by Nick Earls
Two interviews down and we’re back at the hotel thinking about coffee, but settling for mineral water. I can’t help drinking it with my head tilted to the left, and that provokes another apology from Felicity. She tells me she should have had a dental appointment made for me before I got in last night, an appointment for first thing this morning.
‘You’re banned from apologising,’ I tell her. ‘Okay? Banned.’
The festival calls her, for at least the third time, and she checks that I’ll be okay if she goes in to the office when the next interviewer arrives. It’s the last interview of the morning, and she’s marked the dentist’s address for me on a Perth city mini-map, along with two Internet cafes. Everything’s covered, and nothing’s more than two blocks away.
‘I might have Richard Stubbs later in the week,’ she says. ‘What’s he like?’
‘He’s fine. He’s a good guy. Actually, I think he’d be good company in and out of cabs and all that.’
‘I hadn’t expected to be working with you,’ she says. ‘I put my name down for you, but I didn’t think I’d get you. Technically this is work experience for me rather than fully professional. I hope that’s okay. I’ve got my degree and everything, but it’s hard breaking into the business. I’ve done some freelance stuff though. Mostly I work in the coffee shop that Adam works at.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t have picked it.’
‘Really?’
‘No. You don’t have the temperament to make coffee.’ She stalls, a strawful of mineral water on its way to her mouth. ‘I’m kidding.’
She swallows and says ‘Oh, good, right’ and treats it as the joke it was supposed to be. ‘You had me worried for a second there. I thought arriving in Adam’s car was a bit unprofessional, but I don’t drive and he really wanted to do it.’
‘That’s okay. I don’t think I’m really the limo type. Adam’s car worked for me. In London I’ve had drivers with caps. It’s all too weird. And I end up in far too many cabs already, and quite a few cab rides here take a bit of a turn when the cabbie starts going, “Hey, you’re that comedian, aren’t you?” So I sell X-ray equipment. That’s the story I tell them, and there’s not one cabbie yet who’s found it interesting. But it’s not the only job that works that way, I guess, in cabs or at parties or wherever. There are plenty of jobs that chase you around when you don’t necessarily want them to.’
‘My mother’s a doctor,’ Felicity says. ‘People are always wanting to show her rashes and lumps and things.’
‘If you’re a comedian, every time you leave the house you’ve got to be ready for people hassling you to say something funny and make them laugh. And they won’t laugh. It’s a dare. It’s a challenge, and you know they’ll hold out on you. And then they’ll go, “Hey, I’ll tell you something really funny. You might want to use this . . .” Any time your face is on TV it doesn’t help, obviously.’
‘Can I ask about the TV people?’ Felicity says, more tentatively than she needs to. ‘The ones Emma was talking about. Are they bringing your show back?’
‘You noticed my show? That’s quite flattering. And, obviously, rare. No, this is different. More acting than that. A series, probably. That’s the plan, anyway. A drama. Action. It’s a big secret at the moment. It’s all this gym and pool time that I’m putting in. I figure I might as well get more out of it than just the cliché of a long and healthy life. I thought I might make it tax deductible, maybe turn it into a paying job.’
Felicity, from the moment I said ‘big secret’, has had no capacity to treat what I’m saying in any way other than seriously. She’s nodding, and I find myself saying ‘No, really . . .’, about to revisit the tax deductibility remark.
I tell her I want to create a dynamic female character who has the brains and also the physicality to do things. Make her powerful, but with a bunch of normal human imperfections. I want her to be real, but I also want to have fun with the role. I want the show to have some subtlety to it. And I guess I want her to be able to be a kind of role model, but not in an obvious way, or a preachy way. Maybe I want that, maybe I don’t. Maybe I’d be happy if it’s good TV.
These ambitions have been through a lot since they started, I realise that now. Your character starts with a degree in art history and training in forensics, soon enough there’s much more to it, much more at stake, and she’s being parachuted alone into a rogue state at night, clanking with weapons as she drifts down into the waiting darkness.
