by Stephen Orr
By now there was a queue of people waiting for the budgie to tell them how much weight they were going to lose, if a terminal aunt would leave them any money or if they’d be promoted. The woman said, ‘That should be enough.’ She produced a seed tray, half-filled with budgie food and half with folded notes. She opened a door on the cage and placed the tray inside. The hungry bird started picking at the seed, swallowing a few grains, before picking up a piece of paper. After he’d dropped it she slid a hand into the cage and retrieved it. Opening it, looking at me, smiling and saying, ‘Lucas knows.’
‘Lucas?’
‘He says, “Follow the way of truth, it leads to happiness”.’
‘What does he mean—God?’
‘Not necessarily. Truth.’
My son Liam was pulling on my sleeve. ‘Come on, Dad, you said we could do the three-legged race.’
A lot’s changed since then. If I were having my fortune told today I’d have to tell the budgie: name, Sam (not-so-‘Mad Dog’) Morgan; address, living alone in a one-bedroom flat in Salisbury Downs; employment, Four Squares Security; relationships, nine-year-old daughter and eleven-year-old son, eighteen months separated from wife of sixteen years. From Friday prawns and Corona to a constant diet of Don-the-Greek’s steak sandwiches with the lot (minus pineapple). From freshly ironed button-downs to synthetic polos doused in deodorant to make them wearable for the third day running. From teaching physics to guarding pageant floats on South Terrace. And all because of that budgie. Okay, it was slightly more complex than that, but I’m sure the budgie wouldn’t mind me laying a bit of guilt at his little Christ-like claws.
The story I’d like to tell took place last night, on the eve of the city’s annual Christmas pageant, six weeks out from the big day. As five other guards and I made sure no one tampered with the floats. Since there are so many floats, and since there’s not enough time on Saturday morning to drive them all over from the warehouse, they’re ferried over by a small army of drivers the night before. Parked in a line that concertinas two times before moving to the next stretch of road and doubling up again. This way about two hundred floats can be parked along a three-hundred-metre stretch of road.
And there they sit, through the night, waiting for their big moment. When thousands of Credit Union employees arrive on Saturday morning, pull on their fluorescent clown wigs and oversized novelty boots, and practise riding their knee-high bikes. For the marching bands to find their place between the floats, the fairies to start sprinkling glitter, the fiddlers to fiddle, the tellers-dressed-as-farmers to harness their motorised sheep, and for Father Christmas to gather his sack of toys (as all the kids think, Has he got enough for everyone?) and settle into his sleigh.
As jobs go, this is a good one. At least there’s something to look at. I’d just spent the last month standing outside the Klemzig branch of the National Bank. We’re told we can’t use our phones, listen to music or make conversation with customers. No, we’re there to work; to stand and look menacing. Yes, we can walk around (within a two-metre radius of the entrance), have a drink and even eat our lunch, but if we read anything (even a gas bill) we can face instant dismissal. We’re meant to have our eyes open and watch for trouble. This is the sort of job I warned my students they’d end up with if they didn’t study. Last week one of my old Year Twelves walked past, but I pretended I was looking for something, and turned away.
Guarding the pageant is a very important job. What if, for instance, some little hooligan came along with a screwdriver and punched holes in the floats’ tyres? There’d be no pageant. Hundreds of thousands of people would have to be told to stay home, but many would already be in the city, picnic rugs down, and imagine their anger, and how congested the trams and buses would be, and all of the crying children.
Our group of guards met at six o’clock outside the Green Dragon Hotel. Apparently, life hadn’t been any kinder to them than me. One guy had ironed his clothes and shaved (the ambitious type, he’d already told me he was applying to join the police force for the fifth time in seven years); one wore a too-small uniform, I think, to showcase his enormous muscle bulk (like he was some sort of stripper, and might rip the whole lot off at any time); the others had alcoholic eyes, a week’s growth, food on their shirts. Not really enough of a threat to stop anyone doing anything, except living, eating, talking, even being with them. I didn’t feel like I belonged. Had I fucked up my life that completely? Regardless, we were given our pistols and some curt instructions. ‘No one can come within three metres of the floats. They can look, they can take photos, but hands off, folks.’
