The Full Ridiculous

by Mark Lamprell

  You’re wishing you could channel some of Wendy’s excellent parking karma, when you do: two small cars pull out across the road, leaving room for one ancient dinosaursized Volvo. You execute a U-turn and reverse cleanly into the spot. There is no argy-bargy back and forth. No am-I-close-enough-to-the-kerb? No have-I-left-enough-room-for-the-car-in-front? Just a perfectly realised reverse park. If you were in a parking competition right now, each of the three admiring judges would award you ten out of ten. You lock the car and walk briskly down the street because you’re running a little late. Normally you’d be all flustered and sweaty but you’re not. Maybe it’s because you’re a gold-medal-winning parkiologist. Parkographer? Parker?

  Soon you’re lying on your psychiatrist’s couch discussing Zorba the Greek. As you do. You talk about the part where Zorba’s friend’s business collapses and he loses everything he has worked for. In response, the guy goes dancing down the beach, rejoicing because he is suddenly stripped back to his bare self. Instead of despair he feels ‘a sublime unjustifiable gladness. Not only unjustifiable but contrary to all justification…As if in the hard sombre labyrinth of necessity I had discovered liberty herself playing happily in a corner. And I played with her.’

  You wish you felt like that. Doctor Maurice smiles ruefully.

  Books and movies in particular, he comments, often present big crises followed by swift resolutions; that is a large part of their appeal. The bridge blows up so the hero stops the train. The children are kidnapped so the heroine recovers them. The dragon threatens the princess so the knight slays it. Obvious problems. Simple solutions. Life, unfortunately, is messier.

  You sit in silence for a while.

  Sometimes, you think, the only thing to do is endure. Sometimes the great act of heroism is simply getting out of bed. For some people on some days that is a stupendous achievement. It’s not sexy or epic but it is heroic.

  You smile and tell Doctor Maurice how, when the accident first happened, you decided that you had been Called to Adventure, that you were about to embark on a Hero Journey and that the universe would reveal Truths to you. He laughs and asks what you have learned.

  ‘The message is, there is no message,’ you say. ‘Or maybe there is a message but it’s too soppy to repeat.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  At the end of the session Doctor Maurice suggests that you begin cutting down on your antidepressants: instead of two pills, one and three-quarters. You say, yes, you’re ready. You hope your weight loss will improve once you stop with the high dosages; your GP says if you don’t stop eating, you’re going to explode. Doctor Maurice chuckles. ‘You look like you’ve lost a little to me.’

  ‘I think I have,’ you say.

  He walks you to the door.

  ‘It’s strange.’

  ‘What?’ he asks.

  ‘You know everything about me and I know nothing about you.’

  ‘Yeah, I often think that too!’ calls Em, eavesdropping from the reception desk.

  She’s dyed her hair bright pink.

  32

  At the one-year anniversary of being run over by Frannie Prager’s blue sedan, you are rummaging under the house looking for the long pole with the pruning shears on the end that were left suspended under the floor joists by the previous owners. They are not in the usual spot so you grab a torch from the hall cupboard and move deeper into the gloom. Your light beam catches a pair of crutches that you realise are your crutches from the accident. This surprises you because you thought someone had taken them back to the hospital. You remember that they were merely loaned to you by the emergency department. You drag them into the daylight to discover that except for a fine layer of dust they’re in perfect condition.

  Up in the kitchen you wipe them down with the washing-up cloth. Wendy doesn’t like the washing-up cloth used for anything other than washing-up but Wendy’s not here. You rinse the washing-up cloth thoroughly (erasing all signs of domestic disobedience) and think No time like the present so you take the crutches down to the car and drive them back to the hospital.

  Walking up the ramp of the emergency department you rehearse an explanation.

  ‘Sorry, I thought someone had returned them.’

  No, take responsibility for them yourself.

  ‘Sorry, I forgot they were under the house.’

  No, you didn’t know they were under the house; stop taking blame for mistakes you didn’t make.

  ‘Look what I found under my house!’

  No, you should show some repentance for keeping them out of action for six months longer than necessary. Actually, why should you? It’s not as if you meant to keep them out of action. Why not simply remain anonymous?

  ‘Look what I found in the car park! Someone must have left them there.’

  No, why would you compound the wrong by lying about it as well?

  You walk through the plastic swing door at the top of the ramp to discover the emergency department fragrant with sweat, fear and hospital-grade disinfectant. The waiting room overflows with patients; some even lie on the floor. It’s hard to tell who is sick and who is there to support the sick. The nurses at the triage station are run off their feet.