One of the staff comes and takes our glasses away. The condensation under Felicity’s glass forms a letter C and her index finger connects the ends and makes a circle.
‘This is a lot more interesting than the office,’ she says. ‘You should have fun with that. With a show like that. I’m not very physical, so I’d like to see someone take that kind of character and give her more than just physicality. I’d like to see you do that.’
‘Well, we’ll see what it becomes. Once the network and the international co-production partners and everyone else has had their say, I expect she’ll be a large-breasted super-spy. And I don’t think we can ever have too many of those. I’ve got a friend who’s an actor who says that every script she gets has men described in three lines of detail and women described as “beautiful”. That’s why I wanted to focus on creating a character, a fleshed-out character. It’s like the assumption that all female comedians can do is “chick stuff” – as someone delicately put it to me not so long ago. Anyway, we’ll see what happens with the TV plans. I can already imagine the wardrobe meeting, and it’s all cleavage enhancement and grenades and knives and things. Are you getting worried about the subtlety?’
She smiles. ‘I am a bit. I’d still watch it, though.’
The journalist we’ve been waiting for arrives. She’s Alice from a student newspaper, and she gives me a firm handshake and a smile that shows a mouthful of perfect teeth. Felicity checks again that I’ll be okay without her, and tells me she’ll have her mobile on all the time. She’s going to be good at this job.
Alice speaks in a speech-and-drama type of voice, but when I turn down coffee she suggests a beer, if it’s not too early in the day.
The first open bar we find is at the far end of the mall and below street level. The beer smell rises to meet us as we walk down the stairs and into a large room with off-white feature archways and old guys with oily hair settled grimly into boozing. Horse races, somewhere, are running high up on several TV screens.
‘Welcome to Perth,’ she says, without overplaying the irony or even turning her head.
The interview is conducted in just the right spirit. She’s immediately likeable, an arts student who saw the last show I did here and will be paid fifty dollars for this story. I buy the beers, and have to explain why I’m drinking mine half sideways. I already know how her article will open.
She takes out a notepad with a list of questions, and then an oversized tape recorder she’s borrowed from the magazine office. It looks like it was knocked off from a high-school language lab in the seventies.
‘I know,’ she says. ‘State of the art.’ She clears her throat a couple of times, then presses play and record. ‘Interview with Meg Riddoch, in a hand-picked Barrack Street brunch venue where ambience is not the word. Meg Riddoch, do you see yourself as a role model?’
‘Alice, it’s late on a weekday morning, I said No to coffee and I’m making you drink beer in a Spanish-mission style cavern, otherwise inhabited by a group of men wagering on what might be the fourth at Werribee.’
‘So, I’ll take that as a Yes?’
‘Of course.’
The interview becomes a conversation – in the way that only some of them do – with Alice going back to her question list when she remembers to, or when a natural conclusion forms itself. I find out about her brother, her uni subject changes, her father, who hardly understands her at all but tells all his friends she’s setting out to do the longest arts degree in the world. She asks the usual questions and
others too, student magazine questions such as ‘Club sandwich-yes or no?’ and ‘Who are you most like on the crew of The Love Boat?’ Cable, it seems, has brought back more of these shows than it should have.
We’re onto the second side of the tape when she scans down her list and says, ‘Favourite chocolate available in block or bar form?’
I tell her that I used to have a thing for Old Jamaica, since it’s at least an answer I can work with. ‘The promise of dark chocolate, fruit and tincture of rum seemed like a hell of a combo when I was a kid. You could gorge yourself stupid on chocolate and feign drunkenness at the same time. Plus, it came with a kind of “pirate chic”, despite the fact that pirates were generally bastards. Actually, the whole experience was: gorge yourself stupid, feign drunkenness and talk in a vaguely Cornish accent about your parrot, and slicing people from one end to the other. Not just a chocolate bar, but fun for all the family.’
‘Excellent,’ she says, maintaining the smile she’s had throughout. She checks her list again, and looks up. ‘Are you happy?’
