I said, we’re at this meeting …’
She kept talking while I pondered how linear her thinking had become since she started writing policy. This is why older, more experienced public servants should be given charge of policies that determine movement in the lives of the general public – they have had time for proper thinking patterns to form, time to appreciate and enjoy a vast range of humanity. They understand the cyclical nature of things. Older public servants would at least consider the possibility that a lurid tie may or may not be related to a simple need for understanding, and that it is wise not to make judgments without hearing the full case.
‘Then he said he thought I had failed to appreciate the gravity of the situation.’ My friend’s mouth was open. She spread her hands and dropped her jaw and shook her head, begging me with the gesture to express my own astonishment.
‘Huh,’ I said, not too worried that I had missed the actual cause of the astonishment. Like a reliable service, the next one would be along soon.
‘And then,’ she went on, ‘when I went to my head of department to—’
‘This guy, tie guy, he writes policy too?’ I interrupted.
‘Yeah, forest management.’
‘And he’s how old?’
‘Fifty, maybe sixty. He used to be brilliant at policy. Everyone hated what he did – the greenies, the logging industry. He always got it right.’
I imitated her gesture of astonishment back at her. The open palms, the hanging jaw, the wide eyes.
‘Well,’ she said defensively, ‘if one of the groups loves the policy, everyone will think you’ve been lobbied.’
Lobbied – such a strange word. I thought of being hallwayed or verandahed. Porched. My friend whose policy fails to ensure regular safe trams on my route continues with her story as I tick off more words. Porticoed. Entranced. There, I knew I would find a proper word. The man may have been entranced. I realise I am muttering the words aloud and my friend is staring at me. And you can see that now I’m telling you this story in present tense as if it’s happening at this moment, even though I was using the past tense before, and before that I was in the present. Maybe this is happening now, or maybe the actions are completed. Or I could be imagining it all. Forward motion is rarely what it seems. We spend half our lives in the future while still thinking about the past and vice versa, in an endless loop of longing and regret.
‘I just thought I’d talk to you about him,’ she continues, still staring. ‘Because you have, you know, experience with these … with … things.’
‘Being mad?’
‘Don’t be stupid, you know what I mean. You’ve had a nervous breakdown, you know the signs, don’t you? Are they, like, what’s happening to this guy?’
I want to reach out with my hands in the most exaggerated motion I can manage in order to imitate her previous gesture of astonishment. And I want to snarl or bark or spit in her coffee or do something equally disturbing. But I am a responsible man in a responsible position. I don’t do things like that.
So I lean back and say to her, ‘Everyone has a nervous breakdown. Sometimes they’re mild and hardly noticeable. Sometimes they’re catastrophic. Eventually, we all go under. Every time I get on a tram I see someone heading for a breakdown. We’re like machines, we can’t just keep going on. We break down, then we get repaired and back on the tracks. Even you – one day you’ll have one, even if you don’t realise it yourself.’
I can see she’s trying not to smirk with disbelief at the idea of being shunted off to the depot for an overhaul. And maybe I am being too smug. Maybe my policymaker friend won’t break down at all. What would I know? All I can really be sure of is that everything would be more straightforward if I could spend my days riding the City Circle tram, the old W-class clanker that trundles tourists around town for free, around and around, with a conductor on board whose only job is to help.
‘Did you write the policy on the City Circle trams?’ I ask my friend. She pauses, startled by the change of subject.
‘That’s the Tourist Authority,’ she says. ‘Not Infrastructure. I work in Infrastructure.’
She starts gathering her bag and coat. ‘Got to get back to the grind,’ she says, smiling. ‘Briefing due tomorrow. Big night on the computer at home.’
‘Yes, I think your forest man is heading for a breakdown,’ I say.
Once more she does the astonishment gesture, but this time her head-waggle has a new knowingness about it.
‘I knew it,’ she says. ‘No really, I knew it.’
