by Nick Earls
‘How about the bloody gift on the bed?’ he said, as he took a handful of prawns on sticks from a passing tray. ‘Did you get that?’
‘The gift from – how shall I put it – the naming-rights sponsor? Yes. Did you know about that?’
‘No, I just thought it was going to be big, a big festival. Like, drawing people from all across Canada.’
‘Sure, Pan-Canadian, from the Greek. Meaning “all across Canada”.’
He laughed, and set his prawn sticks on the windowsill, all the prawns in his mouth already. The rain had stopped outside by then but there was a blustery wind blowing, trees bending, and not too many people out in it.
We agreed it couldn’t happen where we came from – a festival taking its name from an oil company – but we also agreed the people were lovely, every one of them, and we’d feel dirty if we went home and crapped on them in interviews: ‘Well, I said Yes thinking, Pan-Canadian, that’s got to be one of their big festivals. Then I got there and it was PanCanadian Petroleum!’
We had a festival in Tasmania not so long ago which had the timber industry as a minor sponsor. The organisers emailed months in advance to let us know, and to tell us there were protests being planned and the protesters would attempt to contact us and get us on side, and that they, the festival and its representatives, defended utterly our right to free speech, etcetera, etcetera. It was several hundred words of numbered points about how fine it was that we would have our own views, and that was enough for me. It reminded me that I’d prefer pristine forests and a way of keeping people in work and I wasn’t sure how that would happen, so I lay low, put Emma between them and me and just did the job when the day came.
But Calgary wasn’t like that. Dave Stone and I paid private lip service to the ozone layer, confessed to each other our motor vehicle ownership, and agreed that we were both probably as dependent on fossil fuels as the next person, even when the next person was someone in an executive position with PanCanadian Petroleum, as was likely to be the case in the room in which we’d found ourselves.
I helped myself to a third glass of wine, he took another orange juice and we agreed we were as conflicted as all right-thinking people must be from time to time, and that a lot of what we did might or might not be seen as hypocritical, depending on how you were disposed to look at it. Dave Stone, some caviar caught in his shaggy Viking beard, confessed he even bought Nike shoes, but only because he couldn’t get others to fit. I told him to call me the moment he started to contemplate buying his young nieces and nephews gift packs of cigarettes for Christmas.
We went off separately and schmoozed. I told myself people who work in the fossil fuel industry are, of course, people too. I spent a good ten minutes being silently intensely political, wondering if I should be more committed to public transport at home – catch a bus once or twice, write a letter to the papers about it – and then I gorged myself on the Pan-Canadian Petroleum canapés. There are people less shallow than me who have already evaporated.
Quick, more prawns. There’s no compromise in me, only surrender.
Perth — Tuesday
THE CANAPÉ DIET: you know you’re famous when you never have to deal with food bigger than your own hand. Actual meals mystify famous people, and cutlery is something they’re almost nostalgic for, from childhood.
In fact, that’s probably not the case, even if it is part of my routine. It’s probably more applicable to corporate lifestyles, the medium-to-high-level jobs involving endless networking, but somehow that’s not as funny. It’s funny if Brad Pitt forgets how you eat a meal, but unremarkable if a guy in a dark suit eats more wontons than he needs.
Now I’m tired, a new level of tired. It’s long into the New Zealand night and I’m holding onto that one fact as if it’s the explanation for everything.
I was well publicisted all the way to the lift, Felicity, as she should, leaving nothing to chance. In the room there’s just the low hum of airconditioning, the voices of the late TV news, no pressure to talk, or make sense, or live up to any expectations.
My itinerary sits in a pile on the desk that includes my per diem envelope and some Cabcharge vouchers. Everything else is dumped around the place – my suitcase, damp laundry, other bags, my boots with the jumbo paperclip holding the left tongue in position.
Nothing gets fixed.
That’s the thought that occurs to me, sitting on my bed not concentrating on the news but noticing my boots and the jumbo paperclip. Nothing gets fixed. Not the tongue on my boot, not the blown lightbulbs at home, not the leaky taps.
