Shirley leans over to shine a light in your eye, providing a brief opportunity to examine her with your remaining, undilated, pupil. She’s small-breasted with sad eyes and big teeth. And for some reason you form the opinion that she’s a single mother of two high-schoolers which means that you could go back to her place without being disturbed until three o’clock at least.
Frank the Helper arrives to take you up to X-rays. He’s hyper-friendly like he knows you’re dying and he’s trying to fill your last moments with warmth and bonhomie. He rattles and prattles all the way to the lift which whines in a highpitched, almost human, voice until you arrive with a clunk. Frank pushes you through transparent plastic swing doors and he’s so damn jaunty you’d swear he was rolling you into a bar for a beer. His big head bobs and jerks and guffaws and suddenly he’s gone.
You are abandoned in a tiny cubicle near the swing doors. Except for the cosmic hum of the universe, there is no sign of anything anywhere.
You are floating in a pool of pain.
Your heart beats in your head.
Where’s Wendy? Why didn’t she insist on staying with you?
You are going to die alone because she’s too polite.
You drift.
You are the drifting.
A huge pale green machine points its blunt nose at you. It hums and tuts and grunts and then nothing. You lie alone until Frank reappears and trundles you back into the lift, through the maze of corridors and out into a different room.
A fresh-faced young woman in a nurse’s uniform says, ‘Would you like to sit up?’
Without waiting for an answer, she winds the bed up and you can see a nurses’ station and other beds and a teenage girl with a drip in her arm sitting cross-legged on a bed, poised over a bucket.
Wendy’s compact figure walks towards you. Your mate Dazza once described her (a little too lasciviously for your liking) as ‘a tidy ship’. Her symmetrical face is rescued from generic prettiness by the startling blue of her eyes and an overly full lower lip that curves to reveal a crooked bottom tooth when she smiles, which she does now. It’s one of those appealing faces that people think they know. Quite often she is accosted by beaming strangers who have mistaken her for a long-lost friend or relative. At the last minute, of course, they realise their error and babble an embarrassed explanation. Wendy, being Wendy, always defuses the situation with her gracious good humour.
Your wife reaches the bed and takes your hand. She looks like she’s been through an ordeal but there’s a lightness about her that makes you feel enormously relieved.
Enormously relieved. Like a million fucking bucks actually.
The Indian doctor calls you miracle man and tells you there are no broken bones; you’ve fractured some teeth and they have to assess the extent of any internal bleeding blah blah blah and you’re looking at Wendy knowing you’re going to live and you’re going to walk and you’re floating on happiness and you start to vomit but nothing comes up.
The dry retching is probably caused by nausea which is probably caused by the pain, your Indian goddess declares in an I-told-you-so tone. Her pager beeps her off to more urgent matters and she orders the fresh-faced nurse to give you some painkillers and a shot of Somethingerol.
You’re a big baby when it comes to needles so you feel quite relieved there’s already a shunt in your arm. Wendy takes your hand as Fresh Face inserts a needle into the shunt with crisp, slightly theatrical efficiency. She smiles at you but she doesn’t see you; she sees the Patient. You realise you’re performing in a pageant, the star of which is the Fresh Faced Nurse. You’re a bit player, written in to demonstrate what a wonderful carer she is.
You avert your eyes from the needle and notice your left thigh is huge, swollen to twice its normal size.
‘It’s a haematoma,’ explains Fresh Face like she invented the word. ‘Your thigh muscle is filling with blood.’
You feel woozy.
‘There,’ she says, as an iciness crawls up the veins in your arm, ‘All better!’
But it’s not all better at all, at all.
Beads of cold sweat form on your forehead and your mouth dries up. You ask Wendy to get the children; you want to see them. Wendy protests. She doesn’t want to frighten them.
Declan is seventeen and in his final year at Mount Karver. He is not a steady student but thanks to his mother’s vigilance and his own gift for charming everyone he meets, he’s almost over the finish line. Rosie is living in fourteen-year-old hell, teetering on the edge of an eating disorder and permanently plugged into the vicious lyrics of dead rappers. She hates her parents, school and life, in that order.
You know Wendy is in shock and you know her first instinct is to protect the children but you want to shout, ‘For fuck’s sake! I just want to see my fucking children before I die!’ But you don’t need to say anything because Wendy knows what you are thinking and takes out her snazzy red phone.
‘You can’t use that in here!’ announces Fresh Face like Wendy’s trying to detonate a bomb.
Wendy squeezes your hand and scuttles through the blue swing doors. As you watch her go you remember you’re in the same hospital where your father died almost thirty years ago.
You’re twelve years old, kneeling in the hospital car park with your big sisters, pumping out Hail Marys, willing Holy Mary to save your dad. He didn’t come to Mass this morning because he was a bit wheezy with the asthma. Mum stayed home to keep an eye on him. Tess, who has just got her licence, drove you and Ingrid to St Agathas.
