Green (14 page)

‘Sure. It's not such a fine distinction as it first sounds.'

‘Exactly. Clinton doesn't get that. Some people don't. Hey, do some of that chicken stuff you do. The Shakespeare stuff.'

‘Well, I kind of make some of it up.'

‘So do some.'

‘It's like—I can't believe I'm telling you this—it's like insults and things. In Elizabethan language. Plus some Shakespeare and other stuff. Poetry and things.'

‘So do some.'

‘Okay.' She helps me stand, and I reverse my way up the two steps to the concrete. There's no turning on steps in these chicken feet. I strike a pose that's meant to be Elizabethan, feet apart, wings declamatory. ‘Prithee cockscomb, wherefore dost thou trouble me with trifles when there's commerce to be had in fowl? There's fowl afoot tonight aplenty, so be instead nimble of foot, and get thee to thy servery.'

I manage a couple of shuffly dance steps, since the foot references seem to require it, and I bow.

She laughs. ‘I suppose we should be getting back to it. Frank'll be getting lonely. Cockscomb's rude, isn't it?'

‘Only in a friendly way, I think.'

‘Dad really doesn't know who he's hired here, does he? You want to be doing other things, don't you?'

‘I'm serious about getting into film, you know. I might be saying that out of a chicken's head, but I'm serious. I think it was when I saw Dustin Hoffman in
The Graduate
that I realised how amazing it can be—what film can be like when it's done really well. I really want to do it.'

‘I know.'

‘I don't want to be one of those people who talks about it but doesn't even try to do it. I want to do it like Woody Allen. He just does what he wants. He writes, he directs, he stars sometimes, and he doesn't even have to leave the island of Manhattan.'

‘But wouldn't he want to? Wouldn't he want to see other things sometimes?'

‘I don't know. Maybe he doesn't think he needs to.'

There's singing from inside, Meat Loaf's ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light'. I hope Frank's alone, and not turning it into some haphazard kind of charm.

‘Hey,' Sophie says, ‘Frank told me Phoebe Harris is your mother. Phoebe Harris the uni tutor. Is that right? She's my tutor in one of my media studies subjects.'

‘That'd be her. Is this going to be embarrassing for me?'

‘I don't know. Are a lot of things embarrassing for you?'

‘Yes. Including almost everything to do with my parents. My parents, coloured drinks, exercise equipment, the present Frank gave me for my twenty-first—all of that's at least ninety-five per cent embarrassing. Other things less so.'

‘She was telling us the other day about how she was injured in one of the right-to-march protests a few years ago, and how she's got a Special Branch file.'

‘She assumes. They don't tell you. Lots of people have got Special Branch files. That's one bunch of cops who take far more photos than they need to.'

Embarrassing? Sure it was, but Sophie won't have heard the story in its entirety. It all gets back to how my mother tells them, each time finding a way to step around the whole story while picking up a few of its better parts. And ‘injured in one of the right-to-march protests' is certainly a good start when you're standing in front of a media studies class.

 

*

 

‘What is it with you and Frank?' Sophie says through the toilet door on our next changeover.

‘He's dangerous when he's understimulated. His mind wanders, and his mouth stays open. It's a bad combination.'

A bad combination—Frank was shitty about how long our last changeover was, so he decided to sing ‘MacArthur Park' continuously to Sophie until customers came and interrupted. And when they went, he picked up from where he'd left off and kept singing.

‘Yes, but, you're his friend and most of the time he's kind of, well . . . obnoxious.'

‘Yeah. Tell me something I don't know. Next you'll be breaking it to me that he can't sing. But it's only pretend obnoxious, and it makes a surprising number of women want to have sex with him.'

‘How many would you call surprising?'

‘Well, one, but there are actually a few more than that. It's a little easier to take if you tell yourself it's bravado. A combination of bravado and simple directness. In cowboy movies those are both virtues and Frank could be either the sheriff or, more likely, the wronged outlaw with the good heart.'

‘And in real life? Real life in the late-twentieth century?'

‘Here and now he's more like the outlaw, and there are times when bravado and simple directness can be a lot to forgive. In real life his big issue is that he's been displaced from his natural genre. Sometimes I think he lives to shit people, but he's a good guy really. Frank is a low-rent rock star without a band. He plays life as if he's a connoisseur, but he thought cuisine in this town reached a new high when he found out that, with the aid of just one phone call, pizza would come to your home. It took a while to convince him that we don't all think the way he does, and that the world doesn't work for me in the same way that it works for him.'

‘And how does the world work for you?'

 

*

 

It was my turn for ‘MacArthur Park' after that but I was ready for him. I didn't care about his cake, I didn't care about how long it took him to bake it, I welcomed the rain.

How does the world work for me?

It's not fair that a conversation should be left hanging on such a question, that Frank should call out then, threatening to resume singing and immediately going through with it. I'm never sure how the world works for me. Most of the time, it's best not to think about it. Term Four is general practice. That's what the world has for me two months from now, and I know what happens next year and the year after that, or what's supposed to. But, in the end, that doesn't mean I know a lot.

I'm glad the evening's done and I'm away from the World and ‘MacArthur Park', home in my room, watching TV with the volume down and sucking on a Sustagen milkshake. The bullworker is getting me nowhere, and I should accept that. I should have had bikini babes lounging around every rippling muscle long before now. Do I want anything so shallow? It wouldn't hurt. Worse could happen, and has. For example, the past seven months have given me plenty of study time. Plenty.

Frank tells me I should keep putting myself out there, because sometimes something comes back. It's a matter of projecting confidence. Frank projects confidence to the point of projecting recklessness instead, and sometimes he scores. He says that there are people who find confidence persuasive, even if it's got no basis, and I think he might be right. He calls this kind of confidence ‘pure confidence', as though it's a better kind by being untainted with content issues.

