Walking on Trampolines

by Frances Whiting

On any other day I might have stopped him, snatched the cassette from its box, but on this day I let it go, not knowing how many other ones he had left to annoy the hell out of me.

  ‘I’m glad you came,’ I told him as he walked me to the door. ‘Though I think my mother has a little crush on you.’

  ‘Well, she’s a woman, isn’t she?’ he replied, and I knew then how we were to play it, like nothing had been said at all.

  ‘See you at work,’ he said, turning back to the car.

  *

  And for the next few weeks everything did go back to normal, at least on the surface, or normal if it was on cocaine. Duncan’s illness didn’t slow him down at all; instead it seemed to me he was living his whole life on fast forward, and with the volume turned up. If he was going, he was going kicking and screaming, caressing and cajoling his listeners from behind the microphone, and getting the best ratings of his career.

  In the first warm days of the summer of 1990, no-one could touch Duncan McAllister, at least four points ahead of his nearest rivals, and no-one but me knew it was dying that had made him fearless.

  He told the prime minister on-air to ‘Grow some, sir’, he started a petition to deport the entire South African cricket team on account of their ‘appalling accents’, and in what he said was the proudest moment of his entire life, was named Who magazine’s Sexiest Man of the Year. He was dressed on the cover as a boxer – hooded gown, red gloves, swinging like Frank Sinatra on the ropes as a platinum microphone dangled from the ceiling, The Champ emblazoned on his satin boxers.

  ‘God, I am sexy, aren’t I,’ he said every time he looked at it. ‘How you manage to work in such close proximity to me and not just erupt, I’ll never know, Lulu – you must have loins of titanium.’

  But as weeks turned into months, his voice started to lose its rich honeyed timbre, growing hoarser, his breath more laboured, his skin sometimes turning, I thought, an alarming grey beneath its stubble.

  He asked for, and received, a three-day working week, belligerently telling management he wanted more time to go fishing, and they, desperate to keep him, had agreed. They also agreed I could reduce my days at the station – Duncan needed me, he told them, ‘to bait his hooks’, when in reality I sat outside the oncologist, Dr Patrick Stephenson’s door while Duncan underwent radiation therapy.

  Surgery had been ruled out – Duncan didn’t like the odds – so instead we took a ridiculously complicated route, and a different one every time, to Patrick’s rooms. We always went when the receptionist was on lunch, or on an errand, or wherever it was she went when she was pretending she didn’t know Duncan McAllister was her boss’s patient.

  She must have known, of course, lots of people must have, especially as time went on and Duncan’s voice grew hoarser, but somehow we managed to escape detection for quite a while before the whispers grew into shouts.

  After the radiation treatment, Duncan’s throat swelled and scratched, his energy levels plummeted and we needed every one of the four days between his shifts to get him ready for the next round.

  But somehow he managed to pull it all together for the three hours that made up his show, and only if you listened carefully did you hear the cracks in his voice.

  He didn’t make it to my twenty-fifth birthday dinner, instead thoughtfully sending a male stripper dressed as a courier to the quiet, BYO restaurant where Ben, Simone and Stella had taken me.

  ‘Special delivery for Tallulah de Longland from Duncan McAllister,’ the stripper called, bursting through the restaurant’s front doors and startling the wait staff.

  ‘Over here!’ Simone yelled, pointing to me, while Stella blushed and Ben held my hand under the table.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he whispered, then added, ‘how bad can it be?’ just as my personal delivery boy stood in front of me, whipped off his shirt, pointed to his chest and said, ‘Sign here please.’ Then he pressed play on his CD player and began dancing to ‘It’s Raining Men’, glancing at Ben through the entire performance while Ben and Simone screamed with laughter and Stella stared, fixated, at his chest.

  I was nursing a low-grade hangover at the studio next day when Duncan walked in, grinning.

  ‘How was your birthday?’ he smiled. ‘Did you like your special package?’

  ‘Oh, you mean the gay male stripper you sent me?’ I asked. ‘He was great, I think he and Ben will be very happy together.’

