The Thompson Gunner

by Nick Earls

  ‘You’re looking down the barrel of a whitewash, Tyson,’ the male host says. ‘The blokes are relying on you. Come on, it’s a sport question. Come on, Tyson, you’ve got to know more about this one than Meg.’

  That gets to me more than it usually would, and I hit him with a ‘Yeah, Tyson, who’s the girl now?’

  In the studio, the breakfast hosts – both male and female – cheer, and I want this all to be over. Tyson is stuck in his parents’ kitchen staring blankly at the birds in the back garden, his mouth gone dry, the phone cord coiled in his fingers.

  So I give the answer, it’s three–nil to the ladies, and Tyson, the pressure all gone, thanks me as if he means it and says it was cool, the way I laid it on him.

  At the gym, I start with weights. I bench press more than usual, pumping away my stupid ‘who’s the girl now?’ line. In my brain there was irony all over it, in life I suspect there was none. I should know better.

  My hand hurts again, in the same place as on the plane, on the back in a muscle near the base of my thumb. My gym instructor in Brisbane often tells me not to overdo it. I suspect that’s what he’d tell me now if he were here.

  So I pick up my towel and I go up the stairs to the pool.

  I get about eight laps done before Murray, Elli and life sweep back into my head and won’t easily be put away.

  I stop for breath and tip water out of my goggles. I push off again and concentrate on technique, on long freestyle strokes and making all of them count. My hands look pale when they hit the water, crashing through the mirror of the surface and pulling bubbles down with them.

  Where did we go wrong, Murray and me? We paid good money for the answer to that question. We bought ourselves quite a few answers in the end, but it was the end by then and you need answers earlier than that, while you’re still prepared to work.

  I think I was still prepared to work. And that could be, might be, am still prepared to work, but it’s no good thinking that way.

  We spent too much time apart due to our jobs, mine more than his. In hindsight, it’s a factor that’s important and uncomplicated, and on it went from there. Too much time apart, Murray not understanding why I couldn’t say No more often, Murray telling me he couldn’t say No since he’s not in charge of his life the way I’m in charge of mine. He works for a big company. He always has. He doesn’t understand anything else, he doesn’t understand jobs you invent as you go along, and put together the best way you can. Not that he didn’t listen, not that he didn’t try.

  We both tried, fruitlessly, and it tore us apart. But quietly, like a seam coming undone or something unravelling. There was nothing ugly about it. It stopped working. We stopped having something to work with. It stopped, from Murray’s point of view, being worth the grief. From my point of view it still was. Is.

  He’s in Asia now with work. Shanghai, I think. Elli’s with her mother, where she usually is. Making the usual amount of trouble, I hope.

  I’m used to him emailing me every day when he’s away with work, emailing or calling. That was part of our plan. Every day in some way we would be in touch, and that’s how we would beat geography. But we haven’t, and it’s clear to me every time I check my email or arrive at a new hotel and there are no messages waiting.

  We were together seven years, and I don’t know what I’m going back to in Brisbane if I’m not going back to that.

  Months ago, I talked Elliott King into bringing the other TV people to Brisbane for a look around. It was an earlier stage of the show’s development then, and I took them to potential locations, specific and generic, and we visited the studios at the Gold Coast. I worked as hard as anyone could to get myself a steady job close to home. But I still have no power to decide where the show will be made, if it will be made, and there are still no guarantees. Sometimes I work for a big company too, and I don’t sign the cheques. And my plan – that part of it – is holding together so far, but it’s taken too long.

  Tumble turns work better when you think about them less. When you leave it for your leading arm to show you the way, just like Julie said. And the arm goes, and you go after it and you push away from the wall with your feet. The next lap begins, a rhythm develops.

  Rob Castle had messy hair and a denim jacket and an acoustic guitar. He looked a little like John Corbett from Northern Exposure and Sex and the City, and those guys are always sensitive, right? And he seemed a little like Woody Guthrie to me, and those guys are always out pursuing noble sentiments. The image I have of Woody Guthrie, right or wrong, comes from one photo – the photo of him on a street somewhere, his back to the camera, I think, a guitar over his shoulder and the words ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ written on it.

