Peripheral Vision

by Paddy O'Reilly

  The kind young man smiled. ‘That’s all right. I’ll come and get you when you’re done.’ His hand touched Carly’s elbow to prompt her each time they had to turn a corner. He had a downy blonde fuzz where he was probably trying to grow a beard, and his pants were too short. He was an innocent child guiding her into this dirty world of entertainment.

  They pass through a section of the corridor where the lights have failed. The sudden darkness leaches sight from her eyes. Carly grasps the sleeve of the young man. He whispers to her to be brave, that if she can stay strong it will be over before she knows it. Endurance, that’s all she needs – to play out every step until things reach their natural end. Carly isn’t sure exactly what he’s talking about.

  They come into light again and she laughs with a sick feeling in her belly and she almost wants to turn back into the darkness.

  ‘Endure,’ he whispers again, pushing her in the small of the back with more force than she expected, propelling her forward.

  They reach the maw of the stage. The boy nudges her forward a further few centimetres. ‘Hang on till you hear yourself invited on stage. I’ll be waiting back here when it’s over.’ He turns and sprints away down the passage, leaving her at the threshold.

  When Carly told the other teachers she was doing this they interrogated her. ‘Are you going to meet anyone famous besides your sister?’ ‘When will it be broadcast?’ ‘What will you wear?’ They sent out sparks of excitement and anxiety and envy as if this was the most important thing that would ever happen to Carly, as if she was getting what everyone else wanted without having earned it. ‘But you hardly ever watch TV!’ one complained.

  From the shadows at the side of the stage, the lights were so bright Carly couldn’t see who was there. There was only an eye-stinging brilliance and the sound of many hands applauding. She stepped onto the white tape that marked the boundary between this world and the next. Her eyes closed involuntarily against the glare.

  The boy had said Mac would introduce her. Who was Mac? The usual host was Roger Young. He would stand to the side at the beginning of the show, holding the big red book and reading out facts about the person’s life so you could try to guess who it might be before the curtains swept open and the chosen person was revealed.

  ‘And what did she say about this?’ Carly heard a man say in a smooth caramel voice.

  ‘She doesn’t know,’ Virginia answered.

  ‘Well then,’ the man who must be Mac said. ‘Perhaps it’s time she found out?’

  For a stupid moment Carly wondered if the episode was about her and her life. A pathetic flare of ambition, like her colleagues had shown when they heard she’d be on TV. As if she’d had any kind of life worth talking about.

  Her eyes are adjusting to the glare. An audience of women on raked seats faces the stage. A man sits high on the steps in the aisle between banks of audience members. He is holding a microphone and speaking toward the stage. He has a head of hair a woman would envy: thick, curly and golden. The hair of a god, or a luscious incubus. His face is familiar, soft-focus familiar, in the way photos of movie stars are familiar or like a story that you’re telling someone but you trail off in confusion as you begin to wonder if it was a dream or a sitcom plot or if it actually happened.

  All she needed to do was give the speech and sit down and smile. Perhaps kiss Virginia on the cheek and hug her the way they used to do when they met in public.

  The stage was nothing more than the floor in front of the audience. Virginia, Carly’s glamorous actress sister, sat in a chair beside Carly’s husband, cradling his hand on her lap. No, cradling his hand in her lap and gazing into his face.

  When she sees this, Carly’s body is caught in a strange willy-willy. Her scalp stings as if her hair is being torn from her head. She retches. Something is scratching at her ankles – claws or thorns or unkempt fingernails. Then the willy-willy passes, leaving her uncannily calm.

  Mac lounged on the steps between two banks of raked audience seats. He invited Carly to come in as if they were in his living room. Like a starstruck teenager she stepped into the light. A slant to the floor caused her to lurch and totter toward Glenn and Virginia. Her husband and her sister. She repeated it in her head. Husband and sister.

  Glenn couldn’t or wouldn’t look in her direction. She had only seen him three hours ago, at breakfast this morning, where he was his usual surly morning self, grunting at the coffee maker and pulling on his suit jacket while he chewed at a piece of toast. How could he be here?

