Emerald City (4 page)

MIKE
exits.
COLIN
strides up and down the room gesticulating. He's acting out some of the crucial scenes he's about to write the next day. He doesn't speak the lines out loud but emits a curious, high-speed mumble, rather like a tape recorder being played backwards at triple speed.
KATE
watches him. She's used to it, but is still irritated by his total absorption in his work.

KATE
: Penny lied about where she was last weekend.

COLIN
: Penny? She's never lied in her life.

KATE
: Well, she's just started.

COLIN
: Wasn't she here last weekend?

KATE
: Colin, as a father you're a joke.

COLIN
: As a wife you don't give me many laughs.

KATE
: If you ever give another interview in which you claim to do fifty percent of the household chores and put the responsibilities of fatherhood before your work I'll ring the bloody journalist and demand the right of reply.

COLIN
: I do the shopping.

KATE
: I pin a series of lists headed ‘butcher', ‘greengrocer', ‘delicatessen' to your jumper which you usually manage to leave at the right shop and which you often remember to collect. I'm the one who does all the thinking.

COLIN
:
I'll
do the thinking,
you
spend an hour a day behaving like a forklift truck. Have you ever had to have a prolonged conversation with Doug the butcher? He's a great guy, but after the weather it can get tricky. Especially when the only reason he can think of as to why I do the shopping at ten every morning and why I don't speak like an outback Queenslander, is that I'm the boyfriend of a Qantas flight director.

KATE
: Let him think it.

COLIN
: I don't want him to think it. I'm not.

KATE
: There's nothing wrong with being gay.

COLIN
: Nothing wrong at all, except that I'm not. And while we're on this, will you stop all this nauseating stuff with young Sam about, ‘No-one knows what one's sexual preferences will be until one grows up, but if one's sexual preferences
do
turn out to be minority preferences, one must
never
be ashamed of it'.

KATE
: You're just prejudiced against gays.

COLIN
: I am not in the
least
prejudiced against gays. I just want the kid not to feel guilty if by some odd chance he grows up hetero.

KATE
: You
are
prejudiced.

COLIN
: It took fifteen million years of evolution for my genes to get to me, I'd just like to see them go a bit further. Where
was
Penny?

KATE
: At a disco called Downmarket. She was supposed to be studying at her friend's place.

COLIN
: Disco? When she was in Melbourne the only thing she'd listen to was Mozart.

KATE
: I'd be surprised if Downmarket is noted for its Mozart.

COLIN
: How did you find out?

KATE
: A twenty-three-year-old German tourist turned up on our doorstep looking for our daughter.

COLIN
: What did he want?

KATE
: It wasn't Mozart. Apparently he felt an offer had been made on the dance floor.

COLIN
: [
shocked
] That's terrible. She's only thirteen.

KATE
: Fifteen, but it's still a worry.

COLIN
: Those disco's are where the pushers operate.

KATE
: Our daughter says it isn't a problem. If you stay out on the dance floor they soon stop bothering you.

COLIN
: We'll have to do something.

KATE
: I've stopped this week's pocket money.

COLIN
: [
agitated
] That'll really strike terror into her.

KATE
: What do you want me to do? Lock her in a dark cupboard for a month?

COLIN
: This is serious. She's rubbing shoulders—and God knows what else—with pushers and pimps. What's made her interested in discos, for God's sake?

KATE
: This is a very cosmopolitan city.

COLIN
: Discos aren't cosmopolitan, they're tawdry.

KATE
: I was going to say tawdry, but I didn't want to be rude about your chosen city.

COLIN
: Don't sit there being smug. This is serious. We've got to take firm action.

KATE
: What do you suggest?

COLIN
: If we let her keep on going like this she'll end up in William Street hopping into passing Jaguars.

KATE
: If you're so worried, you take over the problem. And you can handle Sam and Hannah as well.

COLIN
: What's wrong with Sam and Hannah?

KATE
: Sam's apparently running a protection racket in his sixth grade—

COLIN
: [
interrupting
] Protection racket? In Melbourne we couldn't get him away from his computer.

KATE
: New city, new skills. And Hannah's teachers say she's depressed.

COLIN
: Who wouldn't be in this family?

KATE
: How about taking some of the blame for that yourself? You can go to the schools and hear the bad news next time! I'm sick to death of organising this menagerie. I've got problems of my own.

COLIN
: Such as?

KATE
: Such as going quietly crazy because my idiot boss refuses to publish the first manuscript in years that's got me excited.

COLIN
: That black woman's novel?

KATE
: I wish you wouldn't keep calling her ‘that black woman'.

COLIN
: What am I expected to call her? ‘That woman whose complexion is not as ours?'

KATE
: Call her by her
name
.

COLIN
: I forget it.

KATE
: Take the trouble to
learn
. You've heard it often enough. Her name is Kath Mitchell and her book is called—

COLIN
: [
interrupting
] I know the name of her book. Who could forget it?
Black Rage
.

KATE
: See?

COLIN
: See what?

KATE
: The tone of contempt.

COLIN
: It's a terrible title.