I washed some clothes in Christchurch last night, in the bath in my room at the hotel next to the one once stayed in by Bill Clinton. At least they’re sort of clean, if not dry. I rig my portable line up from the shower head to the towel rail, and in Perth they can take as long as they need. I’m here for five nights. Five nights on the twelfth floor of Rydges with a view to the south and east – city buildings, the wide dark body of the Swan River, suburbs glinting off in the distance.
After a while, we all end up with hotel jokes in our routines. Little observations that we accumulate like the ones we used to pick up at home, and that were the first things we found funny. Why is it that the main difference between four- and five-star hotels is that five-star hotels give you the mirror that lets you watch yourself on the toilet? Boom boom. You realise you’ve been touring too long when you get home and you can’t go to bed unless there’s a chocolate on the pillow. Boom boom.
But it’s not all like that, not all about the distinction between four stars and five. You get used to city hotels that are set up for business – for calls, faxes, interviews – and the only new experiences come along when someone offers you a regional tour and you play Rockhampton or Bendigo or the Moranbah Workers’ Club.
I searched far too long for the phone once in a room in Townsville, before finding the note pointing out the convenience of the gold phone under the stairs next to the office. I stood there reading it, a couple of sentences typed badly on a lined card years before, and warm summer monsoon rain lashed my balcony and I knew the stairs were some distance away. And I thought, is this what I’ve come to, creeping out at night dodging the Townsville rain with a handful of wet coins to phone home and talk about the fun I’m having? Is this it? And what happens when I really make the big time? Do I get to use the platinum phone under the stairs?
Emma didn’t understand the system either, driving them crazy calling the office number after hours, when the phone was diverted to the caretaker’s flat. And Murray too, calling from home. I don’t think I had the mobile then.
But I was having fun on that tour. I ran down the stairs barefoot and phoned home wet, and I could hardly hear Murray’s voice through the noise of the rain, but I cupped my hand around the phone and told him everything I could about my day, until the money ran out.
I take my bloody-drool shoulder stain to the sink, and I rinse it and squeeze it and rinse it and squeeze it until it seems to be gone. At least it’s not a white shirt. I wring out whatever water I can and hang it over a chair, its crinkly damp shoulder facing up and ready for the airconditioning to go to work.
Felicity and I didn’t quite synchronise tonight, but it’s hard to invent rapport out of nothing in the dark in the back of a moving vehicle. She turned up with energy – worse, a nervous kind of anticipation – I turned up flat and in the wrong time zone and poorly slept. They’re on their way home now in Adam’s car, both of them saying ‘I thought she’d be funnier’.
I had my thighs Glad Wrapped today, dammit, and how can anyone come out of that with enough self-esteem to scintillate?
Somewhere in my suitcase, I have the Sunday Mail’s ‘Ten Best Butt Exercises’ article from some time last year. I’ve been spreading my butt across plane seats most of the day, but the article manages to do no more than cross my mind. Anyway, there’s no sense in working out only your butt. Tomorrow I’ll swim, and that’s far better. I only brought the artic
le for times like this, days when I don’t move and then find myself in a hotel room late in the evening, thinking I might as well do something to keep my body working. Something to use my muscles, tire them out, put myself to sleep.
I lie on my back on the bed. There’s an ad break in the news. I can remember three of the Ten Best Butt Exercises, or four, but none that can be done while lying on a bed not moving.
I’m here, I’m checked in, my laundry’s out, the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign is on the door. If only someone with energy would come and clean my remaining teeth.
I expect I’ll dream, though I’d rather not.
I picked up an apple from the silver bowl at the reception desk, a hard green apple, and I take a bite of it and chew it with the left side of my mouth. I’m sure my mother used to tell me not to eat lying flat on my back in bed. ‘You’ll only choke doing that,’ she’d say, as if it’d almost be my just deserts since she’d told me enough times before.
