The Full Ridiculous

by Mark Lamprell

  ‘How do you know there’ll be disappointments?’ says Wendy. ‘He might do okay.’ Instead of submitting to your default pessimism, you think, God, he might do okay. That is a possibility.

  Christmas Day is spent at Ingrid’s where she and Tess take the opportunity to tell you that you’re looking so much better with such overworked spontaneity that you know they’ve rehearsed it. You know that you are not looking so much better, but your weight seems to have reached a plateau; you may have even lost a kilo or two. Occasionally you’ve overheard Wendy on the phone, voice lowered, discussing your ‘progress’ with Ingrid or Tess. They have been vigilant guardians, your big sisters. You are about to thank them for this, as you are clearing the table for dessert, when Tess burns the lemon meringue pie and Ingrid tsks. Tess demands to know why Ingrid is tsking. Ingrid asks Tess if she thinks it was wise to leave the pie till the last minute. In a flash things go from pudding to poop and you decide to save your thank-yous for another time.

  In the new year, you plan to get your book in order. Before you start back at the Herald, you want to make sure that there is a clear outline and a useful breakdown of the contents for each chapter in case you ever return to it. One morning after breakfast, you force yourself into the study and close the door. You start by forming a plan of attack.

  Step 1: turn on the computer.

  You turn on the computer and notice that the screen is dirty and the keyboard could do with a wipe down. You pause to consider whether this is a legitimate concern or a delay tactic. You decide that pausing to consider this is actually a delay tactic so you launch into action. You go and find Wendy and ask her where she has put those industrial wipe things that you use to clean keyboards.

  Wendy leads you back into the study and opens the drawer directly in front of where you have been sitting. She retrieves the industrial wipes and refrains from pointing out that the industrial wipes are where they always are: right in front you. You clean the screen with great diligence and wipe carefully around the letters on the keyboard. My gosh, they’re filthy! You hold the keyboard up to the light and decide they need a second clean.

  Once your computer is shipshape and sparkling, you begin work. Well, you would begin work only you look out the window and see the Volvo. How long has that car been so dirty? My God that car is a disgrace! You roll back your chair, spring to your feet and stride purposefully into the laundry where you fill a bucket with warm soapy water. You rummage under the laundry sink, looking for the chamois. It’s not there. You call out to Wendy and ask if she knows where the chamois is.

  Wendy appears at the laundry door and asks what you are doing. You don’t answer, ‘I’m washing the car,’ because you know that’s not what she means.

  ‘I thought you were fixing up your book.’

  ‘That car is filthy,’ you offer by way of defence.

  ‘Yeah, and I’m about to drive it to my office. If you’re looking for some work-avoidance activity, you could run a load of washing.’

  She kisses you on the cheek and heads off to her office. You pour the soapy water down the laundry sink and put a pile of dirty clothes into the washing machine. There’s enough powder to do this single load but that’s all. Maybe you should walk up to the shops and buy some more? You catch your reflection in the round window of the clothes dryer that hangs above the washer. You know perfectly well what you are doing and it’s time to surrender.

  Defeated, you return to the study and your gleaming computer. You read over what you have written previously and begin to type out a plan of how to proceed. Now that you have committed to placing the project in metaphoric mothballs, the ideas flow and the writing unfolds as if you are channelling someone who knows what they are talking about.

  You feel a presence behind you and turn to discover your son hovering at the study door.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt…’ ‘Come in, sit!’ you say enthusiastically.

  ‘I got my marks back for my film; I got an A-plus.’

  ‘Wow. An A-plus! Well done, that’s great!’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You must be so pleased!’

  ‘I am, I am…’

  ‘Well, I’m not surprised. You did a brilliant job.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad…’

  Just when you are working well, when you no longer require a distraction, one has arrived. You are tempted to turn back to your computer and resume typing but you don’t because you have the feeling there is something else your son wants to tell you. Or something he doesn’t want to tell you but feels he must. You don’t push it. You smile and nod, holding his gaze until he says, ‘So that’s the good news.’