  So in Calgary I spilled the beans, and had my first conversation outside our counselling sessions about my break-up with Murray, there with a sensitive singer/songwriter on a windswept mall thousands of miles from home, east of the Rockies in the Houston of the north.

  That’s enough now, enough laps.

  My muscles feel good, having worked. I’m sure I have raccoon eyes from the goggles, but I don’t think I have a photo shoot till this afternoon. It’s very quiet up here around the pool when there’s no one else, as close to silent as you could want. The air is warming up, and I wonder if it’s a lump that I can feel in the cool shrivelled skin of the back of my right hand, or if I’m imagining it. It’s sore when I press it. I think it’s a lump.

  I get as dry as I need to and go down the stairs, past the muscle shots on the wall and the ‘Twelve Things You Should Know About Step’ poster.

  Back in my room at the hotel there’s a message from Felicity, telling me how great I was on ‘Battle of the Sexes’, and that she’ll see me in the foyer at nine-twenty.

  I shower and go to work with my eye cream and a lot of moisturiser, and my skin feels better right away. My hand’s okay now, too.

  I’m listening to CNN with the bathroom door open. There’s a story to do with Northern Ireland, but I don’t catch the details. An American, who is clearly pro-republican, is accusing the other side of sabotaging the peace process. It’s never pointed out to him that he’s referring to the other side of a complicated conflict an ocean away from where he’s sitting. He says, ‘I’m Irish and proud of it, and that’s why I’m saying these things.’ And he says it in a Boston accent and, when pushed about the money his group has raised, he insists that it gives comfort to families, and that anyone who says otherwise – anyone who says that one cent of it has been spent on guns – is an enemy of the peace process. ‘That’s just more sabotage,’ he says forcefully, ‘like I said.’

  What chance do people have of a balanced view when this is put forward as a piece of the story, and the story is put together by media in countries that can’t know? What chance do they have when there’s no balanced view anywhere? The whole situation is driven by a lack of balance, its instability maintained by agendas that go back generations. And simple lines can be drawn an ocean away, and funds raised and spent for a mixture of purposes, and people can be left feeling good about a contribution they’re making to something that, on the ground, is never that simple. Never as decent as they’d like to think, whichever side they’re on.

  You can’t back a side in these conflicts. You can’t know what it’s like from a distance. You can’t know who’s right, if anyone’s right, but that stops being the issue early on anyway. Whatever you stand for, wherever you are, you shouldn’t get to be called a freedom fighter if you’re breaking into people’s houses at night and shooting them because they don’t agree with you.

  From an early age, my parents always told me that you can do better than pick sides. They didn’t pick sides. They got on with life, made that kind of contribution, and it now seems like a noble one to me. They believed that things would improve if there were more people like them, people whose way of dealing with the world was governed by an even-handed decency. They said everyone was entitled to their own views, and to speak
them, but that most differences between people were inconsequential, or at least not enough to justify intolerance and violence.

  They’re retired now, and my mother runs a group in their area that links refugees with health care and the services they need. It’s not political, she says. There’s a need, and she’s responding to it.

  ‘Do you know what halal actually means in practice?’ she said to me when we last spoke. ‘It’s a lot more complicated than you’d expect.’

  ‘What made your family move from Northern Ireland?’ the journalist from the West Australian says, glancing at his notes. He’s in his late fifties, with no-nonsense steely-grey hair and pages of background info printed from websites.

  Felicity has us sitting down the back of a King Street cafe that’s wood from top to bottom and has signs of an earlier, possibly industrial, life. It’s stylish and busy, and the coffee is very good. I’ve told her we should only do coffee-shop interviews in places that can actually make coffee. She’s outside at the moment. She’s taken a call and is pacing in the street with the phone to her right ear and a finger in her left.

