by Nick Earls
My case arrives and I lift it from the carousel and click the handle up into place.
‘Black with wheels?’ Adam says, and he hasn’t said much so far. ‘I thought you had a green backpack. I thought I read that on a website.’
‘Right, and now I’m supposed to just get into a car with you people in an unfamiliar city and let you drive me off into the night? And there’s nothing in the back but a big plastic garbage bag, a boning knife and a shovel . . .’ Adam laughs at that, but Felicity doesn’t. ‘I did have a green backpack, but the Americans or the people at Heathrow busted every lock and every zip with the increased security they’ve got now. And I got back and I thought, bugger it, who am I kidding, I’m old enough for wheels.’ We trundle towards the exit. ‘It’s nice to see websites don’t know everything.’
‘So, the partner called Murray,’ Adam says, ‘his daughter called Elli, you being Brisbane born and bred – does that all stack up?’
Felicity snaps at him. ‘Adam. You are creeping Meg out. You are here because you have a car, remember, not to talk. I’m sorry, Meg.’
‘It’s okay. He was creeping me out until he got to Brisbane born and bred. Despite what most websites say, I was actually born in Northern Ireland.’
‘It’s his sense of humour. I’m sorry. Not the born-and-bred part but the creeping you out part. It’s not funny, Adam. I knew I should have just used Cabcharge vouchers . . .’
‘I don’t think I was the one who mentioned the boning knife,’ Adam says.
She snaps again. ‘Don’t say “boning knife” in an airport, you idiot.’
‘But Meg . . .’ He thinks better of it. ‘I’m going to shut up now.’
Felicity says she’ll sit in the back with me, if that’s okay. There’s festival business to talk through.
I take the seat behind Adam, Felicity fiddles with her phone, I find mine in my bag and turn it back on. My tongue finds the sharp edge of my broken tooth and can’t leave it alone. It’s the gap that’s the most unsettling thing, the space where once there was good hard tooth. My tongue feels swollen back where the tooth has cut it, and the inside of my cheek is cut too.
There are trees on the way out of the airport, tall pale gum trees that seem almost white in the lights of Adam’s car. He won’t have hair when he’s thirty. That’s how it looks from where I’m sitting. But a shaved head would probably suit him. He’s got a look that would work with it.
I ask him what he does and Felicity says, ‘Adam’s a writer, a novelist.’
‘Well . . .’ he says, as though a secret’s out and he wasn’t expecting it.
‘He’s writing his first novel while doing freelance web design on the side.’
‘And,’ he says, wanting to stop her, wanting his own turn at this. ‘And working in a coffee shop in Northbridge a few days a week. That’d be on the other side. Freelance web design’s a pretty competitive business.’
Felicity gives him a look, but only I get to see it. He clearly hasn’t gone with her plan. I think, for the purposes of this drive from the airport, he was supposed to be a novelist. I want to pitch in and help him. Is this how their relationship works? Maybe it is, but I still want to pitch in and help him.
‘Where would creativity be without the big silver coffee machine?’ That’s what I start with. ‘It puts the Australia Council in the shade when it comes to funding the arts. All you’ve got to add is a bit of dishwashing and you’ve got the perfect novelist CV in place.’
‘I’ve done the dishwashing,’ he says. ‘It’s the novel part that’s holding me back.’
He checks if we’d be okay with music, and the CD he plays is Roger Sanchez. I heard it last week, driving through Calgary in a car at night, exactly this music, and I saw the video for the single days before leaving for the tour – a girl walking the streets of a cold city with a huge heart that gradually gets smaller, something sad being sung behind the beat, a chance encounter near the end, just before morning. The phone rang then, at home, and I don’t know if the girl’s chance encounter led anywhere. She looked lonely with that big heart, more lonely than foolish. Or maybe sentiment sucks me in all too easily.
I tell them that I heard the CD in Calgary, and that songs sometimes follow you on tour that way, and Felicity says, ‘That was the PanCanadian Comedy Festival, wasn’t it? That sounds big.’
‘Well, yeah. It had its moments.’ There’s a fresh taste of blood in my mouth, and my tongue is trying to find where it’s coming from.