  ‘What? That’s not what I ordered – oh, never mind, we have far more important things to discuss. Such as this,’ he said, flourishing a white envelope in his hand. ‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked, holding it so close to my face I could have opened it with my teeth.

  ‘A birthday card?’ I asked.

  He shook his head.

  ‘A summons?’

  ‘Very amusing, Lulu, no, this, my darling heart, is your ticket to Closureville.’

  ‘Closureville?’

  ‘Yes, you’ve never been there before, that’s why you may not have heard of it, but it’s by way of Time to Move On and Stop Being Such a Drama Queen Street.’

  He opened the envelope, put the white card from inside its folds on my desk, walked to the door of my office and added: ‘Might see you there if you can man up for it.’

  He shut the door and I looked down at the thick, white card on my desk.

  Enchanted, it said, an exhibition by Frank Andrews. And there, filling the edges of the card, were two grey pencilled little girls, heads close together, features blurred, expressions unseen but with their arms around each other, forternity.

  *

  I had no intention of going, not unless Duncan came up with some story about how it was his dying wish that I should do so – and I wouldn’t have put it past him – but in the end it was Harry who changed my mind.

  He and Frank had become friends after Frank had moved back to the River House from Christa’s.

  Annie had moved out – the fault lines between them caused by her affair with Fergus too deep to mend, and Annabelle was long gone, leaving Frank moving among his wife’s and daughter’s shadows in its cluttered rooms.

  How silent that house must have seemed as he walked its floors, and how loud his steps must have sounded without the jingling of Annie’s bangles or the giggles from Annabelle’s bedroom, falling like quavers down the staircase.

  He listened to the radio out in the studio, where he drank instant coffee made with hot water straight from the tap and painted for hours, only venturing out for supplies, and it was on one such trip he’d met Harry.

  They’d run into each other in a hardware store soon after I’d left for the city; Harry had been there to pick up some stormwater pipes and Frank some methylated spirits – ‘Don’t worry, mate, it’s not for me,’ he’d said to Harry at the counter – and the two men had laughed their way into a friendship.

  After their chance meeting, Harry and Frank had begun meeting up once a week in the Uxbridge Arms – Harry for a beer, Frank for the one glass of red wine he now allowed himself a week – and found they fitted each other ‘like a pair of old overcoats’, Harry said.

  After they’d been meeting for a few weeks, he’d rung to tell me and ask if I minded.

  ‘We don’t talk about you and Josh and Annabelle, Lulu,’ he’d said, ‘that’s all past now, but I wanted to check with you if you had any worries with it.’

  ‘No, Harry,’ I’d said, and I meant it.

  Harry had spent so much time plumbing the depths of excellence and looking after all of us, he’d never been the sort of man to go for a knock-off drink with the other tradies after work.

  So I was pleased he and Frank had found each other among the hand drills and glue guns, although sometimes I wondered what the barmaids at the Uxbridge Arms made of them – Harry in his King Gees and work boots, Frank in his paint-splattered singlet and fisherman’s cap.

&nbs
p; I’d asked Harry once what they talked about, and he’d said sometimes they didn’t say much at all, just sat there, ‘letting the day settle’. Other times, he said, they spoke about Frank’s painting. Once Frank had told him, ‘I can’t get the black right.’ Harry had said, ‘What do you mean you can’t get the black right? Black’s black, isn’t it?’, and Frank had answered, ‘No, mate, there’s all kinds of blackness.’ And Harry, thinking of Rose, had understood.

  Harry had rung a few days after Duncan had showed me the ‘Enchanted’ invitation, and asked if I would go with him.

  He wanted to go, he said, to be there for Frank, and because it was at Bloom, the local gallery, it meant he wouldn’t have to leave Rose too long by herself. Even though Rose had been doing well, we never really knew when her depression would make its appearance from behind a door somewhere, announcing its arrival in a shapeless beige dress and marathon bouts of baking. It would just begin, and sometime later it would end, and in between Harry hovered.

  This time, although Rose was in the middle of a long stretch of good days, she wasn’t well enough to walk into a room full of people; instead, she said, she would send along a teacake.