She gets up and goes, paying for us both on the way out to the street, where the storm has passed and the wet black footpaths are softly steaming.
I often call the City Circle tram to mind, the gentle pace of it, the tourists hopping on and off. I’d like to pass the carefree image of the City Circle on to the greasy-haired man, or even to tie man, who might have already boarded the wrong tram. He probably feels like he’s going places, he’s got speed and modern technology on his side. At the same time he might be looking at the floor, starting to realise that it’s a new kind of floor in a new kind of tram, flat and slippery and deceptive. In this city, you feel like you’re riding high and easy, but there’s a suddenness about things that always surprises you. Up the front, the driver is about to apply a little pressure to the brakes.
My friend blows me a kiss and walks off to her carpark. I want to call after her. I want to tell her about the future.
You hit the wall, you disintegrate, you put yourself back together again.
No lawyer in the world can help you with that.
Stingers
We stood by the side of the Bruce Highway, highway number one, our packs on the gravel and our toes on the tarmac as if some contact with the road surface would give us the power to make trucks stop. The sun flared in the sky, a mirage shimmered halfway along the ribbon of grey stretching north, a swarm of bugs buzzed from inside the head-high feathery crops beside the road.
‘Put out your thumb,’ Josie said.
‘You put yours out. You told me you’re a champion hitcher.’
Josie cocked her hip at the oncoming car. She thrust out her hand with her thumb pointing skyward. It looked like something she’d learned from a movie. She had these gestures, these stances, phrases and winks that she tossed off like an actress. I’d longed for her careless grace all my life.
‘Have you ever hitched before?’ I asked. I’d forgotten a sun hat, and the top of my head was scorching. The word scared formed a swift surprising tension in my mind before evaporating like the wavy mirage up the road when trucks bored through it.
‘No.’
The taxi from the airport had dropped us here on the side of the highway.
‘It’s unbeatable irony, Josie. We took a taxi here to start hitchhiking.’ I poked through the bag of animal-shaped sweets in my shorts pocket until I found a coiled snake and popped it into my mouth. Josie had handed me the packet when I emerged from the aerobridge that morning. ‘An introduction to the tropics and all its creepy critters,’ she’d said. She was as thin as a snake herself, and dry, and somehow different from when I’d last seen her.
‘Shut up and look sexy.’
We felt the road grinding under our soles as four cars and a truck roared past in a hail of grit and dust.
‘Pull your top down a bit,’ Josie said. ‘Show us some of that famous cleavage.’
‘I haven’t got cleavage. I’m an A-cup.’
‘God, I have to do everything.’ Josie wiggled her torso and pushed and pulled at the bra under her purple singlet until a wrinkle of cleavage appeared.
‘Push your bicep
s into your boobs. It’ll make them look bigger.’ I’d practised that plenty of times myself in the bathroom when I was a teenager, leaning forward, arms crushed to my sides, pouting and slitting my eyes, making love to my own reflection in the hope that one day I could fool some boy into believing I knew what I was doing.
‘Why don’t we just strip?’
‘Why don’t we strip and run out onto the road screaming?’
‘Why don’t you strip and lie down on the bitumen and I’ll flag someone down like you’re injured.’
We decided to walk back to town, stay the night and take the bus the next day. The next afternoon when the bus rolled up we congratulated ourselves on our wise decision, but I was aware that the bus was too tall for its width, like an over-decorated cake that could easily topple over. The inside of the bus smelled like people had been living in there. Down the side of my seat I found a used tissue and a ticket stub for the Reading Cinemas in Townsville.
‘Yuck. Don’t touch that,’ Josie said. She batted at my hand with her pen until I dropped the tissue. ‘That person might have had TB.’
An old man hacking away in the back of the bus sounded like he did have TB. The driver put Johnny Cash on the sound system. Josie was scribbling into a notebook.
‘J & M’s Travel Diary, Day One. We are losers and couldn’t hitch a ride even when we showed our cleavage,’ Josie read out.