‘Oh, the tooth,’ Felicity says. ‘Sorry, I should have asked you about that by now. Emma called me about it.’
‘Emma?’
‘Emma from Big Talk – she’s your agent, isn’t she?’
‘Yeah. I just didn’t know she knew about the tooth yet.’
The weight of this settles on me. The weight of being beaten here by the story of my day. I’m home, where everyone knows everything. This is my job and how it goes. Conversations are had about me – me and my tooth – people talking till they know each other and can mention one another like a third friend who’s out of the room. I’m almost incidental to this, it feels, though if bits of me didn’t break I guess these calls wouldn’t be made.
This whole complicated thought seems horribly ungrateful.
‘I don’t have an appointment for you yet,’ Felicity says. ‘It’s classified as not urgent since you aren’t in any pain. Emma was reasonably sure you didn’t have pain, so that’s what I had to go with. I’m sorry if it’s wrong. Tooth pain they were talking about. Like, if it’s broken down to the nerve.’
I can still taste blood. It’s from my cheek, I think.
‘Oh, your itinerary,’ Felicity says, and pulls some folded sheets of paper out of her bag. ‘Emma told me you like an itinerary.’
‘Yeah, um, my tooth. It’s cutting my tongue. It’s cutting the inside of my cheek, so I really think it needs to be fixed.’
‘Oh, sorry. Yes, sure, sorry,’ she says, as if she’s let me down already. ‘I’m sure they’ll go for bleeding. As a reason, you know.’
‘Or, just tell them there’s pain. My mouth is sore, trust me. There’s pain. All you need to do is get me in the door.’ It’s two or three in the morning in Christchurch, my hair is greasy, my mouth is sore and I can taste my own blood. ‘If you could tell them whatever you need to, that’d be good. I know you couldn’t have done anything before now, but if we could get it fixed I’d really appreciate it.’
She offers to take the itinerary back, since some interviews will probably need rescheduling. She says it’s no trouble. She’s feeling bad because I don’t have a dental appointment; I’m feeling bad because I’m putting her neat itinerary into disarray in the minute she’s handed it to me. I feel like someone who just made a colour-specific M&M demand, but who isn’t cool enough or famous enough to do it. I come very close to switching the light on and opening my mouth wide to show her the damage.
Instead I tell her I’d like to keep the copy of the itinerary. Even though a few things might change, it’ll still be useful for me to look through it tonight, to get some idea of what we’re up for.
‘Good,’ she says. ‘Good. I know you like to know what’s going on.’
She takes another sheet of paper from her bag. It’s a cream Oroton bag with a silver clasp, and she keeps adjusting it to different positions on her lap and next to her, as if she’s not used to carrying anything like it.
The sheet of paper is an email from Emma, with questions for a magazine’s Q&A column. I don’t mind Q&A pieces, though if you don’t keep it brief the sub-editors cut your answers in half, and each one ends up just intro and punchline and you have to rely on the reader to fill in the rest.
Felicity tells me Emma wants me to call her about ‘the TV people’, the ones I’m working on a show with, and it’s only once the moment’s passed that I realise a pause was left in there for me to elaborate. By then she’s moved on to tell me there’s a celebrity canoe race on Sunday, and sh
e and Emma were sure I’d want to say Yes so they’ve done it for me. And Emma said to tell me that there’s a beer sponsor and a VIP marquee deal.
When Felicity mentions it’s two to a canoe, I tell her I’ll take anyone with a world record or an Olympic gold in butterfly or freestyle – anyone famous for their upper-body musculature.
It seems unfair that I should bump into Susie O’Neill at a photo shoot that was all about the stapling of spangly fabric, and yet I get dudded frequently at celebrity sporting events. I once played tunnel ball with an air-guitar champion, the state Health Minister, a hairdresser to the stars and Ronald McDonald, and there’s a reason tunnel ball isn’t usually played in huge plastic boots. Ronald was crap, frankly. The event was a fundraiser for cancer support, and we got caned by some ten-year-olds from Indooroopilly State School who, it has to be said, showed signs of considerable practice.