  Your why-I-haven’t-returned-my-crutches alibi suddenly seems insignificant. Gently you lean the crutches against a pillar and, without a word of explanation to anyone, leave. It’s neither heroic nor courageous but you have returned the crutches to their rightful place.

  On the way home you find yourself cruising down a shady avenue lined with high-walled mansions and realise that you are approaching the pedestrian crossing where you were run down by the blue sedan. You make sure no one is waiting to cross because it would be appropriately Kafkaesque for you to run someone over here exactly a year to the day after you were run over. In your version of the story you would run over the woman who ran you over, Frannie Prager, and the attending officer would be Constable Lance Johnstone.

  Fortunately the street is empty and you drive over the crossing without incident.

  Then, on a whim, you pull over and walk back to the scene of the crime. You imagine yourself on the other side of the road and see yourself walking across, connecting with the blue car, sliding up the hood, smashing the windscreen, catapulting through the air and landing in the gutter, a vivid replay with anatomically correct detailing like one of those awful drive-carefully ads you see on TV.

  All you think is: so that happened.

  You explore the quiet corners of your head or your heart or your gut or wherever suppressed feelings hide but nothing emerges.

  Just: so that happened.

  This seems way too normal a response for someone as catastrophically inclined as yourself. You cross the crossing. You stand there looking, waiting. A woman appears at her front gate and pretends to be sorting through her mail rather than assessing your potential as a thief/rapist/vandal/graffitist.

  It occurs to you that this could be the very same lady who placed a blanket over you or patted your back a year ago today. You decide to go over and introduce yourself and thank her for her kindness. You are about to cross back when you see a silver Jaguar coming. It slows but you wave it past, and by the time it has gone, so has the woman.

  Probably wasn’t her anyway. So you return to the car and drive home.

  The gravel of your driveway crunches comfortingly under your tyres. The French doors of the converted garage are open and Declan is inside, waxing his surfboard. He comes to greet you.

  ‘Hi Fatty,’ he says.

  ‘Shut up,’ you grin back as you hoist yourself out of the old Volvo.

  Your son looks up and you follow his gaze into the achingly blue sky. It is a glorious late summer’s day. You feel the warm air ebb around you.

  ‘How about a walk?’ you ask even though you know the offer will be declined.

  ‘Sure,’ he says.

  You go inside and change your shoes while Declan puts his surfboard back in its silvery plastic cover and locks it in the
room where Juan was once ensconced.

  ‘Do you miss him?’ he asks when you return in the battered runners that you have not run in for exactly one year.

  ‘Who?’ you ask.

  ‘Juan.’

  ‘Oh. No, not really. Do you?’

  ‘Nah. I wish him well, but.’

  At the end of the driveway you usually turn right towards the dip in the road that eventually leads to the dead end where suburbia meets the bush. But Declan steers left and leads you up the hill, across the main road, and back down a tree-lined avenue of modest timber cottages. Here and there a house has been bulldozed and replaced by a brick McMansion, one of those neo-Federation confections with a living room and a family room and a rumpus room and a media room and a conservatory, designed so that no member of the resident family need ever cross paths with any other member.

  ‘You haven’t been walking much lately,’ says Declan.

  ‘Cars still freak me out a bit,’ you confess. As if to prove the potential danger, a yellow Volkswagen Beetle tears around the corner, forcing you off the road and onto the verge.

  ‘You should come surfing with me.’

  You laugh at his joke.

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘I’m too old.’

  ‘Not for a long board. There’s plenty of old blokes out there on long boards.’

  ‘Yeah but I’ll bet they’ve been doing it since they were kids.’

  ‘Not all of them. It’s not that hard once you learn the basics. Then it’s just practice and persistence.’

  You look at your son, touched that he is trying to involve you in his favourite sport. You don’t want to hurt his feelings so you say, ‘Well thank you. I’ll give it some thought.’

  ‘And there are no cars out there in the surf,’ he adds as a kind of incentive.

  ‘Yeah, but there are sharks.’

  ‘Which is why I’m a very fast paddler,’ he says. ‘Come on.’

  Declan heads down a battleaxe driveway.

  ‘Where are you going? This is someone’s house.’

  ‘No it’s not, it’s a fire trail.’

  You have lived in this suburb almost your entire life and you have passed this long strip of basalt gravel thousands of times. But this is the first time you walk down it. You follow your son and find yourself in a part of the bush that you never knew existed.