Why am I here? I wondered.
At seven in the evening the bus spilled us into the dark wet air of Cairns. The driver hauled our packs from the belly of the bus. As the other passengers drifted away or opened up maps and started peering at street signs, Josie and I punched each other in the arm to wake ourselves up.
Around us were palm trees and assorted tropical plants breathing out steam. After we had changed our clothes in the nearest cafe toilet, we sat outdoors on plastic chairs in yellow light, inhaling the exhaust fumes and briny air.
‘There are no pancakes on this menu,’ Josie said to the waiter, a beanpole fired up with some kind of health mania, who bounced on the balls of his feet with his pen poised. ‘I can’t tell you how disappointing this is.’
‘We could make you up a cinnamon buckwheat hotcake. It’s pretty tasty and filling.’
Josie turned to me, her bare white thighs squeaking on the plastic chair. ‘I want to go home.’
‘She’ll have the hotcake,’ I said in my usual straight-guy role, ‘and I’ll have a mango smoothie.’
Josie already had her pen and diary out. I peered over her shoulder while she scratched away.
J & M’s Travel Diary, Day Two. Cairns smells like a muck of sea, rotten fruit and dried cum. The people here have not yet discovered pancakes.
‘What’s with the diary? You’re a writer now?’
‘Yep. I grew tired of my free and easy retail-assistant life.’
Inside the hostel was a lounge filled with lounging backpackers wearing singlets, shorts and thongs.
‘We brought the wrong uniform,’ Josie said.
I couldn’t see what she meant. Both Josie and I were wearing singlets, shorts and thongs.
Josie sighed. ‘I wanted to find a different crowd. These people look like the ones we left at home.’
‘No they don’t. They look like exciting overseas travellers. They look like carefree young men and women looking for adventure.’
‘Citizens of the globe. Happy wayfarers. Pioneers.’
‘Or gap-year kids.’
‘It’s true. They’re middle-class gap-year layabouts. I think we’re too old for this. Twenty-six is ancient.’
‘We should be in motels with fenced swimming pools.’
‘A guide with a flag.’
‘Hourly rest stops and emergency wheelchairs.’
‘Have you got photo ID?’ the girl behind the counter asked. ‘I need to make copies.’ She sounded resigned like the receptionist at the dentist, dealing with clients who have arrived miserable. I had thought that everyone in the tropics would be welcoming and have sweet breath. They would exude pineapple fragrance and optimism.
‘People in the tropics should be happy,’ I whispered to Josie as the girl hunched over the grey copy machine and stabbed buttons.
‘I’m sure they are. This is an act to discourage us from staying. They want it all to themselves,’ she whispered back.
The area around the counter was decked out with postcards pinned to a corkboard leaning against the wall, posters for Great Barrier Reef cruises and rainforest tours, ads for part-time salespeople and charity collectors, lost earrings and necklaces hanging on screw-in hooks, and a rubber marlin head looming over it all. Counter girl was filling in another form.
Josie reached up to touch the marlin’s spike. ‘I don’t know how you talked me into this, Merryn.’
‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘You sent me a ticket to fly to Townsville. You said we’d hitch up to Cape Trib and have a ball. You said this was the trip of a lifetime.’
‘You’re right. Let’s have a shower and lather up with bug spray. The good folk of Cairns await us.’
At the pub, tables were clotted with backpackers conducting their travel conversations over jugs of beer and the crushed remains of silver chip packets. They wore singlets, shorts and thongs, and an array of fading tattoos.
‘Tell me again, why are we here?’ Josie asked.
The banter, our old clubby banter, was wrong, out of place. I didn’t know how to stop it. I took a mouthful of the yeasty cold beer and held it while it fizzed on my tongue. On the big TV screen in the corner I could see pictures of Melbourne. Something must have happened. After the opening shot of the skyline there was an image of a police car and a reporter sticking a microphone into the face of a spiky-haired kid who couldn’t hide his excitement at being on television. In between answering the reporter’s questions he kept looking around as if he was waiting for someone to applaud.
