Desperate Husbands (12 page)

Once a person is deceased, a
lot of people might say: ‘Fair
enough. He’s worked hard—
time for a rest.’ But here’s
the point: do the dead have
the right to lie there,
sponging off the rest of us,
just because they’ve passed
into some other ‘special
category’?

Please forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I am not fit to be part of this thrusting modern economy. I have sins of commission and omission to confess. I have failed to compare long-distance telephone options. There, it is said. And, behold, I have not used a calculator to study the choice of plans, thence to average the costs over the full length of the contract. Nor have I studied my bundling options.

And so it came to pass that my wife sayest: ‘This Telstra bill is an abomination. It is steeped in vileness and evil. Shall we not compare other plans?’ But I denied her thrice, smoting her with the words: ‘We could compare plans or we could just do nothing. I can never be bothered with such hassles.’

Verily, I stand naked, without excuse for my words, apart from the sin of sloth, and the loss of my calculator, which I could not find in any of the drawers, even unto those in the
shed. But help me, Father, for now I fear my beloved will runneth away with another man, one who can amortise a debt with one hand, while stroking her wild hair with another, and who could blame her?

Father, I have not compared superannuation funds. Judge me as you must. I have not studied the feature article in last week’s Money section, nor have I checked my fund’s average weighted returns against those of comparable funds, both under the three-year and five-year systems of averaging. Verily, when the statements arrive, do I place them on the raiment of the kitchen table and plan to look at them, but fast do I become sorely distracted and so I dispatch them to the box in the hall cupboard.

Father, I was once young and knew not what I did, but now I am old and I hath no excuse. I sit before you, festering with evil. Yet there is still more to confess. It came to pass last Tuesday that my neighbour, Tom Neatwhistle, spake to me over the fence, and, lo, he sayest that true and real savings are now available through a broadband internet connection, and verily did he give me pamphlets and an article from the
Bulletin
which described how to calculate one’s current costs, including dial-up, and compare these with a variety of offers, many with full and ripe download limits.

Later, after the dinner begat the sitcom and the sitcom begat bed, I cast these offers before my countenance, but, lo, I found my eyes grew sleepy and verily did I discover that I just couldn’t be knotted.

Choice is offered to me, all golden and shining, and yet do I turn my head in fear. Deals are there to be compared and yet I find myself limp with indecision. Send me asunder,
Father, for I have sinned. I am not equal to all that is offered by our gods.

May I come closer, Father? I have something to show thee. Can I admit it? My cheeks rage red with shame; tears sting the eyeballs which did not look and did not see. For five years and ten months hath I paid this Telstra bill, yet never hath I looked at the fine print: a charge of $3 per month for handset rental. Father, that handset stopped working six years ago. I threw it in a box in the laundry and bought a new one. I never knew I was still being charged for it because I never read the bill. I am full of regret now, of course, but remorse will never bring back that sweet $200.

Father, again I must creep closer and make my voice whisper so that it slithers towards you like a snake. It is of fantasies that I speak, dreams that come to me late at night, dreams of when I was a young man and had no choice. If I wanted a phone, I would ring up. Just like that. Not a thought in my head. One company, one plan, one price. Ohhhhh. There could be no regrets, for, verily, I had no choice but to do as I did. The bank also. One account, one choice, one rate. There were two airlines, but oh, wondrous thing—forced to offer the same service at the same price.

There’s no need to say it, Father. I know it. It’s not proper to have such thoughts. Not today. It was bad value, no competition, a rip-off. But sometimes, when I am alone at night, my mind travels back to that glorious prelapsarian time, before we were given free will, free choice and quite so many options. The time before Eve bit into the apple for the
second
time, only to be asked by Adam: ‘But are you sure Red Delicious really offers the best value of all the varieties on offer?’

Sixty is the new fifty, the baby boomers say; and eighty will soon be the new seventy. I just hope the boomers will manage to redefine death by the time I get there. Maybe ‘death’ could be the new ‘I’m-a-bit-tired’. In the meantime, I’d like forty-six to be the new thirty-three, but somehow it doesn’t have the same ring.

In the bush, people are more practical. One friend is turning sixty, and is taking to retirement with rather too much relish. She’s just bought a particularly stout pair of shoes which, she eagerly tells everyone, with proper care will ‘see me out’. Every purchase is now accompanied by this dour calculation. ‘I bought a good one,’ she says of her new fridge, ‘since that way it will see me out.’ She has recently bought her ‘last’ car, ‘last’ winter gloves and even her ‘last’ pair of jeans.

Friends try to jolly her along and suggest that she should be able to go through at least five more pairs of shoes before
she pegs out, particularly if she foregoes the proper care and forgets to apply the polish. But she seems to find these suggestions troubling, as if we were impugning her purchasing skill rather than praising her good health.