  Uh-huh.

  Weirdly, you don’t panic. Your palms go sweaty but your heart does not race and you do not have to fight the urge to hide under your desk. Declan sits in the broken office chair that Wendy normally uses. He picks at the black gaffer tape binding the torn vinyl cover to the seat.

  ‘Remember the pencil case and the drugs thing?’

  You nod again.

  ‘I was in on it…James was going to give me ten per cent of whatever he made. That’s why I was minding them.’

  Of course. Of course that’s what was happening. Anyone other than you with your unique head-in-the-sand approach to parenting would have seen it. But now you must deal with it. He has come to you and you alone. Wendy is not here. Deal with it like a proper father.

  ‘Thank you for telling me. I appreciate you telling me the truth.’

  He looks at you. There needs to be more. You don’t want to say, ‘I’m very disappointed in you,’ because that feels so predictable but the fact remains that you are disappointed so you say—

  ‘I’m very disappointed in you.’ You shake your head. ‘I thought, I know, that you know better.’

  ‘I know. It was…dumb.’

  ‘And wrong. Very wrong. That’s the main thing. It’s wrong to sell drugs to vulnerable kids. Kids who may get addicted, kids who may die from their addiction. You could have been responsible for someone’s death.’

  Declan looks at you, horrified. Good. Be afraid, be very afraid. You can see he is about to cry. ‘Indirectly responsible but responsible nonetheless,’ you say. ‘Take a deep breath.’

  Declan takes a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

  ‘Why are you telling me this now? Has something come up about it?’

  ‘No, I was just thinking about it. I wanted you to know is all.’

  ‘Well I appreciate that, I really do. It takes guts to admit something like that.’

  He smiles through his frown and nods his gratitude for this small concession. Now it is your turn to come clean.

  ‘I took them,’ you say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The drugs. I found them in your room and I threw them out.’

  You can see him wondering whether to go on the offensive or not. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I just did.’

  Clever answer but not a good one. You know you should have told him before this but the truth is that you were frozen in the headlights of your own inaction. You let the opportunity pass and then you couldn’t think how or when to say what you needed to say. It became harder to raise the matter and easier to let it drop. You were able to do this by telling yourself you had more important things to deal with.

  Perhaps you did. Perhaps you didn’t.

  You watch your son crossing a moral tightrope, balancing up who should have told what to whom and when. You don’t want him to detour into an argument about your own ethical turpitude, not because you are afraid of the fight, but because he deserves better. He has had the courage to raise this transgression when it could just as easily have been discarded in a quiet corner. He deserves this to be about him, not you. So you take back control by asking—

  ‘What on earth possessed you to do something like that in the first place?’

  He shrugs. ‘I dunno…James asked me to.’

  This is not a very good ans
wer either but you have no doubt it is a truthful one. You recall Wendy and Mel riffing about the insanity of adolescent peer pressure. There’s no point in saying, ‘Well if James jumped off a thirty-storey building, would you jump off too?’ because the amazing answer is that, yes, he would jump. At this age, he would do anything to be like his friends.

  You wonder what to do about the issue of punishment. He’s obviously contrite and perhaps being beaten black and blue by his good mate James (note to self: scowl nastily at James next time he breezes through with a ‘Hey Mr O’) is punishment enough, but still you tell him that you will discuss the matter with his mother when she comes home.

  ‘Just assure me that you know it was wrong,’ you say. ‘That you know this is not the way good men behave.’

  ‘I know it was wrong.’

  ‘Don’t do it again. You’re better than that.’

  ‘I won’t. I promise.’

  He doesn’t add, as he is entitled to, ‘But you were wrong too; you should have told me you had thrown the drugs away.’ He does not say this because he appreciates that in the grand scheme of things the withholding of such information is a comparatively minor offence, and because he has a generous spirit, your boy. You stand up, put your arms around him and hug him tight. He mumbles sorry again into your shoulder and you let him go.