‘Let’s go somewhere the locals go,’ I said. ‘I hate backpackers.’
Josie was still looking at the TV. ‘That’s Hoppers Crossing. I used to live in a street near that street.’
‘Come off it. That could be any street. All you can see is a few weatherboard houses and a dumb kid talking to a reporter.’
‘No, really. I walked along that street every day when I worked at the sandwich shop.’
‘You did not work in a sandwich shop.’
‘Did so. For a month in school holidays.’
‘You would make shit sandwiches. You can’t even slice cheese without the block falling apart.’
‘I did make shit sandwiches. No one cared. They ate their shit sandwiches and enjoyed them.’
‘Came back for more.’
‘Daily. Sometimes they bought two shit sandwiches.’ Josie stood, drained her beer, picked up her bag. ‘Let’s find that local joint. Meet some locals. If they’re lucky I’ll consider making them a shit sandwich.’
What’s wrong? I wanted to ask her. Why are we doing this stupid talk when you’ve flown me up here because something is terribly, awfully wrong? But I couldn’t ask. She had that power over people, making them unable to voice the same questions she would ask without hesitation.
Every bar, every pub, every cafe was full of backpackers and their singlets, shorts and thongs, their array of fading tattoos and face jewellery. We gave up after an hour and plumped ourselves into a furry hot-pink love seat in an air-conditioned bar where the small space was compressed by too much black carpet and chipped gold paint.
‘We could be anywhere,’ Josie shouted over the thump of 1980s retro pop.
‘Okay,’ I called back, my straining voice breaking mid-word like a pubescent boy’s croak. ‘Let’s have this drink then go to the beach. Maybe the locals are skinny dipping.’
‘Maybe they’re swimming in their pantyhose.’
‘What?’
/>
‘You can’t swim with bare skin now. The water’s full of stingers. You know, box jellyfish.’
‘We can’t swim? Crap, Josie. Why did you bring me here?’ The love seat vibrated to the Eurythmics singing ‘Sweet Dreams’. Every time I heard that song I’d think of my mum, stubby in one hand, spliff in the other, swaying on the grass on summer nights, slapping at mozzies and trying to make my little brother dance with her.
‘I was lonely, Merry Merry. And this is my big trip. You have to do Cairns and Cape Trib on the big round-Australia trip.’
‘Couldn’t you have waited till you got somewhere with a proper beach?’
‘No. Hey, listen to this.’ She waved a brochure at me. ‘If you happen to encounter a cassowary do not run from it. Face the bird and back away slowly until you can hide behind a tree or bush. Cassowaries live in rainforest remnants to the north of Cairns. The cassowary grows to two metres, as tall as a man. These giant blue and black flightless birds sport a large brown casque, or helmet, on their heads. Each muscular leg has three toes: the inside toe bears a long claw that resembles a dagger. While normally peaceful and shy, the birds will attack during mating season. The male cassowary is responsible for incubating the eggs and teaching the chicks how to forage.’
I nipped the brochure from her hand and opened it.
‘It looks like the bird that time forgot. Let’s go on a tour, Jose. Let’s get on a cassowary bus with fifty other tourists and go discover ancient history.’
Josie said nothing. She’d been on the road for four months before she sent me the ticket. When I met her at the airport, I was shocked to see her lank hair and flat face. Her facial expressions were all wrong – it was as though her skin had thickened and couldn’t fold and crease properly anymore. She’d eased up a bit now. She was laughing again. But she still wasn’t the old Josie.
I finished my beer and set the sweating glass on the table. ‘I’m going to do it, Josie. A touristy tour. You coming?’
‘Nope.’ She gestured to the waiter to bring another beer.
Peripheral Vision Page 4