As Mass is finishing, an altar boy hands a note to Father Bourke. He scans it and asks in his thick Irish brogue that we pray for Bill O’Dell who is critically ill and being taken to hospital. Everyone looks and Ingrid shepherds you outside through a kind of blur. As you get into the car, an ambulance comes wailing past and Tess says, ‘That’s Dad.’
All that morning and into the afternoon you kneel in the hospital car park as various relatives join your vigil. Uncle Bryan arrives. He’s your godfather, not a real uncle, but he’s a policeman and always knows what to do. He tells you to keep praying. You pray—harder than you’ve ever prayed for anything—until the doctor appears, looking tired like they do on television, with his tie loosened around his neck. He doesn’t say anything.
You start to cry and Tess says, ‘Don’t cry.’
Ingrid says, ‘Let him cry,’ and she folds herself over you and cries too.
You can feel blood leaking out through your organs into the cavities of your body. You try to catch Fresh Face’s attention but you’re not enough of a person anymore. The pain has frayed your edges until you’re barely there. Even when she bustles by and adjusts the flow of the drip, you’re unable to reach beyond the fuzziness.
You hear a voice say, ‘I feel funny,’ and realise it’s you.
Fresh Face looks at you and says, ‘What kind of funny?’
And now you’re in all different places talking to all different people—Wendy, Declan, Rosie, Tess, Dad, Mum, God—having seven separate simultaneous conversations. It’s like watching seven different movies again, only they’re getting faster and shorter,
becoming fragments
of sentences
words
faces
mouth
eyes
I.
3
Most stories begin long before the point at which we choose to start telling them. You could have begun this story with…
I was born on the green vinyl seat of a two-tone Valiant;
or
I had never heard her utter a single syllable but when Wendy Weinstein spoke, she instantly sounded like home;
or
Wendy and I decided we were too young to have children so we adopted a cat.
But the most useful entry point to the story of your winter that began in summer and lasted one whole year occurs three days before you are run down by Frannie Prager’s blue Toyota.
You remember most of that year like you ne
ver forget the squeal of nails down a blackboard. Some of it you’ve had to imagine, darn the holes between the facts to stitch together a proper story. But all of it, hand-on-your-heart, is the truest version you can offer. The full ridiculous.
It begins at Rosie’s school, where you are attending an information evening for the French tour. At the end of the year, Rosie and a group of her classmates will travel to Paris where they will practise and improve leur Français. Rosie’s school, Boomerang, is an institution from an era when people said gosh and gracious instead of shit and fuck; it reminds you of jolly adventures in a Girl’s Own Annual. You can’t afford it, but you and Wendy have taken out a second mortgage which the bank thinks is for home improvements but is actually to pay for school fees while you take a year off, researching and writing a book on Australian cinema.
Wendy works as the sales and marketing manager of a company that imports and exports high-end furnishing fabrics. She started as a part-timer when the kids were little and the flexible conditions meant she could pick Rosie up from pre-school or duck off when Declan got an award in assembly for Sitting Up Nicely When Mrs Donlan Is Speaking. With a degree in politics and history and a post-graduate diploma in conflict resolution, she only intended it to be temporary but quickly became indispensable and over a decade later she’s still there. The job is neither particularly well paid nor challenging (although the conflict-resolution training does come in handy wrangling flighty designers and belligerent sales reps). Wendy is prepared to ignore the drawbacks, at least while your children are at school, as long as it remains a family-tolerant corporate environment.
Her wage covers your mortgage and some living expenses but, because you are no longer on a salary, a black hole of debt widens before you. Your life savings are gone, courtesy of a sad little high-risk share portfolio masticated by the GFC, but you’re not too worried because your book is going to be a success and soon there will be champagne for everybody. Actually you’re not that dumb—you know this book might not make you rich—but if it’s successful there will be at least two more books: one on Russian cinema and one on German cinema. Eventually you plan a complete anthology of world cinema. You may be getting ahead of yourself but your gut tells you you’re going to be okay financially and sometimes you just have to listen to your gut, don’t you?
Don’t you?
Rosie’s trip to France is an expense you don’t need but it’s part of the deal at a school like Boomerang. Anyway, it’s almost a year away, which means you can hold it out like a carrot to coax her through the next few terms without any major disasters. Thus far, touch wood, this appears to be working.
Miss (not Ms) Crowden Clark (no hyphen), the French mistress, approaches the podium and gives the microphone a timid tap. Breathless with excitement, she welcomes the parents and expresses her joy at seeing such a fine turnout. You can tell it’s going to be a long night. You shift in your seat and stifle a yawn. Rosie leans over and whispers, ‘If you think this is boring, you should try her French classes.’ You share a smile and Rosie’s boyfriend, Juan, leans forward to catch what he’s missing out on.
Juan is living under your house in the single garage you converted into a rumpus room. He’s been kicked out of his own three-storey home, one floor of which was designed exclusively for him and his older sister. His parents adopted them both out of an orphanage in Buenos Aires when they were toddlers. Of African–Spanish lineage, Juan is handsome and dark and always being stopped by the police—a living echo of the dead rappers Rosie listens to so devotedly.