I tell Felicity not to expect much of me, that the moment I start hoping for a canoe partner with shoulders I’m pretty much guaranteed to end up with some fey boy interior designer from some crap TV show, who hardly has the upper-body strength to lift the Product to his own hair.
Felicity apologises, and I tell her I love these things, that’s what I’m saying. This is all good. The race will be a happy debacle, we’ll raise money for something that needs it, and there’s a beer sponsor. Could a Sunday be better than that? I don’t think so.
In the dark in the back of the car, this isn’t all coming through the way I want it to. Maybe I should have mentioned Ronald McDonald and the tunnel ball, instead of just drifting off into it as a hazy old thought. Maybe I should stop trying to play the role of the comedian just met at the airport. Most people expect you to behave like a chat-show guest, but perhaps Felicity doesn’t. I should be glad of that.
We pass some shops and a park. She pulls a festival program out of her bag, and tells me there’ll be a T-shirt but they come in two different styles and she thought it might be nice for me to choose. She says Elliott King and the TV people are looking at Saturday and they’ll get back to Emma with the details. She goes through the last couple of minor items on her list, and seems to relax once they’re all crossed off.
I ask her if there’s a gap somewhere in the itinerary for me to have coffee with a friend and she says ‘Sure’ and she makes a note of it. ‘Easy.’
So, that’s business attended to for now, in a conversation that never quite worked the way it should. But that’s probably just me, this day, these weeks. Roger Sanchez plays on. Adam taps the wheel sometimes. The Perth CBD appears ahead of us.
Calgary — two weeks ago
WHEN YOU ARRIVE at the PanCanadian Comedy Festival, it’s the big gift-wrapped box with the plush bag and the genuine steel pen and pencil set that give it away – the festival’s name comes from PanCanadian Petroleum, the principal sponsor.
The box was on the bed in my room at the Fairmont Palliser Hotel, wrapped in gold paper, with a matching gold ribbon. It was the first thing I saw when I shut the door, my suitcase in tow and my other hand full of envelopes, a warm shower my only immediate plan.
I flew to Calgary from Melbourne via Los Angeles and Vancouver, and I was met by someone who said, ‘You must be Meg Riddoch. I’ve seen your picture.’
She was holding a festival program above her head to rally the necessary passengers, and she kept it there while she spoke to me, her arm sticking straight up into the air. There were two other festival comedians on the flight, one from Vancouver who had flown only over the Rockies, one from New Zealand who looked in better shape than me. The Canadian was dark and wiry, the New Zealander looked like a dissolute Viking. He looked unstoppable, and it was only when I stood next to him at the baggage carousel that I could see how bloodshot his eyes were, and that the flight might have taken its toll.
‘I met you in Melbourne, I think,’ he said, and it might have been bourbon that I smelled on his breath. ‘At the festival there, a couple of years ago.’
His name was Dave Stone, and his voice was quieter than I’d expected. I didn’t remember him, but I covered well enough. He’d had a break from stand-up after that, after Melbourne, and he’d been getting back into it in the past couple of months. He told me he’d been filming The Lord of the Rings, not that I would have seen him. He ended up on the cutting room floor, every frame he was in.
‘It pays, though,’ he said. ‘I had some lines, and lines pay. And they’ve brought me back for the director’s cut on the DVD.’
We loaded our bags into the back of the brown station wagon, and I sat in the front passenger seat next to our driver, whose name I can’t remember. She was a festival volunteer.
We’d flown over mountains, serious snow-capped Rockies, to get there, then circled Calgary over a dry brown plain that I supposed must be prairie. On the way into the city in the car, we passed low buildings built for snow, the Winter Olympic ski jump, dry leafless trees and people turned shapeless by the sheer volume of clothes they had to wear to walk outside.
‘Winter must be cold here,’ I said, as some drops of rain hit the windscreen and the wipers shuddered and scraped them away noisily and the leaden sky seemed to go a long long way off into the distance.
Our driver turned to me, wanting to offer better news to a new visitor, and she told me brightly, ‘Oh no, it’s much worse in Winnipeg.’