  ‘There were a few reasons, really,’ I tell the journalist, having allowed a pause so as not to make the answer seem automatic. ‘My father got a job at the Port of Brisbane – a better version of the job he’d been doing – my mother was a teacher, so that was pretty transferable, and 1972 seemed like a good time to take your eight-year-old and leave Northern Ireland for somewhere like Brisbane. So it was a combination of factors, probably. And a good decision, a good decision they made.’

  That’s the answer. Almost every time it’s the whole answer. It’s a small question in these interviews, it gets taken no further and the answer usually doesn’t appear in the article. The article, if it mentions where I was born, usually says nothing more than ‘moved from Northern Ireland to Brisbane at the age of eight’, though sometimes it says nine. I’ve read other ages, too.

  ‘Just a couple more details,’ he says, in a business-like way. ‘You and your partner – are you married or de facto? If you don’t mind me asking.’

  ‘No, no, it’s fine. We live together.’

  ‘And for about how long now?’ Just the facts, that’s all he’s looking for.

  ‘Seven years.’

  ‘And it was Murray, wasn’t it?’ he says, already not really listening, on the brink of packing up. All I have to do is nod. He turns the tape recorder off. ‘We’ve got some good stuff there. Plenty for eleven hundred words. It’ll be a good profile piece.’

  He looks at his watch and tells me he’s got six hours. The Saturday magazine section has a five p.m. Thursday deadline. ‘Easy,’ he says, and he stops to confirm with Felicity on the way out that the photo shoot is still in the itinerary for three o’clock.

  We walk down King Street back towards Rydges, and he leaves in the other direction. Felicity has her phone in one hand and a bag over the other shoulder, a canvas courier bag today, more like something a student would carry than the one she’s had with her so far. She power-dressed to meet me the night before last, I realise, and I’m glad the pressure to do that seems to have passed.

  ‘Good interview, great latte,’ I tell her when she asks me how it went. ‘My exacting standards are being well met. Good gym, very good dentist . . .’

  In the cab on the way to the next interview, I admit that there was more to the dentist than I’ve mentioned so far, more than good service, a movie and a spectacular new tooth.

  ‘I had this incident . . .’ That’s how I begin it. ‘One of those collisions between life and art, that’s how I’m seeing it now.’

  She laughs when I tell her what happened. She starts laughing early, when all I’ve done in the story is take a wrong turn and end up stuck in the stairwell. By the time I’m outside trying to explain myself in my dental-dam voice, she’s laughing through her hands, her eyes wide, seeing the funny side and the survivable horror.

  ‘But don’t think I’ll make a habit of it,’ I tell her. ‘For the rest of the week you’ll see nothing from me but impeccable self-control. I’m only telling you now because you never know where people’s photos might end up. I don’t want you thinking I’m out drumming up my own publicity by running round the mall with a blue rubber dental dam shoved in my mouth.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t have thought that,’ she says. ‘You told me you’re more about subtlety now, and that wouldn’t be very subtle, would it?’

  At the ABC I’m on after the two o’clock news.

  ‘We’ve met before,’ Prue, the presenter, says as she reaches out to shake my hand. She’s good. I remember her. ‘You’ve been busy since you were in last time. Plenty to talk about,’ she says, going back to her side of the desk and picking up her headphones. ‘They must be missing you at home. It looks like you’ve been away for a while on this trip.’ She clicks two buttons, pushes something I can’t see. ‘There’s just under two minutes of news left before we’re on. I noticed there’s quite a few Irish comedians on the program. Can we talk about that, since you’re from there originally? Along the lines of whether or not there’s something about Ireland that inspires this kind of view of life? Comedy? Storytelling? That kind of thing?’

  Ballystewart — 1972

  IT SOUNDS LIKE an Irish story.

  I was born and lived in the village of Ballystewart in the last of a short row of two-storey terrace houses. Like all the others, it was whitewashed. It had a green door, bottle green and glossy and I can only remember it freshly painted, though I should assume it wasn’t always. I was there almost nine years, and can remember most of them.