  You arrive in a clearing behind a group of houses. A black ring of grass bespeaks a once-mighty, probably-communal, certainly-illegal bonfire. You imagine the neighbours gathering here, dragging fallen logs from the bordering bushland and adding their own building offcuts to create a great mound of wood. Night falls and the man from number 42 splashes his mower fuel over the timber mountain. Mothers withdraw their children to a safe distance. A match strikes and—whoosh—the fire is away! Young and old watch mesmerised as the flames leap and roar. Sparks spiral magically into the dark sky.

  ‘Oi. This way,’ says Declan, stirring you from your reverie.

  Beyond the clearing an old wooden bridge spans a tinkling creek. Declan leads you across, following the fire trail again. The track is muddy in parts, lined with wattle and glossy shrubs with dark green leaves. Sydney blue gums and angophora with almost-human limbs tower tall as skyscrapers above your head. Their vast canopies rustle in the gentlest of breezes.

  The word zephyr pops into your head.

  The world smells warm and damp and at irregular intervals the perfume of eucalypt flowers assaults your senses. You come to a sandstone ledge jutting over the creek where it swells into a small pool. It reminds you of suicide rock and you blush at your foolishness. Declan sits and you sit next to him. He drapes his arm casually across your shoulder and those damn tears spring to your eyes once again. Fortunately your son is looking down into the water that mirrors the green canopy and sky above.

  You blink back the tears without him noticing.

  He lies back and folds his hands behind his head, looking up through the trees to bits of the blue beyond. You remain sitting, staring into the reflection on the water’s surface and realise that you and your son are looking at the same thing.

  Not a word passes between you. In the silence you become dimly aware of a distant hum. Slowly the sound builds in your consciousness and you wonder where it is coming from. Then a whiff of eucalypt reminds you that way, way above your head the trees are flowering; they will be filled with millions of bees occupied with their harvesting. You can’t see them. You can barely hear them. But you know they are there.

  And now you are aware of something else. A mighty river flowing below you. And above you. And all around you.

  Some people never know this river. Others are destined to feel only the occasional splash. Others dive in and out but still don’t feel enough of it. But you, you are in the river, swept along in the torrent, sometimes floating, sometimes drowning, spluttering, flailing but always soaked in it.

  You are an unremarkable man living an unremarkable life except for this single thing: you love and are splendidly loved. You will never paint a masterpiece or engineer a great bridge or leave any lasting monument to yourself. But you have been swept into the river of love and you know how to swim there and you are teaching your children how to swim as your parents taught you and your children will teach theirs and on it will go.

  This is your legacy, your luck, your glory and your magnificence.

  You lie back on the hard ground next to your son. You know it can’t be true but you feel like you are levitating.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank Margaret Connolly for her considered counsel and for believing that this small offering might be something worth publishing. I’d like to thank Michael Heyward for agreeing with her and for his great skill and enthusiasm, both as publisher and editor. Along with Anne Beilby, he has also been a wonderful promoter of this novel internationally. Thanks to my other editor, Mandy Brett, for her attentiveness, humour, kindness and rigour, Chong Weng Ho for his brilliant cover and for summarising my book so succinctly to me (‘middleclass loser makes good’), Kirsty Wilson and Shalini Kunahlan, Michelle Calligaro, Imogen Stubbs, the perfectly named Natalie Book, and publicist extraordinaire Jane Novak. The thing that shines about you people is your genuine love of books. You are inspirational. Thank you.

  Thanks also to Phil Rich, Richard Mortlock, Kim Maine, Susan Vass, Joanna Weinberg and Menno Meyjes for their assistance and guidance. And for being there.

  Finally, thank you to the large, rambling assortment of oddments that make up my family over three continents and two hemispheres. I’d especially like to thank my sisters, Trish Mair and Helen Bateman, my wife, Klay, to whom this book is dedicated and without whom it would not exist, my wondrous children, Louis and Gina, the fortuitously addended Nell, and last but not least delightful, delovely Delilah Rose Lamprell, who makes everything brand new again.

  About the Author

  Mark Lamprell has worked in film and television for many years. He co-wrote the film Babe: Pig in the City and wrote and directed the award-winning feature My Mother Frank. His most recent project is the movie musical Goddess, which he co-wrote and directed. The Full Ridiculous is his first novel.

  About the Publisher

  House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz,
Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”