Perhaps the answer is to buy shoddy goods, just to make yourself feel younger. Shopping at Target, I purchase a particularly cheap electric kettle and a pair of really tacky sandshoes, already falling apart. If I treat both badly, I could go through quite a number of them before I trot off. ‘It’s my nineteenth last electric kettle,’ I will be able to tell the young man on the checkout.

Meanwhile, the government is not interested in such calculations. In the government’s view there’s just too much malingering going on. Retired people putting their feet up at sixty or sixty-five. Young people avoiding work right up until age fourteen or fifteen. Middle-aged people maintaining only two or three jobs, plus child-care responsibilities. How, the government wonders, do they fill all their spare time?

Everywhere the Treasurer looks he sees people slacking off. Take, for example, the thousands of babies living in Australia. All seem to expect services from the government and yet they contribute nothing in tax. Indeed, many seem to have no other ambition than to lie about and suck on the teat. I say they need to learn to stand on their own two feet. And, a little later, to get on their bikes. Or at least their trikes. Then there are the disabled pensioners, lying around dependent on the taxpayer just because they happen to be missing the odd leg. Well, that’s hardly a reason they can’t hop to it and stand on their own foot.

Worse still are those Australians who are near death. It’s their selfishness that most annoys economists. Some have
failed to even dig their own grave at the cemetery. Ask them who’ll carry their coffin and it’s always: ‘Oh, somebody else will do it.’ Well, it’s not good enough. Not in these times of demographic change.

No wonder the Treasurer wants a revolution in our attitude to work. If there’s a single inspiring image of this new world, it’s this: a disabled pensioner with only one leg, hopping through the graveyard with a shovel over his arthritic shoulder, moaning quietly due to his chronic emphysema. He finds the right spot and manfully digs his own grave. Only once he’s spooned out the last handful of dirt and arranged the roses on the graveside does he finally succumb to illness and exhaustion, tumbling neatly forward into his own grave: stone, cold dead.

Of course, he’ll still be
bludging
on someone else to throw the dirt in on top of him…but at least he’s doing a little to protect the country from the ravages of demographic change.

Once a person is deceased, a lot of people might say: ‘Fair enough. He’s worked hard—time for a rest.’ But here’s the point: do the dead have the right to lie there, sponging off the rest of us, just because they’ve passed into some other ‘special category’?

Given the demographic challenges we face, that may be a luxury we just can’t afford. Consider the buoyant stone-fruit industry in the Riverina and its urgent need for more scarecrows. It’s perfect work for a dead person—not too arduous and yet still a real contribution to our booming economy. It also doesn’t need to be full time—just a few days a week will do. The government is not without compassion: the Treasurer understands that once a person is dead he may wish to take things a little easier.

Of course, all these calculations change once you start listening to the longevity experts. Several of them, with an air of quiet confidence, now claim that humans will soon live to the age of 300—an idea that leaves the Treasurer rubbing his hands together with glee.

Admittedly, if we all live to 300, everything will have to change. At the moment, a twenty-first birthday party comes about a quarter-way through life; under the new system, we’ll have to hold it at age seventy-five. The gatecrashers, as usual, will be slightly older than the birthday boy or girl—a rampaging group of thrill-seekers in their mid-eighties, with a taste for rum, Mylanta and mischief. Meanwhile, the midlife crisis will be put off until age 150, with hoards of sesquicentenarians driving sports cars, attempting skydiving and making crazy career shifts. Half Australia’s dislocated hips will come from bungee-jumping 180-year-olds.

Age 100 will no more deserve a telegram from the Queen than age thirty-three does right now, and children will live at home until they are at least 120. (‘Clean up your room, Batboy. I’m sick of coming in here and finding your dentures on the floor.’) It will also be hard to exert parental authority when you are aged 290, and they’re just behind at 270. (‘I think I’m old enough, Dad, after nearly three centuries, to come home when I damn well want.’)

That’s why we’ll have to make some changes. Age sixteen will be far too young for your first kiss. You’ll want to remember that delicious moment for ever, so safer to put it off to age sixty and give your memory an even chance. Losing your virginity should be put off until at least age seventy. That way you can play the field for a good decade, before settling down with that someone special for the next
two centuries. The first kneetrembler can happen when you’re ninety, by which time your knees will be trembling of their own accord.

The first century of your new marriage may well be the toughest. After a time, you may experience the seventy-year-itch and want to play the field once more. Who could blame you? You’re only 170 and have just been fitted with your third set of new hips. Naturally, you’ll want to test them out.

But how are our bodies going to cope? Already mine is like a map of past accidents and errors of judgement. Through careful prodding, I can still locate the outline of a Mars Bar I thoughtlessly consumed in 1992. A close inspection of my cheeks shows the pinkish bloom of too much Australian shiraz. I have three deep scars on my thigh from a sporting accident when I was twelve, and a dodgy knee from a misguided attempt at ballet a few years later.

Here’s my point: had I known I’d have to make the vehicle last another couple of centuries I may have been more careful.