Your friends say you’re crazy letting him stay but he’s been nothing but polite and helpful and, while he remains so, he’s welcome. Your friends say they’re having sex and you know they could be but you believe Rosie when she says she’s going to wait until she’s sixteen, which is a bridge you’ll cross when you come to it. Your friends say she’s lying but it is not in her nature to lie. She may be wilful and defiant but she has always been alarmingly truthful—
Look Daddy, I’m flying out of the treehouse.
I’m just cutting Barbie’s legs to fit her in the box.
I’m only using petrol to light the fire.
Your niece Mel, who is thirteen years older than Rosie, says she’s the only child she has ever seen advance on an advancing adult; as you stride towards the three-year-old with your finger raised, she strides towards you, outraged that you would address her in such an impertinent manner. Once, when she was four, you smacked her for trying to cut off the cat’s tail and she followed you around for days showing you the red mark on her leg long after it had faded, repeating, ‘Look. Look what you done.’
While Miss Crowden Clark meanders into a monologue on the French roots of English words, you look around the restless prison of her audience hoping that someone has remembered to bring their poison darts. Rosie puts her hand up.
‘Yes, Rosie?’
‘Um, Miss, Ursula O’Brien hasn’t put her name down or anything but she was wondering if it’s too late to come.’
Later, in the car on the way home, you ask Rosie if this was a genuine question or a clever ploy to end Miss Crowden Clark’s ramblings. She rolls her adolescent eyes and looks out the window. You remember Wendy’s edict that driving is one of the few times you can dialogue with teenagers because they’re stuck in the car with you so you make a few stabs at conversation before Rosie snaps the radio on. Juan shrugs and grins at you in the rear-vision mirror and you doof-doof home.
And that’s it. An unremarkable evening appears to end uneventfully. Only it doesn’t. The evening may have ended but events have just begun. Something is happening. Rosie’s question to Miss Crowden Clark is setting off a chain reaction that will devastate you all.
4
At four in the morning of the day you are run down by Frannie Prager’s blue Toyota, the phone rings and you wake up thinking someone is dead but it’s your publisher calling from London. He’s just touched base with some key foreign publishers and is a little disturbed by the lack of interest in The Decline of Australian Cinema.
‘Last year they would have gobbled it up, darling.’ Your publisher, Maxx with a double x, is not gay but he calls you darling.
You try to sound light-hearted and say that the decline in Australian cinema has probably triggered a decline of interest in Australian cinema, which would account for a decline of interest in the decline of Australian cinema. Maxx chortles and you tell him not to panic yet and he goes off to a banquet.
You hang up and panic.
Maxx has paid you a small advance for the book and you’re counting on the next payment which is due on delivery in three weeks. Maxx has called to warn you that unless he makes some international sales he cannot pay the next instalment. He doesn’t actually say this, of course; he doesn’t need to because this is the subtext of your exchange. International sales are crucial to the viability of this book. And if he can’t sell this book, you can kiss the rest of the anthology goodbye. You know this and Maxx knows you know.
You pace around the house and boil water for coffee but you make green tea because it’s better for your blood pressure. You sip tea as the sun rises over the Sullivans’ house across the road and think fuuuck. You look around the house for something useful to do—work? laundry? dishwasher?—but you soon spiral into a financial funk. You’re already skating on papery ice; Wendy has mooted the idea of a third mortgage. Is such a thing even possible? you wonder. It’s your own stupid fault but you were going insane at the paper, writing articles designed to show off your intellectual prowess rather than illuminate the films you were supposed to be reviewing.
It all came to a head last Easter when a young director confronted you during a family dinner at a local Chinese restaurant.
Sobbing with rage and hatred, this guy accuses you of ruining his career and his life for the sake of a few laughs at his expense. As his embarrassed friends drag him outside, he spews this invective of abuse and you pretend you think it’s funny.
You go home and spend the rest of the long weekend in bed with a bottle of vodka and eleven packets of kettle-fried potato chips. Wendy sits on the bed and says, ‘What are you going to do?’ You smash your antique bedside lamp into the wall and Wendy’s voice turns icy. ‘What else are you going to do?’
Over the next few days you formulate the idea of a book. A whole anthology of books. They will be your redemption, a pathway out of the cynicism. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned and for my penance I will write a beautiful anthology, a truly illuminating anthology, a celebration of the splendid cinematic blah blah blah blah. Fuck that. It’s got to be honest. It’s got to confront the way culture has been sidelined across the globe while we all cheer madly for economic prosperity. Fuck that. It’s got to be readable. Fuck that. You’ve done readable and look where that got you.
In the end, you pitch Maxx a series of coffee-table books with lots of glossy pictures. The first will contain a penetrating analysis of why Australian movie stars are prospering overseas while Australian movies are not. The cherry on the cake, the thing that tips Maxx into the yes camp, is a series of candid photographs of various uber-celebrities in real-life situations. Uber-celebrities in real-life situations will sell just about anything.
The Full Ridiculous Page 2