During psych I put it to him that it might, in a way, be the flip side to existential angst, so we should maybe think of it as ‘existential confidence'. He told me he thought that was worth a shot. About a week later he said he'd tried it on a girl and found it had worked pretty well. ‘Sometimes a reference like that can make you look kind of intellectual,' he said. ‘And that can be good, depending on the girl. You should bear that in mind.'

Unfortunately, being pseudo-intellectual was already one of my better things, and hadn't been as persuasive as I'd hoped.

At least Sophie didn't seem to make the connection between Phoebe my girlfriend and Phoebe my mother. But why would she, I guess? It's not a common name but it's not exceptionally rare, either.

I shouldn't have let her talk me into doing the Elizabethan stuff for her. Pure confidence isn't easy but that's no excuse to project pure strangeness instead, even if her lack of availability meant that my guard was down. It would be smarter to remember that she's a girl, and to use her as practice.

The Elizabethan stuff is my mother's fault. Damn her and her insistence on eisteddfods. I can't even quote things in a cool way. I know people who can go, ‘Well, Nietzsche did say . . . ' as though they were just talking to him this morning. Doing slabs of Shakespeare that I've deliberately rote-learned, and doing them while chickening, is not the same.

I hated eisteddfods at the start. The worst part was being corralled into side rooms at City Hall before taking the stage to orate. Something always went very wrong with my hair and my mother would slick it down with water from a sink in the toilets.

Eisteddfods were an early attempt at finding the means to project confidence. And has the ability to recite sonnet thirty-one from Sir Philip Sidney's
Astrophel and Stella
(while water from your slicked-down hair trickles to your collar) improved anyone's confidence in the last four hundred years? I don't think so. For me, it was all nothing more than the bullworker and Sustagen equivalent of five years ago.

How is it that I'm much more confident reciting things as the chicken than as Phil Harris, confident enough that I'll make up Shakespeare and almost dance about it? The chicken is tall and broad and fearless, and a place to hide. The bigger dick I make of myself in there, the less chance there is that anyone driving past might know it's me. I play the chicken like I'm playing Frank in a good mood. Devil-may-care. I think it was even the chicken that paid Sophie the earring compliment.

I can't believe the things my mother says about her Special Branch file. She was destined to be involved in media studies.

The Joh Bjelke-Petersen state government banned protest marches when I was at school. Perhaps they'd always been banned, but that's when it became a big issue. The biggest reason to march then was for the right to march. And, since there was no right to march, there were plenty of arrests.

My mother decided she couldn't stand by and let everyone else do the marching for her. She worked in town then, and she left work early to be part of the protest.

The police decided that the line for action would be the kerb. They made that very clear. One foot off the kerb and onto the road and you'd be arrested for marching.

My mother wasn't with the main group of marchers—she didn't know anyone else who was marching—and she was left behind, some distance away, when they surged onto the road. She stepped off the kerb but, because of her highish heel, turned her ankle and crumpled into the gutter. Two young police officers rushed over and, just as she was thinking of the great pictures she was creating for the next morning's papers—a forty-something well-dressed woman being carried off, arrested—they were totally polite.

They thought it was an accident, one of those things that can happen in a crowd, and they helped her over to the St John's Ambulance people, who strapped her ankle. She couldn't bring herself to say that she'd been setting out to march.

‘I was born into a world of manners, Philby,' she told me later that day, her ankle strapped, iced and elevated, a cup of tea beside her. ‘That was my downfall. I can't help but respond to manners. And they were so nice. I couldn't disappoint them.'

Then she said it was important that we all contribute, in our own way, and she settled for writing a stern letter to the
Courier-Mail
. I don't think it was ever published.

Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen has been the Queensland premier the whole time we've been in Australia, and the state is a national joke for having a Deep North government that's said to resemble governments of a generation or more ago in some parts of the US Deep South—governments that always talk about getting things done and never talk about rights. Governments that send in the police to clear protesters before felling rainforest, or that set demolition crews onto old buildings in the hours before dawn. By morning it's too late. There's just rubble left, and pictures for the papers.

We're an easy target for remarks about crossing the border and turning the clock back fifteen years, or a hundred. We're a state that's known for pineapples and cane toads, old bad attitudes and the brain-addling heat that comes from the Tropic of Capricorn sitting right across our middle. We're that kind of state—hot and steamy, unlovely and unloved, far too much fodder here for metaphors about festering and putrefaction.

There are times when you get tired of it, tired of the easy bashing of the place. Sure, you'd like it to be different, but most days here are just like days in a lot of other places. They must be. You get on, you live your life, you try to vote them out when the chance comes.

Rigged electoral boundaries don't make it easy and, at the last state election eighteen months ago, Joh got back in without needing much of the vote. My parents were at a party that night. It hadn't started as an election party, but the topic couldn't be avoided. TVs were on and everyone was watching the tally room. There had been a split in the government coalition, and we really thought they might go down. My mother left for the party, anxious but hopeful, having campaigned during the day. As the results came in and Joh looked like clinging on to power, my parents sensed they were perhaps the only people at the party wanting a different result.

I'd turned the coverage off early and I was asleep in bed when they came home. I woke to hear my mother throwing up in the garden, having drunk too much for the only time I can remember, moaning about ‘bloody fascists' as my father's voice murmured something supportive beside her.

Of course, the families of most of the people I'm doing medicine with probably voted for this government or for their ex-coalition partners. Not everyone's like my mother.

 

 

 

5

 

 

 

O
n
Sunday
I borrow my mother's car so that I can drive to the Greens'.