  ‘I’m glad I told you.’

  ‘I’m glad you told me too.’

  On the day the high school examination results finally come out, you wake early. Summer rain is sheeting down and you drag yourself out of bed. Egg greets you as if you have risen from the dead which, for all he knows, you have. A familiar dripping sound leads you down the hall to discover—rediscover—a leak in the skylight you had inexpensively installed in the dark dining room when you first moved in. Water drip drip drips into an expanding puddle on the worn pine floorboards. You towel them dry and place a bucket under the drip, only to discover that there is a second drip. Wendy shuffles in, bleary-eyed.

  ‘I thought you fixed that,’ she says.

  ‘So did I,’ you answer.

  Just over a year ago, you pumped enough silicon into the space around the skylight to fill a swimming pool. Now the leak is back, trumpeting its victory over you by demanding not one but two buckets.

  ‘I hope it’s not an omen,’ you say, all gloom and grumpy doom.

  Wendy looks at you hard and shuffles back down the hall to brush her teeth. By the time you join her, the rain has stopped and a small patch of blue has opened in the grey above the bathroom window.

  ‘Well I’ll be…It is an omen,’ says Wendy in a silly cheesy voice. ‘The world has been washed clean.’

  The phone rings and you both hear Declan spring out of bed to answer it.

  ‘More miracles,’ you add in the same silly voice although it doesn’t sound nearly as funny or original when you do it.

  And anyway, it’s not a miracle. It’s no surprise at all. Some of Declan’s mates already have their results via the internet. They are calling, texting and facebooking, celebrating or commiserating.

  Declan, unusually, has elected to receive his results in hard copy via snail mail. The letter should come today but because she has to leave for work, Wendy encourages Declan to log on and check his results. He says he can’t be bothered, which Rosie points out is a big fat lie. Wendy leaves on the promise that Declan will call her as soon as he knows anything. The household busies itself with other tasks but everyone keeps an ear out for the postman, unnecessarily because Egg will go off his head once the red motor scooter is within a three-house radius.

  Just after 11am Egg goes off his head and Rosie shoots out the door like a rocket. Declan shouts, ‘Hey!’ and races after her. He pushes Rosie off the path and she plummets into an azalea, laughing. The postman grins because he has been similarly greeted by other expectant eighteen-year-olds and knows exactly what is at stake here. He hands Declan his letter and says, ‘Good luck.’

  At that moment, Egg bursts through the unlatched screen door and charges down the path, hackles raised, barking ferociously. Declan tries to dive tackle him but the wretched dog wriggles free. The postman shouts, ‘Egg! Sit!’ and (rather pathetically) Egg sits, looking guilty. Rosie resurrects herself from the azaleas and grabs Egg by the collar. Declan apologises but the postman says he enjoys it.

  ‘Me and Egg, we have a thing,’ he explains.

  Rosie and Declan come inside and you get Wendy on the phone and all huddle around the kitchen table for the Reading of the Results. Declan rips the letter open with mock ferocity. As he scans it you all unhelpfully add to the tension by taking turns with single-word questions.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Good?’

  Declan finishes reading and hands you the results with a slightly nonplussed look on his face. ‘Good,’ he says. You read the results to Wendy. They’re better than good; they’re great. He’s hoping to do journalism or law and these marks should get him into either. Wendy asks you to remind him to call his cousin Mel.

  You start to plan a special celebration dinner but Declan overhears you and says he’ll probably be out. ‘Fair enough,’ you say, ‘we’ll do it another time.’ Declan calls Mel on his mobile and even Wendy can hear her whoops of delight. You all laugh at Mad Mel’s enthusiasm.

  All four members of Team O’Dell are laughing at the same thing at the same time. You try to remember the last time this happened but you can’t.