I started my night beside the pirate float: a twelve-foot-high Bluebeard, his broom bristle mo fluttering in the breeze as birds sat and shat on his cap. Helped by a scrawny pirate using an old bottle as a telescope and a two-ton pig-man-cutthroat guarding a treasure chest full of coins. Finally, a navy officer in a boat attached to the float, rowing as fast as he could to get away from the pirates.
Cute. I knocked on Bluebeard’s boot. Hollow. The pageant could transform flesh into fantasy. I remembered sitting behind the blue line with Sarah and Liam two, maybe three, years before, watching this same float drive past. Remembered the smoke coming from Bluebeard’s ears and the pre-recorded growls and pirate-speak over an old PA. The clerks-as-pirates threatening onlookers with cardboard swords and hook-hands. And Liam, looking up and saying, ‘This is the best one yet.’ As he smiled so hard I thought his cheeks would pop. And then, perhaps, my eyes frosting over, and me wiping them, feigning hay fever.
As I wished the pageant would last forever.
But it didn’t, and doesn’t. I can also remember Avril staring at a mother (in a cotton twill asymmetric jacket) and father (with a half-ton Tiffany CT60 watch) who’d sat their kids in front of Sarah and Liam. She’d spoken up, as usual. ‘I believe our children had the front spot,’ as I said, ‘Don’t worry, they can share.’ But she wasn’t having any of that. ‘Typical eastern suburbs attitude.’
As the other mother said, ‘Pardon?’
‘You heard me. Today’s meant to be about the kids,’ (who by now had all moved to accommodate each other).
I paraded my stretch of South Terrace, passing Nellie the foam elephant, who would be accompanied by a group of teller-types bathed in fake tans to make themselves look Malaysian, or Thai, or something faintly North China Takeaway. Glaring blue, yellow and red velvet jackets, three-quarter pants and sandals. Bamboo canes to tap the diesel-driven beast on the rump.
Darkness settled across the grammar school on one side and the paddocks on the other. Yellow lights on Stobie poles blinked to life and it was officially night. A few families with excited kids strolled along the terrace, dads looking at me as if to say, What if you turned your back for a few minutes? Just after nine a group on a buck’s night emerged from the Green Dragon and one, a short, stocky kid with shaving cuts and a high voice, jumped the cordon and grabbed Nellie’s horsehair tail. ‘She won’t shit on me?’ he asked, as the others laughed.
I just shrugged, remembering my buck’s night, what seemed like a lifetime ago. I was so excited to be marrying Avril, to be leaving home and starting a new life. I wondered what the budgie would’ve told me back then. Don’t do it. Just don’t do it.
I strolled past floats that reminded me of other times, other places: the Seven Dwarfs, the Timber Cutters, the Anything Goes cruise ship and the red and green School Daze. Wood, fibreglass and paint provided flashes of fantasy, worlds beyond acceleration coefficients and broken line-trimmers, wildly fictional orthodontist bills and staff meetings that ran past six. Beyond Mike and Carol marriages and Neighbours communities. Ali Baba instead of algorithms. Tom Sawyer instead of tax returns.
Frank, a twenty-year Four Squares veteran, brought me a coffee and we sat on the Toyland float to rest. ‘Nice job?’ he asked, with his Godfather voice.
‘Different,’ I replied.
‘Someone said you’re a teacher.’
‘I was.�
�
‘So what are you doing here?’
‘I quit.’
‘Why?’
‘To annoy my wife.’
‘Serious?’
‘Sort of. There was more to it … she didn’t appreciate the sacrifices I was making.’ I stopped, realising I hardly knew him. He slapped me on the shoulder, slurped his coffee and wiped his mouth on his forearm. ‘Women are bitches,’ he said. ‘They get their claws in, you know what I mean?’
‘I know.’
‘You did the right thing.’ Then he stopped to think, looking into the sky and tilting his head. ‘Bet you miss the money?’
‘What’s to miss?’
‘Got another girl yet?’