The question comes without an agenda. It’s the next on the page. I’ve worked hard with chocolate, but the best I can do with happiness is a rather late, slow ‘Sure’ with the emphasis on the unspoken ‘un’ part of the word, and on the pause before it.
She wasn’t expecting that. I’ve played the games I should so far and dealt creatively with questions that have called for it. She’s surprised, I can tell, even though she’s trying to hide it. I try to force a smile, as if the pause was only me dreaming about my own list, the long list of things that make me happy.
‘Is that any kind of question to ask a comedian?’ It comes out of me in an almost on-stage voice, the sound of mock confrontation. ‘Aren’t we all tapping into some deep seam of sadness?’
‘Very eloquent,’ she says, acknowledging the performance, but with a smile as though the issue’s disappearing, not an issue after all.
‘Or, alternatively, a bit of a cliché.’
‘But nicely put, nonetheless,’ she says, tapping the end of her pen on her notepad, turning it end over end. ‘Your work seems very much about the everyday – about things you’ve done or noticed – rather than some deep seam of sadness. Even though some of the stories now are about TV or international travel, they’re also about regular insecurities and have an everyday feel to them, if you get what I mean.’
‘Yeah, yeah, they’re about normal embarrassment even if it’s in uncommon places, little rituals gone wrong. Small things.’ We’re back on track, or back on some kind of track at least. ‘And I don’t really know why, to be honest. That’s just what found its way in there and people started laughing.’
‘Early on it was more bitter and twisted,’ she says with a half smile. ‘I get the impression you’ve refined it, in a way. You pick up on different things now, and some of that stuff’s not as prominent.’
‘I lead a different life now. Maybe that’s it. Alice, I was just a fool who once had a drink too many and got up at an open mike since it seemed like an invitation to slag off the last half-dozen shitty men I’d bumped into. And I have to say it felt pretty good. Quite cathartic. Sadly, in my mind I would probably have categorised that as very much about the everyday back then.’
‘Really? Give me an example. Some cruddy everyday guy story from back then. Something that really happened.’
‘Something that really happened? That sounds quite unwise. But what the hell. It’s a long time ago. I did honestly go out with one guy who had a birthday when we’d been together four weeks, and I wasn’t too sure how it was going and I didn’t know what to get him. I didn’t want to send the wrong signal. So I asked him for suggestions and he said that things were a bit tight for him at the time and, if it was all the same to me, he’d prefer the cash. And how did fifty bucks sound? But he was a shocker and I should have known it all along. Denial had been the glue in that relationship for at least three-and-a-half of the four weeks. He pissed in the shower too. Some men think anything’s a toilet. But there was always other stuff in the act as well, except for that first night maybe. Soon enough I had something reasonably coherent together, and off it went from there. And I’m lucky it did. The coffee-shop thing never worked for me, no matter how hard I tried. And I did try, with a lack of success that could verge on the spectacular on a bad day. I make shithouse lattes, and that was the least of my worries. I needed the comedy to work, for my own sanity.’
She’s right though. Whatever I might say about having other material, I gave the bitter-and-twisted chick stuff a good run when I started, and Felicity was too polite to point it out to me, back at the hotel. I stood up at that first open mike and I mouthed off, and I’m sure I’d had more than one drink too many that night. The problem wasn’t always with the shitty men, of course.
‘You were born in Northern Ireland,’ Alice says, the end of her pen now touching the bottom question on the page, ‘but you came to Australia with your family when you were young. What made your family move to Australia? Do you remember anything from before you came here?’
‘Yeah. I was eight when we left, nearly nine.’ That’s the statistic, a standard stat and I’m used to saying it. I expected we’d go somewhere with my ‘shithouse lattes’ remark but we didn’t. I realise, too late, that the stat alone isn’t much of an answer. ‘I shouldn’t be having this beer. It’s giving me pauses.’