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Mrs Carly Kantzakis,’ Mac said, his voice rebounding from the studio’s make-believe walls. ‘Someone help the lady.’

  Amid a cacophony of whistles and shouts and jeers from the audience, a man in a tight T-shirt bounced over to her and gripped her upper arm with his massive hand.

  ‘This way, lady,’ he muttered. He half lifted Carly to the podium, where an empty chair faced her sister and her husband.

  She feels surprisingly flat. Perhaps it is shock. Perhaps you lose your sense of humiliation and rage under shockingly bright lights. She doesn’t feel much at all, and that seems wrong. She crosses her legs, hears the rasp of stocking on stocking. Does it again the other way, hears it again. Time stops once more, a space of silence and stillness as she crosses and recrosses her legs in a queer seated dance. After a period that is nothing but the movement of her legs in their rhythmic nonsense scissoring, the sound comes back, distant at first – a crowd from afar, growing louder until she lifts her face and rage smashes up against her calm.

  Mac leaned in. ‘Carly, I think you’ve guessed what’s going on here. How do you feel?’

  The camera dolly trundled toward her. She wished she could wipe off the lurid painted face but it was too late for that. It was too late, wasn’t it? Mac cleared his throat to get the attention of the crowd before he lifted the microphone to his lips.

  ‘Carly, do you have anything to say to your sister? Your husband?’

  She raised her head. Why would they do this? Was Virginia broke again? Stupid alcoholic Glenn had no idea what he was getting into. Carly had lived with Princess Virginia and her neediness all her life.

  The calls from the studio audience were gathering like a rehearsed chorus into a chant and accompanying clap.

  ‘Car-ly. Car-ly. Car-ly.’

  It makes her smile. As if she is the famous sister, the one loved by the tabloids. Is this how it feels to be golden? People calling to her. Her name turned into a song. Everyone wanting her yet knowing hardly anything about her. Mac smiles as if he has heard her thoughts. She turns her face away, blushing. When she glances back he is still smiling at her. Space and time are curving around her body, tucking her into a tight uncomfortable fold as Mac reads her mind and keeps smiling.

  Carly could see the iris of the camera opening. She knew the kind of thing they were hoping she’d say, the weeping and shrieking they wanted her to do. She had grown up with television and its conventions. She had laughed at the women on shows like this who lunged at their husbands, tried to tear their hair out, who moaned and wept, who bared themselves.

  But Carly didn’t want to be one of those women. She was here on stage, betrayed, sure enough, but by a man she had already grown to despise. Sitting there, watched by a crowd of screamers, she could only come up with this one thought. The words popped out of her mouth, harmless missiles out of a peashooter. ‘Why didn’t I leave you years ago?’

  A small man holding up a large placard raced backward and forward across the studio floor in front of the audience. The placard said Laugh. Scattered on the floor at the side of the stage were more that said Scream and Howl and Hiss and other instructions for whatever he wanted the audience to do. Right now they were doing it all at once. A woman in clingy aqua pants barrelled down the stairs, arms flailing, calling out that Carly should punch the dirty bastard. She was caught at the botto
m of the steps by two hefty men and escorted backstage to the cheering of the crowd.

  Mac stood. He tamped down the noise with hand gestures until there were only a few catcalls coming from the back rows.

  ‘Glenn? Would I be wrong to say your wife doesn’t seem as surprised as you expected?’

  Glenn’s lip curled in that special way that Carly used to find sexy. ‘Don’t believe that shit. She’s surprised all right. This is her fake “I don’t give a damn” routine. The one I’ve put up with for nine years.’

  ‘Hey!’ an angry voice shouted down from the top tier of the seats. A slim woman in jeans and a T-shirt with her hair in two girlish pigtails sprang out of her seat. ‘You didn’t like your wife? Why’d you stay? Why didn’t you run off with the famous sister instead of humiliating this woman here on TV?’