  ‘Don’t make me walk in carrying a cake tin by myself, Lulu,’ Harry smiled.

  ‘I don’t know, Harry – who’s going?’

  ‘Everyone,’ he’d answered, ‘the whole kit and caboodle.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I’d repeated. ‘I’m just not ready, I don’t think.’

  ‘We never are, love,’ he’d replied, ‘but it’s probably time.’

  *

  The day Harry invited me, I went home and when Ben and I were having dinner, I told him about the exhibition.

  ‘How do you feel about that, Lulu?’ he asked.

  He knew about Josh and Annabelle – when we first started seeing each other, we’d swapped edited versions of our previous relationships, Ben’s largely consisting of girls his sisters had manoeuvred in front of him.

  ‘No-one really serious,’ he’d told me, ‘before you.’

  I had told him that since Josh and Annabelle, I’d had a few casual relationships also, which was, of course, not strictly true, but how do you tell someone you’ve been frozen in time since high school? Even to me it sounded ridiculous.

  I poured us both a glass of wine. ‘I feel fine about it, actually,’ I told him. ‘A bit nervous, sort of like going to a school reunion, I guess.’

  Ben smiled at me. ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said, ‘and I’ll be there, and your dad, and Rose’s teacake.’

  I smiled back. ‘Which is the only reason you’re going,’ I teased.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ he said, surprising me by coming around to my side of the table and kissing my neck. ‘I have to protect my woman.’

  That night when Ben went for his run, I stood in front of our full-length mirror practising being normal.

  No, not normal, nonchalant.

  ‘Oh, hi Annabelle, hi Josh.’

  No.

  ‘Hi Josh, hi Annabelle.’

  ‘Hey there, you two!’

  Hey there, you two?

  What the hell was wrong with me?

  ‘Annabelle, Josh, how lovely to see you.’

  Better.

  ‘It’s been so long, hasn’t it? I keep up with your travels – Ben and I subscribe to Gourmet Traveller, actually.’

  Ben and I subscribe to Gourmet Traveller?

  Clearly, I needed professional help.

  *

  Duncan was sitting at his desk in the studio, a pile of newspapers fanned out in front of him.

  ‘I’m going,’ I told him, not needing to explain where. ‘Harry’s going as well, and he needs me to go with him. And Ben’s coming too.’

  Duncan looked up over his reading glasses and smiled. ‘And I’ll be there as well, so you’ll have a whole battalion of blokes there to protect you from the evil ones, a veritable army. Perhaps we should wear great knobs of garlic around our necks . . .’

  ‘Don’t, Duncan,’ I said, ‘I’m actually a bit nervous.’

  He nodded, waiting.

  ‘The thing is, I don’t know what I’m going to say when I see them . . . I have nothing to say. They’ve spent the last eight years travelling the length and breadth of the planet, winning bloody awards and seeing the world, and I’ve been stuck here.’

  ‘With me.’

  ‘Oh Duncan, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.’

  ‘I know you didn’t, Tallulah, but the truth is you have rather been stuck with me of late, and Barney, and all my children and my ex-wives. Then, of course, there’s your father, your mother, your friends and Ben, all of whom, my dear, would be utterly lost without you.’

  ‘Duncan . . .’

  ‘Don’t stop me, I’m on a roll. Also, I am, in case you have forgotten, dying, and you can’t interrupt the terminally ill.’ He smiled his watery smile at me. ‘Now, as I was saying, you’ve been stuck here quietly going about your business, which is, of course, to keep us all sane and out of prison, fussing over me, dislodging God knows what from Barney’s throat, babysitting Stella’s children, staying at Simone’s when one of her leso girlfriends dumps her, sorting out your father’s business, ironing your mother’s mad bloody dresses, attempting to make Ben more vigorous . . .’

  I smiled back at him.

  ‘So who cares? Who cares where Annabelle and Josh have been, climbing the Andes or sailing the Amalfi Coast on some bloody boat. Anyone can get on a boat, Lulu, you just buy a ticket. There’re thousands of us out there flailing about in the ocean, but there’s not that many of you. You’re the one standing on the shore and shining the light, guiding us all in safely.’ He picked up a newspaper and pretended to read it. ‘So fuck ’em,’ he said.