  We were within spitting distance of the Irish Sea, my mother would tell people later and, from my bedroom window with the right wind, it’s possible that we actually were. Within spitting distance of the Irish Sea, a stone’s throw from Millisle and Donaghadee, on the same stretch of coastline as Ballywalter and Ballyhalbert. All of these are names that aren’t much known to the outside world, at least not the parts of it where I’ve been.

  From my window I looked out to the grey sea in the distance, and to our garden with its wide flowering laburnum, its two apple trees, some rose bushes that never did well, a trellis of sweet peas and a back lane that curved behind the hedge, then curved again and led to the Donaghadee road. There were two hives in which someone had once kept bees, but they weren’t used in our time.

  We’d go to Donaghadee to do the banking. I remember my mother queueing at the tellers but I was never high enough to see over the counter, so my strongest memory is of the lifeboat over near the far wall. It was a model, but a huge one, and there was a collection box which always had money in it. My mother often added some.

  When I could read enough I read the signs that went with it, about a lifeboat that went down in a storm with lives lost. My mother helped me with the harder words. I read each sign aloud to the end, my mother sounding out the longer words with me and explaining any I didn’t know. When we’d finished I knew the whole story, and the model boat couldn’t be the same again. Before then, it was like a great toy gone astray in the bank and, if you put money in, maybe they’d get more of them.

  All of a sudden it was about people gone down in a lifeboat, and I’d thought lifeboats couldn’t sink. If lifeboats could sink, what could save you? So every sea shanty about drowning might be true, and the sea was right there. The harbour was just across the road, with the lifeboats, not as safe as I’d thought. I wondered why that had never been explained to me, and I read every sign I could from then on.

  My mother wouldn’t remember it that way, I’m sure she wouldn’t. That would apply to a lot of things.

  I know it’s the case because of what’s been said since, and because it’s how memory goes, how it must go as time passes. We’d remember it differently because we saw it with different eyes, but also because all things remembered are to some degree imagined. Recollection has an irresistible urge to tell a story and is more likely to fill gaps than to leave them,
if you work at it.

  But I can’t be persuaded that I didn’t see the things I saw, and that I didn’t do the things I did. And no one would call me on the bubbles in the whitewash or how the sky looked from my window, though they’d say I was wrong in some areas. They’d say I was eight and I wouldn’t know, not really.

  The politics, for instance. My parents would say my memories were wrong, but they aren’t. They’re right, they’re sharp. My story is not their story, but it’s not less real just because I was eight.

  At eight you can be just old enough to know quite a lot and to keep it in your head. You have your own life then, or at least you’re starting to. You have some sense of yourself, some sense of your own of the world you’re in, and you learn that your parents’ protection is not absolute. You learn that there are limits to what they know, and what they can control. Despite them, people are killing and being killed. There are bad people out there, going out with bombs and guns and killing on their minds, and they can be very hard to stop. You learn that because it happens and it makes the news.

  They can come to your door in the night, and sometimes they don’t even knock.

  My mother and I read the lifeboat signs, and then we went for ice-cream. It was a clear day in early summer with a flat sea. She held my hand when we walked near the harbour, but we didn’t talk about what the lifeboat signs had said. My father worked at a harbour, though not that one. I was quite afraid, but I didn’t let my mother know it. Every night, the lighthouse beam swung over our house, hoping to keep boats from the rocks.

  My parents had a context for what happened in Northern Ireland when I was young. They were in their thirties when I was born, and both of them over forty by 1972. They had lived both young and adult lives already, and every new development could be tested against what they already knew.

  I had only the context I was putting together at the time. That was my entire frame of reference. On one day in early 1972, I walked in the woods with my father, I read Enid Blyton, I stood still while my mother held the pinned-together pieces of a dress against me and said I’d grow into it, and I watched Bloody Sunday on the evening news. If that’s life no one can change it, and no one can tell you that it’s not how life is. At eight, if you’ve got all those things in your day, then that’s how it is.