‘I don’t want another girl.’
‘I got a cousin.’
‘I could imagine.’
‘If you just want sex.’
‘Thanks anyway.’
A few minutes later he set off to check the other guards, and I continued my stroll. It must have been after ten when a mother and father with a six-or seven-year-old daughter wandered past the Toyland float. The girl couldn’t believe her eyes: hundreds of presents, some of them as big as washing machines, piled up at the base of a five-metre high Christmas tree. She slipped under the cordon and climbed onto the float.
‘Get off,’ her mother called.
The girl ignored her. Crawled towards the pile of presents, grabbed one and discovered it was stuck on. Pulled at it, but it wouldn’t budge. Looked at her parents and scowled. Her father started laughing, but her mother kept repeating, ‘Get down, this instant.’
The girl looked like Sarah: mousy blonde hair, a button nose bisecting a pair of demonic eyes, strong piano hands and a will that couldn’t be tempered by reason. Sarah. Christmas morning. Ripping through presents like an angry tornado, examining plastic-wrapped dolls and games and exploding with joy, throwing herself at me with open arms and saying, ‘Thank you, Daddy.’ Between kisses, although it was generally Avril who’d bought the presents. If she found one of Liam’s presents she’d throw it across the carpet or just brush it aside or say, ‘Liam, that’s the basketball you asked for.’
Eventually the girl crawled back to the edge of the float and the father helped her down. She crossed her arms, stamped her feet and said, ‘They’re not real.’
‘What did you expect?’ the mother replied, turning and walking on.
I watched as the girl smiled knowingly at her father, taking him by the hand and lifting the yellow rope for him to walk under. She noticed me but just raised her eyebrows as if to say, So, what are you gonna do about it? I smiled and the father winked at me, and I wondered if Sarah was home asleep or reading or watching television. I felt, as I did thirty times a day, that I’d made the wrong decision by putting myself first, especially when it seemed like every other parent on the planet was doing the right thing.
But then I remembered a warm March afternoon, last year, walking in the front door, Avril on the phone. I put down my bag, smiled, waited until she was finished. Then, ‘Guess what?’
‘What?’
‘I quit.’
She smiled as she stirred something on the stove. ‘Quit what?’
‘Work.’
‘One day.’ She kept smiling.
‘No, today. I quit.’
Then it dawned on her. She turned off the stove, stepped towards me and said, ‘You didn’t?’
‘I did.’
Then the fireworks. ‘Why?’
‘Because I don’t enjoy it anymore.’
She asked about the mortgage, school fees and bills and I reminded her we had enough savings for a year or so.
‘While you do what?’ she asked.
‘Write this novel I’ve been planning for the last eight years.’
‘Are you stupid?’
‘And after that I’ll get another job. There’s plenty of work for physics teachers.’
‘But you didn’t even ask me.’
‘I did, for the last five years, and you always said, “One day, when the kids have finished school”.’ And I whispered, ‘I could be dead by then.’
‘We all could.’
‘That’s the thing, isn’t it? You couldn’t give a rat’s arse. As long as I’m earning …’
‘I supported you for years.’
‘So what?’ I waited. ‘We’ll make it work. I’ll get my book written and you—’
‘Ring the principal. Talk to him. It’s not too late.’
But I just smiled.
The beginning of the end. She kept pleading for another few days, and I kept ignoring her, locking myself in my study and reading about Daisy Bates for the Great Australian Novel. She tried a different approach—ignoring me back, talking to me through the kids and refusing to acknowledge my presence in the house. After two days of this I said, ‘Come on, grow up, it’s not such a big deal. Twelve months.’
‘You didn’t even ask me.’
‘I did.’
‘You only think of one person.’
‘Bullshit. I’ve spent years thinking of everyone else.’
‘You could’ve asked for leave.’
Everything I’d been thinking for the past few years crystallised—small compromises leading to bigger ones. The words of the budgie were sounding in my ear.
‘What do you think of me?’ I asked.