KATE
: Just because she's a member of a minority who've been made marginal in a land they owned for forty thousand years, and a member of another minority who've been made marginal by the post-agricultural patriarchy for eight thousand years, doesn't entitle you to dismiss
her
or her
work
.

COLIN
: I haven't.

KATE
: You'd better not. It gives her work a lot of power.

COLIN
: Whereas mine, being pale and male, is limp?

KATE
: You're work hasn't got her power. No.

COLIN
: [
hurt
] Thank you.

KATE
: [
attempting tact, which she's not very good at
] But yours has got certain qualities hers hasn't.

COLIN
: Of course. It's more frivolous, less passionate, less committed. You know, I've got a certain sympathy for your boss. Why
shouldn't
he publish stuff people want to read, instead of yet another frothing-mouthed cry of rage from yet another disadvantaged minority? I
hated
those bleak Melbourne bookshops full of surly pinched-faced zealots shuffling down corridors stacked with envy, anger and hate.

KATE
: You prefer Sydney bookshops? Filled with cookbooks?

COLIN
: If people want cookbooks, let them have cookbooks.

KATE
: I'm not devoting my life to improving the North Shore soufflé!

COLIN
: Of course not. You're going to keep trying to publish stuff that nobody wants to read.

KATE
: I'm going to keep trying to publish books which prick the consciences of a few thousand people out there and make them aware that under the gloss of affluence there is
real
suffering. Did you know that rents are so high in this subtropical lotus land that all the women's hostels are overflowing and five hundred women and their kids are being turned away every week? Families are out there sleeping on golf courses and in car wrecks?

COLIN
: What do you want me to do? Go to my nearest golf course and redirect them here? What do your two thousand pricked consciences actually go and
do
when they've put down the book?

KATE
: Eventually they change the consciousness of this nation. They make it a fairer place for everyone.

COLIN
: Kate, the country isn't going to become fair because someone in a book says it should be. The unpalatable truth is that we're an egocentric species who care a lot about ourselves and our children, a little bit for our tribe, and not much at all for anyone else.

KATE
: Where did you pick up that right-wing drivel?

COLIN
: Kate, can you be honest with yourself for a change without
posing?
Whenever one of those ads comes on urging us to save starving children, we're shocked by the images of the emaciated kids, we look at each other and murmur, ‘Must do something', but we don't even
note down the number
. But if our young Sam so much as whimpers in the night, we're instantly awake, bolt upright, staring at each other with fear in our eyes. Face up to this awful equation: one cut finger of Sam's equals more anguish than a thousand deaths in Ethiopia!

The logic hits home.

KATE
: Alright. Most of us
are
selfish. We're taught to be.

COLIN
: We aren't taught! No parent is
taught
to care more about their child than someone else's!

KATE
: Alright. We
are
selfish, but we can be taught to change. We can be taught to
care
about others. Sometimes the process is slow and you don't think it's happening at all, but it is. We don't have eight-year-olds working in mine pits anymore. Perhaps you hadn't noticed?

COLIN
: [
suddenly reflective
] No, we don't.

KATE
: Things
can
change for the better, but I'm sure you're not convinced.

COLIN
: I want to be convinced. I
hate
the thought that humanity is grasping and egocentric, but the evidence often seems overwhelming, and some of it comes from pretty close to home.

KATE
: You mean me?

COLIN
: No, I mean
me
.

Pause.

KATE
: I
am
getting tired of organising this family, Colin. You're too self-obsessed to ever do your share and I'm starting to feel very, very trapped.

KATE
exits.

COLIN
: [
to the audience
] That wasn't exactly music to my ears. I knew the dream behind that threat. A room in Glebe where she'd write short stories for women's anthologies published by McPhee Gribble. And they'd be about leaving a husband who was so thick he had to have shopping lists pinned to his jumpers and so right-wing he voted Labor. If our domestic harmony was precarious, it became even more so after Kate met Mike.

MIKE
enters the kitchen and reads the morning paper. He's wearing nothing except a towel around his waist.
KATE
enters wearing a dressing-gown and stares at him.

KATE
: Good morning. I'm Kate.

MIKE
looks up and then down.

MIKE
: Hi.

KATE
: I was going to pop my head in and say hello when I got home last night, but I thought I wouldn't interrupt. You, er, stayed overnight?

MIKE
: [
not looking up
] Raining. Couldn't get a cab.

KATE
: You're both working here again today?

MIKE
: [
not looking up
] Going to work here from now on. Much more room.

KATE
: Ah.

She looks at the paper
MIKE
is reading. She has come downstairs to collect it.

Anything interesting?

MIKE
looks up, puzzled.

Anything interesting happen in the world overnight?

MIKE
: [
looking down
] No. Same old shit. Makes you wonder why you keep reading it.

KATE
hopes this means he'll stop reading it, but it doesn't.

KATE
: Could you possibly leave the paper there when you've finished? I like to glance at the headlines before the children get up.

MIKE
: [
still reading
] Right.

KATE
gets visibly irritated. She takes an electric jug and plugs it in, banging it down noisily.

Making coffee?

KATE
: Yes.

MIKE
: Could you pour me a weak one with no sugar?

KATE
: [
tersely
] Are you married, Mike?

MIKE
: Have been. Twice.

KATE
: But not now?