The gun in the dream has a wooden stock and a box magazine with the right sort of capacity, so I’ve assumed it’s a Thompson submachine gun, even though the man holding it is right-handed every time and I don’t get the clearest look at it. I used to think it was an Elvis Costello song, the one about the Thompson gunner, but it was Warren Zevon. I found a best-of CD at a friend’s house that I stayed at not so long ago, and I played it when they were out. It’s about a mercenary in Biafra in the sixties.
I don’t have dreams often, not ones that I remember. But there are some that come back on and off, brought out by travel and time-zone changes, things like that. Dreams in which I’m falling, or my teeth are loose. Dreams in which my car brakes don’t work, or something’s gone very wrong at school, or someone’s after me. When my head’s buzzing with overtiredness, it seems to flip through them like an old deck of cards.
My neighbour broke two teeth once, his front teeth, on a marble floor when he fell from a chair he was spinning around in, one afternoon while we were watching TV after school. Maybe that’s where the tooth dreams started, though I’ve heard they’re common. And I’ve lived in an era when plenty of news stories are about a war somewhere, and all stories come with pictures. And I was born in a place and at a time when the accents and the streetscapes in most of those stories were close and familiar, even though I lived in a peaceful village on the coast. You can’t ignore it when it’s in your own land, even if it’s not your village, even if you’re small.
So that’s the dream that comes on some nights of poor sleep. Our village, those times. Taken and worked on in the way dreams do.
Men with guns, following me, chasing me through cities, forests, the woods close to home. The lights of silent cars turning into the lane. Old black saloon cars with suspension like a porch swing, rocking and swaying, the lights rocking and swaying like lanterns behind the trees. No noise, no noise, and the heads inside of gunmen, dark and shrouded. Weapons on their laps, cleaned, loaded, the glint of the moon on gunmetal, then the smooth click of moving parts – a bolt being tested, a magazine clunking into place, thirty-two bullets. Hands like farm boys’.
In a shudder, the night goes. I’m on a road, face down, I can’t move. It’s all about noise then, recovering noise from the deafness in my head. Crowd noise and smoke, the clatter and clatter of gunfire and its echoes, that’s where I am, right at the heart of it. Right at the feet of the Thompson gunner, becoming as small as I can, wishing myself away.
The apple is fresh and hard, dark green and almost sour, and that’s the way I like them.
I won’t sleep just yet.
Ballystewart — 1972
IN BALLYSTEWART when I was young there were two apple trees in the garden of our white house beside the sea, but all the apples were good for was cooking. Mostly they would fall to the ground and stay there until my mother or father collected them in a bag and tipped them onto the compost heap.
‘Why would you plant trees when no one can eat the apples?’ my mother said. ‘What would make you choose a variety like that?’
But my grandmother never liked to see them going to waste so sometimes she and I would pick them, her up a ladder and me below with her sun hat to catch them in so they wouldn’t hit the ground and be bruised. She’d make pies and apple sauce for pork, and she’d put the sauce in jars and cover each lid with a bright piece of material cut with pinking shears. I wanted to help her cook, and I wasn’t allowed to cut or peel but I could stir the sauce when I was tall enough. I was seven then.
I spent afternoons with her sometimes. She was the first person to teach me card games and she let me watch Doctor Who on TV, though I had to watch the Dalek scenes from behind the sofa. My mother said I wasn’t ready for Doctor Who – she said I’d have nightmares – so it was a secret when I watched it at my grandmother’s house. And my mother would turn up later to take me home and she’d ask what we’d been doing and my grandmother would say, ‘Oh, this and that.’ I can’t remember any nightmares though.
The news would come on after Doctor Who, and we’d change the channel or turn the TV off. ‘It’s all miserable,’ she’d say, as the first pictures came on screen. ‘Too many bad people doing things we don’t need to see.’ And the picture – an armoured car on the wet streets of Belfast, a blown-out shopfront – would fizz into nothing, and she’d lead me back into the kitchen saying, ‘Shall we make something else, my girl? What would your daddy like?’
My grandmother stuck recipes in exercise books, and she had half a shelf of them. If we made a cake I got to lick the bowl and sometimes to pipe the icing on, squeezing it from a bag out through a star-shaped nozzle.