  As the crowd applauded, Glenn looked off to the side. He sighed, the way he did with Carly when he had no answer to a question and he wanted to pretend the question was stupid to begin with. But the woman wasn’t having any of that. She pushed aside the blonde next to her and clambered across three more people to reach the aisle, where she put her hands on her hips and her lips to the microphone that a stagehand had raced up the stairs to hold in front of her face.

  ‘You answer me, mister. Why are you doing this?’

  Virginia lifted the stage microphone and murmured into it. ‘It’s not his fault. We fell in love. We didn’t know how to tell her.’

  ‘You shut up, you washed-up hack!’

  Virginia shook her head, lip trembling, features emulsified into the vulnerable haunted face that got her into movies in the first place.

  Pigtail woman jabbed her scarlet-nailed finger at Virginia. ‘A slut like you took my husband away too but at least she didn’t go on national television to tell me.’

  Carly starts when she hears that line. ‘A slut like you took my husband away but at least she didn’t go on national television to tell me.’ The line is thrumming through her. She’s heard it so many times before, but where?

  ‘Steady, ladies,’ Mac interrupted. He’d been moving around the studio, and now he came to rest behind Virginia, placing a hand on her shoulder as he spoke. ‘Virginia, what do you need to say to Carly?’

  ‘No, stop.’ Carly surged out of her seat, tugged down the back of her dress. ‘I’m not going on with this. I won’t give permission for this to be broadcast.’ She’d received the contract in the mail, seen her sister’s name as the feature of the show, glanced at the clauses on the first page about network serial repeat rights and other TV jargon, and signed it without looking any further.

  Placard man scooted up and down in front of the audience rows again. The shiny eager faces responded with boos and hisses and foot stamping.

  ‘Forget it.’ Carly turned to the rows of angry faces. ‘I’m not going to be your freak show. Find someone else.’

  Behind her Mac spoke to the audience in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Ladies, don’t you find it amazing that no one, absolutely no one, reads the fine print of contracts. I would have thought our Carly here, a teacher of all things, would have read what she was getting herself into.’

  ‘So sue me.’ There was nothing to stop her leaving.

  Or so she thinks, but when she wheels around and strides to the stage entrance she finds two T-shirted brutes standing with their arms crossed in front of the open door.

  ‘Get out of the way.’

  They remain motionless. Carly pushes her arm between them and tries to shove her shoulder through, the way you would at a gate that won’t open properly. The men don’t budge. They’re welded together like the two-headed dog guarding the gates of hell. So it is true. She is in hell. Why? Why is this happening to her?

  The crowd was screaming, laughing, hooting. Rage percolated in Carly’s gut. She muttered threats at the guardians about assault charges, keeping her voice down and her back to the cameras. She found herself hissing at them like a cat. ‘I will not let this happen. I will not accept this.’

  ‘My, my.’ Mac had climbed the audience steps again and was looking down. ‘Carly seems to have found her inner fury. So Glenn, I guess this isn’t the ice queen you were telling us about.’

  ‘Stop filming me!’ Carly shouted, still facing away from the crowd and the cameras and Mac. ‘I refuse to allow this.’

  She certainly couldn’t look at Virginia and Glenn. Glenn, who had been telling this mad chorus that she was an ice queen. Glenn, who chewed nicotine gum sixteen hours a day. Glenn, who had a swatch of wiry ginger hair at the base of his spine that she could no longer bear to touch. Glenn, who had lusted after her sister from the moment he saw her. Her sister – spendthrift, actress, star, family favourite. Selfish witch. They deserved each other but Carly would not say it aloud, because she was on TV. She was on her way to becoming an ugly reality star, and she’d watched enough TV and read enough magazines to know what that meant: if she allowed the invective to flow, the couple would be recast as the good guys, leaving her the ranting bitter cause of their coming together. She would not give them the satisfaction. She would not give them the airtime, the gloating, the happiness they thought this alliance might provide them. Shame had filled her, shame and rage and a new iron stubbornness. She would not endure this humiliation.

  The cameras on their dollies wheeled around the studio floor trying to capture her face in all its mortification while she sidled to a corner and faced the wall like a naughty child at school.