She wasn’t the last person to tell me that, or to explain the particular weather systems at work, the Chinook Arch you see sometimes in the clouds, the way winter operates in these parts when it’s really set in.
I told her Brisbane city had never recorded a freezing temperature and she said, ‘I can’t believe that. How can it be? It must be strange for you. How do you know when the seasons change?’
Later, after my shower, I wanted good coffee but I had no idea where to get it. I went down to the festival office – in a suite on a lower floor – and kept myself awake by talking to the people there. They had coffee and it was offered to me I don’t know how many times, but it was in a large pot kept warm on a table full of Danishes, and for quite a few years now I’ve had a serious attachment to the big silver machine and a fresh genuine skinny latte.
The time for the reception came, and my next Calgary fact came along with it. The reception was in a different building, but we never went close to outside to get to it.
‘It’s the fifteen-plus rule,’ one of the staff said. ‘All the downtown buildings are linked fifteen feet above the ground, so you don’t have to go outside in winter.’
To me this sounded like a theme park idea, some kind of urban maze, but they all seemed to think it was normal, passing from one building to another at altitude. It stopped me putting together a map of the place. I left Calgary without ever being quite certain where the PanCanadian building was, though I’m sure it’s one of the big ones – it must be near the hotel and I ended up in it several times. But I have no compass indoors, it turns out, and each time I had to go to the PanCanadian building I needed help, and our arrival there took me quite by surprise.
There was food in abundance at the reception, stand-up canapé-style food, and my body decided it was a meal time though it can’t have been later than five p.m.
I talked to a festival board member, an accountant called Tina, who worked for PanCanadian and who said, ‘Oh, yeah, we’re a big part of the community here, so we feel it’s important to give something back.’ She told me Calgary was often called the Houston of the north, that it started as a wheat town, that the company loved events like this. They were behind a few festivals throughout the year, and the writers’ festival was just last month. ‘There were Australians here for that, too,’ she said. ‘I think we get three of them, two or three. Your government helps. But I don’t know the details of that, not as well as I should. We were gearing up for the comedy at that time also. I just love comedians. You’re all just so darn . . . funny. Well, most of you. I’ve got to admit there’s the occasional guest who remains a mystery to me. But it
’d be no good if all our tastes were the same. I mean, what kind of world would that be?’
She had a severe fringe, and a glass of non-alcoholic punch with an umbrella in it, and she chose only the neat canapés that were easy to handle. I drank wine and had tartare sauce sticking the fingers of my free hand together, and I’d already spilt soy on my boots. She seemed like the kind of person a festival such as this would find essential, but who would keep themselves determinedly low-key and who quite enjoyed it when jet-lagged comedians daubed themselves with food in front of her. That way, she could go home and tell the family something like, ‘Hey, kids, quite a crop we’ve got this year. I met this Aussie . . .’
Dave Stone arrived at the door about then, and came over our way lifting an orange juice from a tray as he crossed the room.
‘Goodness,’ Tina said, ‘two of our international visitors. I can’t keep you all to myself. I should leave you to mingle.’
She took two steps away before being caught by someone with festival business to discuss, and they walked off with their heads down.
Dave Stone had washed his hair and now it seemed to blow back from his head as though it was wind-tunnel affected. He still looked like a Viking.
He caught me noticing and said, ‘Can’t do a thing with it,’ and he shrugged his shoulders theatrically.
He told me he’d had no idea where the reception was, and a volunteer had caught him in the doorway of the hotel as he’d been about to wander onto the street in search of it.
‘Wrong, wrong, wrong,’ he said. ‘And she set me straight. “Comedians freeze till they snap out there.” Apparently.’
I told him they say it’s much worse in Winnipeg, and he laughed and said he’d heard that.
He clinked the ice cubes around in his glass, and took a mouthful. He shook his head to clear away the seediness of flight. He told me he only drank orange juice now, not even Coke, but that he’d flown from Hawaii smelling of the drink someone had spilled on him and it had been good to get his clothes on their way to the hotel laundry.