I’ve got an answer for your question, I want to tell her, and it runs about six lines. Usually it comes right out without thinking, but not today. And it’s no more the whole truth than the rest of my answers, but it is the truth and it does the job, and lets us knock the topic off in one go, every time.
It’ll be there tomorrow, automatic as ever. Why couldn’t we be talking tomorrow?
I had latte anecdotes, bad coffee shop experiences to talk about, but she missed her cue.
Ballystewart — 1972
I WAS EIGHT when we left, nearly nine, and anyone who asks if I remember anything didn’t change countries at that age. Eight years is a lot of seasons, a lot of school, real friendships left behind, TV, music, rain, snow, sometimes sunshine, blackberries, barley harvests, plenty. Wet dogs and the wind off the sea, the slippery bladders of dark weed on rocks, wheel ruts in lanes, foxes, plenty.
And airports – Belfast, Heathrow, Teheran, Karachi, Singapore, Darwin, Melbourne, Brisbane. Days of that, with two dawns at least, Teheran and Melbourne. One with the sun breaking over purple hills and fans on stands marking rickety time in the airport waiting area, the other cold and clear over flat country as we wandered around the terminal, smacked with jet lag, waiting for that final connecting flight.
In Brisbane we were met by a man from my father’s company. He had his hair slicked back and a box of chocolates and fat cufflinks. The chocolates had no list of what was what, and I’d always had a clear preference for soft centres. It left me with the feeling that this country mightn’t be as easy as I’d been promised.
But that’s the end of the journey, the end of my time in the other country, not the start.
I laid my earliest memories down in my first summer when the laburnum tree in our garden was in bloom and I was in my pram under it. I was wrapped up well and looking up at the bright yellow flowers, then on my side, nose against a seam in the plastic, feeling the pattern in the plastic, rough on my cheek. And the wind whipped up as it often did and flowers fell down onto me, dropping from the tree and landing in my pram. And that was confusing, exciting, strange, another new thing in the world to come to grips with. Along with birds – gulls flying in from the sea – bees out pollinating, the sound of my father’s car arriving at the front of the house, wheels turning on gravel.
This is all still real, every bit of it, somewhere back and deep in my head. Just as real as everything that followed it.
We had whitewashed walls, and I’d get in trouble for picking at them, for picking at the bubbles in the whitewash and their flaky broken edges.
&nbs
p; We lived four doors down from the local shop, and the man who ran it was huge and bald and always told my mother it was lovely to see her, a real pleasure.
My mother made her own skirts and took time with her hair so that she’d get it just right, and she was the woman in the village who looked most like Jackie Onassis. That’s what someone’s mother said once, and I remembered it, and it was true. Admittedly none of the others looked anything like Jackie Onassis so she had a head start, but she also had magazines that came with the right patterns and a sewing machine with all the features you could hope for.
She was a teacher, but not at my school, and I’d seen no other teachers who dressed quite like her. I never knew if that was a good thing or not, but she stood out in a shop where half the people had come in from farms, still with their boots on. She’d be there in shoes with real heels, and big round sunglasses and a pastel knee-length skirt with matching jacket.
There’s a photo of me in those sunglasses and a pair of her shoes, and I’m wearing the dress that became known as my ‘party dress’. It was cream and covered with dozens of red cherries, most of them in pairs. My mother made it too, and it was my favourite thing in the world when I was six. I would have worn it every minute of the summer in 1970, if she had let me. By 1971 it didn’t fit and I’d moved on. She made me clothes that year too, I think, but I don’t remember them.
By then when I went to parties I was content to look like everyone else there, and not like the different one with the special dress. If there was a special dress that year it was worn by a girl called Christine, who I never much liked, and it was made of royal blue velvet and had long sleeves. She was, as my mother said, ‘a girl who was far too fond of herself’, and we lived in a place that didn’t suit attitudes like that.
The village wasn’t much more than one street, two rows of houses roughly paralleling the shoreline, a place where cars might slow down a little but not stop. There were farms almost all around, though at one end the last few houses backed onto the woods.