There are other problems. Your music collection will be spread over twenty-seven different formats, of which LPs, CDs and iPods will only be the first. Hollywood, always keen to push the age difference as far as possible, will feature love affairs between various ingénues and Harrison Ford, who, at this point, will be 280 years old. The Rolling Stones will be playing at the Enmore Theatre in the year 2254. On the roads, the majority of drivers will be over ninety, and the law will be forced to bow to majority opinion. All motorists will be required to wear a hat and have their left indicator blinking permanently.

Back at home, I wash Jocasta’s cereal bowl with an angry flourish. I hate the way she just slings it in there. I was going to let it ride, but not with another 260 years of life to go. If I start my campaign now, she may well reform before we’re much over 190.

Apparently, it’s the new forty.

I
N THE
U
NITED
S
TATES
D
ISTRICT
C
OURT

S
WIM
S
TYLE
I
MPORTS OF THE
USA
VS
K
OALA
R
UBBER OF
A
USTRALIA

J
UDGE
J
AMES
S
TUBBS
P
RESIDING

Opening statement of Mr Tom Smith, attorney for SwimStyle Imports:
My client, a swimwear company headquartered in southern California, pursuant to the objectives of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Australia, did order 20,000 items of a product described as ‘a pair of black rubber thongs’. The meaning of the word ‘thong’ is very clear within this jurisdiction. As Your Honour would be aware, it refers to piece of scanty clothing, by way of a G-string and/or other item of revealing swimwear. The fact that these were offered in black rubber, and as part of a two-for-one deal, only added
to their allure in the view of the SwimStyle marketing team.

SwimStyle Imports did not see the necessity of checking the product carefully, as it came from a reputable supplier and under the umbrella of the FTA. The thongs were thus received and immediately packaged as lingerie/bikini wear and supplied into the Californian market. Your Honour would be aware of the situation which followed, with thousands of Californian women walking in public—on beaches and boardwalks—clothed in nothing but an item of Australian rubber footwear, which they wore grasped between their upper thighs.

Certainly, the thick rubber sole cut into their legs; and the waddling gait necessary to keep the thong in place caused several back injures. Many women also discovered it was impossible to sit down without the thong dropping to the floor, with a consequent loss of modesty.

And yet Americans are ‘can-do’ people. Given the product was labelled as bikini wear, many women were convinced it was simply the new style—albeit one that was particularly revealing, especially when viewed from above. They were determined to find a way it could be worn with comfort.

It was for this reason that many women tried to heat the thong, believing the thick sole could be bent into a more modest shape, thus providing a little more coverage. Sadly, as has been widely reported, once put in position and heated, the rubber has a tendency to melt. While your honour will appreciate the popularity of the Brazilian wax among Californian beach-goers, there are, in our humble submission, less painful ways to achieve one.

Your honour, I note the submission of Koala Rubber on this point. It says, firstly, that the product was never designed to be heated. And that, secondly, the rubber straps provide a sort of handle with which one can pull the thong free of its entanglements.

It is our submission, Your Honour, that the rubber handles merely led to further injuries. Many women, with the heated thong stuck firmly in place, requested assistance from a husband or other male friend. Typically the male helper would prop the woman up in a chair and begin to exert pressure using the rubber straps or, as they saw them, handles. Typically the rubber would begin to stretch while the melted thong was immovable. Your Honour will be aware of the male desire to be successful when offering assistance in this way. Some men recruited friends, and one would often find a whole conga line of helpers heaving on the fixed object, the rubber straps expanding and expanding and expanding, much like a rubber band or slingshot, the woman braced against a low wall or other anchorage point.

The force built up was, of course, incredible, especially when released by the sudden pulling free of the rubber straps. Whole groups of men would be sent sprawling backwards at enormous speed, the thong still immovable. Given the nature of Californian coastal landscape there were, in many cases, cliffs involved.

The 143 cases of death that have followed, together with the seventy-three cases of back pain, 347 cases of involuntary Brazilian waxing, and thousands of cases of inadvertent nudity, have left SwimStyle the subject of legal actions totalling $7.3 billion dollars. We hereby seek leave to countersue the Australian Government for its failure to
harmonise Australian language with that used in the rest of the American empire.

Your Honour may ask whether we attempted to settle this matter outside the court system. The answer is a definite yes. As soon as the issue became apparent, SwimStyle’s managing director, Mr Denis Kazan, put through a call to the Sydney headquarters of Koala Rubber, speaking to Koala’s CEO, Mr Barry Brown. Early in the conversation, Mr Kazan confided that SwimStyle’s entire marketing staff were ‘all pretty pissed’—a phrase which, within this jurisdiction, is properly taken to convey feelings of anger and disappointment. The response from Mr Brown—which was to guffaw and say ‘Well, you all better sober up a little’—leads us to claim supplementary damages of a further $1 billion.

Total damages, Your Honour, amount to the sum of $8.3 billion. We also respectively submit that the FTA be henceforth scrapped until the two countries can at least agree to speak a common language.