  ‘Enchanted’ had sent a frisson through art circles: the return of Frank Andrews with a major exhibition after an almost seven-year hiatus had the critics and collectors welcoming him back into the fold with open arms and, it was rumoured, deep pockets.

  Within days of the white envelopes arriving in various mailboxes across the city, people were saying that ‘Enchanted’ – thirty-six paintings and line drawings – was Frank’s best work to date.

  They were also asking whether Annie would have the hide to turn up.

  Fergus had discarded her long ago, Frank had not taken her back, and Christa, it was said, remained furious with her for driving a wedge between her sons.

  Still, I thought Annie would show up, because I was fairly sure the years wouldn’t have changed one of the things I had admired about her.

  ‘I don’t give a stuff what people think about me, Tallulah,’ I heard her voice echoing from one afternoon at the River House, ‘and neither should you. No-one who ever truly matters does.’

  Frank had chosen to show ‘Enchanted’ not at one of the major city galleries, like Rafferty’s or Slater’s, but in our home town, at his friend Laura Metcalfe’s art space, Bloom.

  People moaned and grumbled – it was too far, what was Frank thinking, making them trek from the city on a Saturday? But they would all go, I knew, because it wasn’t just Frank’s pictures they wanted to look at.

  They were going to see the other show as well, the one starring Christa, Frank, Fergus, Annie, Josh and Annabelle – ‘I could sell extra tickets just for them,’ Laura Metcalfe had said to me a few days before the exhibition.

  With Duncan resting at Lingalonga, I’d headed home the week before the opening to check on Rose, and had run into Laura outside Bloom.

  I’d known Laura since I was a little girl – Harry had done all the plumbing at the gallery, and Sam and Mattie had gone to school with her son, Brett.

  ‘Tallulah,’ she smiled, ‘how are you, my love?’

  ‘Good thanks, Laura,’ I answered. ‘How are things with you?’

 
‘Mad,’ she said, and told me how her phone hadn’t stopped ringing since the invitations had gone out. ‘It’s crazy,’ she said, ‘usually I have to beg the local rag to run up to one of my openings, but everyone’s coming, all the papers, some TV stations, and they’re all asking the same questions: is Christa going to be there? Is Annie invited? Is Fergus? They’re all hoping for a fight, of course.’ She laughed. ‘You know – Fergus and Frank rolling around the footpath, Christa and Annie at each other’s throats, stabbing each other with their hatpins . . .’ Then she told me how grateful she was to Frank for giving her the exhibition, instead of Slater’s or Rafferty’s, adding they were mightily pissed off he hadn’t gone to them. ‘But that’s Frank for you, always there for an old friend,’ she said, walking into Bloom. ‘Of course, I’ve got no bloody idea where I’m going to put everybody.’

  *

  There’s a photo of Ben and me from that night, taken for some newspaper’s social pages – Rose cut out the clipping, and kept it in one of her albums.

  Ben is wearing a white shirt and olive tie, black trousers, his hair cropped close to his head in a number two buzz cut he’d just had, saying it was easier for travelling. It made him look much tougher than he really was, and with his arm wrapped around my waist, he looked faintly menacing, when all he was really doing, I see now, was trying to hold on.

  I’m standing beside him wearing a dark blue satin wrap dress Rose had made for me, a silk flower of some sort in my hair, and a fake smile stretched wide across my pink cheeks. I have smoky eyeliner on, and red lips, and my hair is down, out of its usual ponytail and falling in big, loose curls around my face and past my shoulders. I look nothing like the sort of girl you would leave standing by the river.

  ‘You look amazing,’ Ben had said that night at Harry and Rose’s, where we were staying.

  ‘Thanks, I don’t know why I’m doing this.’

  ‘I don’t know why either,’ he smiled, ‘but if we are doing it, let’s just get it over and done with.’

  We walked to the car where he reached across the seat for my hand.

  ‘You can do this, Lulu,’ he said. ‘You can do this with your eyes shut.’