She didn’t reply, and I knew. I couldn’t remember when I’d ever loved her, or how, or for how long. She’d become a sort of assembly-line foreman, telling me how to put my life together, inspecting the finished product and putting a defective sticker on it. In a fit of rage and revelation I went to our bedroom, took a case from the robe and started packing. She followed me and stood staring, her arms crossed. ‘Nice performance.’
To be honest, I think I was mainly bluffing. ‘You think I won’t?’
‘Gonna tell your kids where you’re going?’
I decided. Twelve months. Daisy Bates would get written. I’d get to rediscover the ‘Mad Dog’ in Sam Morgan and she’d be brought back down to earth.
At least that’s how I remember it happening. Then there were the three nights in a motel, the flat, the lawyers and money taken out of my account. Four Squares. The National Bank. The Christmas pageant.
As Daisy Bates went unwritten.
I moved to the Barn Dance float. Red, blue and green planks of wood. The loft full of fresh hay, paddocks mined with nibbling sheep, hungry pigs, grunting. An area had been left for cowgirls to dance with milk pails. Lanterns. Wagon-wheels and a Hills Hoist with a thousand corks blowing in the doughnut-scented breeze. I could just hear the music and see the dresses flying in the air.
It was still, and mostly quiet, except for the hum of a distant air compressor. I piddled in a bed of red and white petunias and returned to sit on the Barn Dance float. Someone had painted a line of horses, nose-to-tail: simple two-tone ponies minus mouths and ears, their eyes a single dot of watery paint that had run, leaving them crying milk-white tears.
Liam was the artist in our household. I’d given him money to buy canvases and a set of oil paints and he’d painted aliens landing in our backyard, Jackson Pollock-inspired psychoscapes, portraits of Avril and Sarah and one of me filling a blackboard with nonsensical physics formulae.
I touched one of the horses’ white eyes and the paint flaked off.
‘What do you think of this one?’ Liam asked me, as he sat in the corner of the living room of my flat the previous Sunday.
‘What is it?’
‘The budgie, remember, at the fair?’
‘I remember.’ It was a Picasso budgie—fat, misshapen, its yellow body striped with pink and purple paint. The note in its beak had grown to the size of a large encyclopedia and I wondered if it was the budgie (or Liam) telling me that life is far more complex than a fortune cookie. I sat on the floor and asked, ‘What’s written on the note?’
‘I can’t remember.’
But I could—‘Follow the way of t
ruth, it leads to happiness’. Or this, sitting in a hot flat that smelt of cooking oil and petrol, its shagpile carpet full of dust mites and dirt, the sun beating on the cracked window as the air conditioner made enough noise to drown out the telly without actually cooling the room.
The Truth? Happiness?
‘That’s a damn fine budgie,’ I said. ‘But I think he was wrong.’
He looked confused. ‘How?’
I just put my arm around his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered, without thinking.
‘Why?’
‘Because of … all this.’
He shrugged. ‘Mum says you’ll get over it, when you’re finished with Daisy.’
I touched the tip of his nose, and almost laughed. ‘She does, eh?’
‘Who’s Daisy?’
‘She ran away too.’
‘From what?’
And then I pointed to the painting. ‘I didn’t know budgies had teeth.’
It was almost five-thirty when the horizon started to lighten from black to purple, to a blue that promised day between the rooftops. I sat yawning, rubbing my eyes, beside the Jolly Swagman, an oversized sheep rustler who’d slept the night (and his whole existence) beside a cellophane river, waiting for a giant cod to take the bait. He wore patched jeans that were held up by a length of twine; his toes dangled in the river and his nails, smelling of fresh paint, were clogged with real dirt.
I took an envelope from my top pocket, opened it and produced a pile of colour photos. Sarah and Liam playing under our nectarine tree. I looked at them—tall, lanky, brown-skinned—and decided I’d make a phone call when I knocked off. If I drove straight to Wynn Vale, picked them up and returned to the city, I’d be back in time for the pageant. I could find a nice spot on the southern end of King William Street and settle in with them. That way I could reclaim the pageant. Our pageant—fantasy made flesh. I could tell them, ‘I almost fell asleep on that float,’ and they could think, So what?