  ‘I have to say, ladies, this is not great television.’ Mac sighed. ‘What can we do to bring Carly out of her shell? Hmm?’

  The chant started up again.

  ‘Car-ly. Car-ly. Car-ly.’

  ‘Tell those bastards what you think, Carly! We’re on your side,’ one woman screamed.

  No one was on Carly’s side. That, at least, was clear.

  ‘Go on, Carly!’

  ‘Smack that bitch, Carly!’

  ‘Car-ly. Car-ly. Car-ly. Car-ly. Car-ly.’

  They think they can unleash her rage. They are wrong. How strange her name sounds when it becomes a chant from the audience. It could be someone else’s name. Car-ly. Ka-li, she realises. Kali. Religions of the world, Year Eight. Kali, the goddess of destruction and change. Can you destroy by doing nothing? Can you banish by not accepting?

  She remained perfectly still in her corner, refusing to turn around. As long as she didn’t participate there was no show.

  The shouting from the crowd slowly died down. The audience members began to chat among themselves. Mac raced down the stairs and murmured over her shoulder, promised her a chance to respond with dignity.

  She ignored him and waited. The warm-up comedian faced down the mutinous audience, cajoled them into a few laughs, ran out of material. Mac, leaning over her shoulder and speaking so close to her face that his breath heated her cheek, threatened her with lawsuits. She waited.

  The show’s producer hurried onto the stage. He rode the other shoulder, his muttering a spray of warm spit. Time passed and her legs ached with tension and she needed to go to the toilet but she closed her eyes, her ears, her mind, and waited.

  The stage manager ordered the operators to shut down the cameras. The big lights went off with a clank. She waited.

  People chattered as they edged across the rows. She heard the rumble and clatter as they filed down the staircase and out through the exit. One or two called out to her. ‘Goodbye, Carly!’ ‘Good luck, Carly. Stick it to him!’

  After a long time in the dark of the shut-down stage, she felt someone behind her. A warm presence, a scent of pine. A hand touched her arm. Her body had tipped forward with the rigidity of a board leaning against a wall. Her forehead pressed against the flimsy studio partition. She stared at her feet, knotted that morning, an aeon ago, a minute ago, into the straps of her best silver high heels. She remembered that time she woke fro
m a dream in which actors from her favourite TV drama were carrying her in an open coffin.

  ‘You can turn around now.’ The young man who had led her to this place stood with his hand out to take hers. ‘They’ve shut down the cameras. The audience is gone.’

  ‘Is it over?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Everything had fizzled and left an eerie dim silence, an electric loneliness, like the empty drawn-out moment when the TV is turned off.

  She takes hold of his forearm and follows him out to the corridor, weak and prickly with the leftover adrenaline of her emotional storm. All she wants to do is go home, lie down, take a few days off work. It has been hellish, unbelievable really, but she stood her ground. She would not talk this through with those betrayers, not on reality TV, not in her home, not anywhere. Never.

  All she wants to do is sleep. So tired she is dizzy. Things have taken on a dreamy quality. Is she asleep, dreaming? There is tiredness, yes, but there’s more. A kind of echo of time passing, or moving. A swirling, eddying sense of the movement of time.

  Back in the make-up room, the woman was waiting for Carly. She held a sponge already loaded with tan foundation. Carly sat down in the chair. The make-up woman looked familiar. She was probably one of the parents Carly had talked with at some parent–teacher day.

  The woman stroked the first bars of tan colour onto Carly’s white skin.

  ‘The studio lights are hell,’ she said. ‘They bleach out colours. If I don’t do this …’

  Caramels

  Across the creek a couple is squatting on the muddy bank, shoes and socks in a pile behind them on the grass, pants rolled up to their knees like little kids at the playground, except they’re no kids they’re pushing at least sixty both of them. The bloke is tying the string around a knob of reeking meat I can smell from here, green meat rotten enough to tickle the senses of the yabbies below, those innocent crusties hiding in their lairs harming no one when down through the water comes an alluring gob of steak.