  31

  You are in the backyard with Wendy, excavating the ruins of the vegetable garden that you laid out two seasons ago and promptly abandoned. Making feverish trips to the nursery, you purchased railway sleepers for the borders and filled them with two tons of top quality (organic!) soil that some idiot delivery man almost dumped directly on your driveway before you charged out and stopped him, laying out a tarpaulin to protect the gravel.

  You borrowed your neighbour’s flat-tyred wheelbarrow and, being the Big Strong Man that you are, ferried the soil from the front to the back garden in no time. Well, not no time, half a day, actually. After your impressive effort, you presented your freshly bulging biceps for Wendy’s inspection and she laughed. Cackled, some might say. In playful retaliation, you threw a handful of soil at her but this didn’t turn out to be the hilarious back-lit romp amongst the daisies that you envisioned when dirt got stuck behind her contact lens and she rushed off to the bathroom, blinded.

  Half an hour later Wendy returned with a swollen red eye and silently began to plant enough vegetable seedlings to feed a starving nation. If said nation had been counting on your baby lettuces, carrots, beans, rocket, tomatoes and cauliflowers to mature into edible adulthood, they would indeed have starved because four weeks later you went camping during a heatwave and the whole lot died.

  You swore it was Wendy’s job to ask the neighbour to do the watering while you were gone. Wendy swore it was yours.

  Your current argument revolves around the (evidently drought-resistant) lemon tree. You are bickering about whether to leave it as the centrepiece of the vegetable killing fields (let sleeping dogs lie, you say) when Rosie appears and tells you she has some news.

  You both freeze.

  ‘No, no, no. It’s not that bad,’ Rosie quickly adds. ‘It’s just a bit…sad, I guess?’

  Now she really has your attention.

  ‘Juan and I broke up.’

  Wendy peels off the rubber washing-up gloves that she has been using in lieu of proper gardening gloves and goes to hug Rosie.

  ‘Oh darling!’ she proclaims but Rosie puts up her hands, cutting the hug off at the pass.

  ‘I’m okay, I’m okay,’ she says.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Absolutely positively. Geez, Mum. Have a panic, why don’t you?’

  You’re reluctant to be the one to ask the obvious question but you say, ‘What happened?’

  ‘We had a bit of a fight and he said, “Maybe we should call it quit
s” and I said, “Maybe we should”,’ she says with a shrug. ‘So we did.’

  ‘So he called it off?’ you ask, amazed.

  ‘They both did,’ counters Wendy defensively.

  ‘No, Juan did really,’ says Rosie, ‘but that’s okay.’

  ‘You seem okay,’ says Wendy, sounding slightly surprised.

  ‘Yeah I am okay. I’m…relieved.’

  Relieved. It’s the same word she used when Juan moved out and you think: Of course you’re relieved, you poor sweetheart. Smarter parents would have put an end to things long before the boy had your name tattooed across his chest.

  You don’t give voice to this but you do silently hope that one day when Rosie is lying on a psychiatrist’s couch she will forgive you for your lack of vigilance.

  Later, when you are watching television, Rosie executes a kind of somersault over the back of the couch and snuggles in between you and Wendy. You both wrap your arms around her and she allows you to cuddle her. You don’t get many cuddles these days but this, you note, is a good one.

  You feel your luck. First about the hug but then in a cosmic sense: you are part of something far bigger than yourself that travels to your children and to their children and their children and on and on. Rosie’s children.

  Now there’s a thought.

  Wendy looks over at you, blinking slowly as a way of saying, ‘This is bliss.’

  You drive around the maze of city fringe laneways, searching for a park. A red car pulls out in front of you and your heart leaps. You accelerate the old Volvo before some zippy little number materialises and nips into the spot, invalidating your claim on it. Quickly the spot forms in your mind as your spot, but sadly when you get there, it’s a No Standing zone. You consider whether to park illegally but you will be here for at least an hour, maybe ninety minutes, because you are visiting your psychiatrist. In that time a parking inspector is bound to come along and while insanity may be mounted as a defence for murder, you’re not sure you can offer it up as a defence for illegal parking.