Even in pies our apples weren’t sweet, but people make apple pie too sweet most of the time.
Perth — Wednesday
I WAKE EARLY, when the light comes, next to a half-eaten apple gone brown. My tongue’s more swollen, my cheek a bit shredded. I won’t sleep again and I know it, so I find the Q&A email from Emma in the mess on the desk and I get to work. I can make notes now and it’ll cut down on emailing time later.
Q: What’s your worst addiction?
A: ‘Where Are They Now’ articles in magazines just like this one.
Q: What’s your burning ambition?
A: To go through life without sitting through or doing a PowerPoint presentation (must be a better word than ‘doing’) and to tumble turn competently.
Q: What’s your worst blind spot?
A: An irrational hatred of drive-in dry-cleaning customers. Irrational? Maybe not. Think about it. It’s the ultimate self-indulgence, and they add to that by expecting an immediate place in the traffic. They’re so lazy they can’t put one foot out of their cars to pick up their clothes. Did I says cars? I meant Mercs and Range Rovers, obviously. Range Rovers that never go anywhere more rural than pony club. Yep – it’s a blind spot, very blind.
Q: What’s your least successful attempt at self-improvement?
A: Could be that ‘Ten Best Butt Exercises’ article from the Sunday Mail that I’ve carried for thousands of kilometres over the past few weeks and done twice – excessively the second time (typical) on a day when I thought I really needed it. It took a very expensive ski-lodge-style butt massage in Banff to stop me walking like a chicken the next day, to be frank. I’m assuming exercise articles confer at least some benefit if you pack them in your bag and think about them most days?
Q: What’s been the highlight of your career so far?
A: Seeing my name in a mirror ball above Boy George’s on the back of a fundraising anthology (check exact name of book and charity).
Not bad. And I think I carried off the dry-cleaning one with some conviction, even though it’s actually Murray’s and I could hardly care less about drive-in dry-cleaning.
I miss it, that misspent passion directed against people with big cars and an inflated sense of entitlement. Q: What do you miss? What do you miss most right now? I’m glad they’re not going there. Where would I begin? A catalogue of endearing idiosyncrasie
s that are also infuriating, the laugh lines around his pale blue eyes, his hair in the morning that stands up like a jester’s hat, the games he and Elli invent together and that make sense only to the two of them, the simple measured rhythms of a normal life and every small detail of it.
Q: What’s the first thing you see in the morning?
A: I look for the windows. I look for the light. I look for a sign that will tell me where the hell I am.
That’s the real answer. I think I’ll skip the question. I think I’ll get back to the rest of them later. At home the light comes in from the sides, both sides, and Murray’s up already, opening and shutting kitchen drawers, his tie slung loosely around his neck, his hair still wet and misbehaving. There’s coffee waiting when I get out there, on the counter already sugared and stirred. Murray’s standing watching TV by then, eating a bowl of cereal and expecting that I can talk sensibly before caffeine kicks in. It’s just not how my brain works.
But today I’m awake at six-twenty a.m., I’m on the wrong side of a wide country that already has light everywhere and my head is full of wrong, unhelpful things. The gym in the building next door opens at six-thirty or so, and I can get a pass at reception.
The lap pool’s only about thirteen freestyle strokes long, ten if I work hard on my style, but the gym is good – nothing like a hotel gym. My hand is sore again, this time from doing weights. It’s sore near an old scar, but the discomfort goes while I’m in the water.
I have a resistance training routine that I do sometimes, though not as often as I should. I’m more into cardio, and particularly kickboxing or swimming when the chance comes along. At least swimming doesn’t change too much from place to place. No two bikes or two treadmills seem alike from one gym to the next, and there seems no point in learning how any machine works. I always end up standing there poking at buttons until round about the right number of red dots appears on the screen. Then I have a minute or two staggering along looking drunk, but soon it’s working smoothly and I’m flipping through channels on the TV remote, the usual mixture of CNN, BBC World, soccer somewhere in South America or Europe, local programming.
