Green (15 page)

‘AJ'll be a while,' Frank says when I get there. ‘A big night, apparently.'

‘Work or play?'

‘He didn't say. You want a beer?'

‘Sure.'

AJ—Arthur Junior—is a couple of years older than us, and shares a flat at Paddington with a friend. He's an interior decorator, or something like that, but on weekends he DJs for weddings and twenty-firsts. It hasn't been long since he moved out and, when Big Artie decides there'll be a barbecue on the weekend, the decision's binding for the whole family, including his first-born namesake.

‘Weekends,' Frank says, when we're out the back, ‘there's nothing like 'em.'

He clinks his stubbie against mine, takes a mouthful of beer and keeps talking. He's straddling Fonzie, the Green family's pet sheep, and both of them seem particularly nonchalant about it. Frank's talking as though he isn't on the back of a sheep, even though he's patting Fonzie's head. Fonzie's pulling up mouthfuls of grass, occasionally looking at me as if I'm the strange one, this free-standing beer-drinking person. Surely I'm going to fall over any second, without a sheep under me.

Years ago, Big Artie—who loves nothing more than a fiercely irrational opinion—was mouthing off about butchers being a rip-off, so he went and bought a live lamb. But he couldn't kill it. Then Frank's little sister Vanessa called it Fonzie, so he definitely couldn't kill it. Now Fonzie's fully grown and Artie bullshits on about the savings on mower fuel instead. Once, in a cocksure moment about eight beers into a barbecue, he is said to have declared, ‘No one sticks it up bloody OPEC like the Fonz.'

I know that sometimes, when Frank gets bored during study, he puts David Lee Roth (their Yorkshire terrier) on Fonzie's back and tries to train them to do laps of the yard. ‘Next,' he said to me once, ‘there'll be a hoop to go through. Maybe even fire. That'd give us something I could tour.' But so far the excitable David Lee Roth and the dull-witted Fonzie haven't come to the party. The one that should stay still, can't stay still. The one that should be lapping, munches grass instead of moving. At its brief best it does look very silly, but you couldn't call it a show.

Today, while we're drinking beer and everyone's waiting for AJ, David Lee Roth is with Vanessa under the house. She's playing an Alice Cooper album, loud enough that Frank can't resist and takes a stab at the chorus of ‘You and Me' (holds it down, takes a stab at it, leaves it for dead).

Vanessa is working on Frank's car. He tells me he does most of it himself, of course, but she's up on the electronics and he wouldn't want to stand in her way.

‘I'm going to do something,' he says, turning purposeful. ‘Something about that bastard O'Hare. I should have got eight out of ten for that case. I shouldn't have to cop his bullshit.'

‘Yeah, but his bullshit is all about copping his bullshit. You cop it, you do what you've got to do and then you move on. He wants you to take him on. You do that and he'll get you.'

‘I've got to go and see him. Tuesday. Between him and bloody Ron Todd . . . does that guy get to you? He gets to me.'

‘Why? He's odd, but why does he get to you? What's the point?'

‘Aren't you hanging out for a time when you don't have to deal with guys like that? When there's No one who'll come up to you and put a hand on your shoulder and give you some patronising advice and a blast of halitosis? And you've got to cop it because he marks your cases or pays your wages or whatever. Not that Ron's like O'Hare. Okay, on one level I admire him—Ron, I mean. He's got some vision. I don't know how things are going at the World—I think they could be better—but he had an idea and he's seeing it through. I think I identify with that.'

‘Yeah? Which bit?'

‘I've got this idea for a franchise. I'd probably make some money from medicine first and then kick it off. It's a food thing. I thought of it the other night at the World. It's called “Eat of the Beast”. I'm thinking it's a simple one-price-only all-you-can-eat meat restaurant.'

‘A meat restaurant?'

‘Yeah, total meat.'

‘Even the salads?'

‘Meat. Different cuts of meat. Salad cuts. It's a new concept. Thin cuts, marinated. The pastrami salad, for instance.'

‘Which contains?'

‘Pastrami.' Pause for effect. ‘See what I mean? Simple. I reckon one day all those vegos are going to get wise. And when they come running for meat, I wouldn't mind at all if they came running for me.' He pauses again, nods this time. This one's a different kind of pause, like a pioneer cresting a hill in a covered wagon and pausing to take in the view. ‘There'd be fondue,' he adds as an afterthought. ‘Stacks of fondue. People'd go for that. Spike it, cook it, eat it. Nothing but meat and sauce.'

‘Hey, Frank,' Vanessa shouts from under the house. ‘I think I'm done.'

‘Good on you, Ness,' Frank says when she comes out. ‘Allow me to fetch you a tall, cold Diet Coke.'

She's wearing an old tie-dye T-shirt, baggy army shorts and a belt with battery-operated car signals—something that, I think, she won on an afternoon kids' TV show. Frank brings her the Diet Coke and swings his leg back over the Fonz, and Vanessa flops down onto a folding chair.

‘Hey, Dad's pretty buggered after those Chinese elms yesterday,' she says, her right indicator flicking on and off.

‘Yeah. It must be tiring, standing around giving all those instructions.' Frank's not much into tree talk.

She laughs. ‘He's the expert. That's his job. It takes a lot of concentration.'

‘Try being sixty foot up a tree with a chainsaw hanging from your belt.'

‘Hey, that's only 'cause you've got what it takes, you know. That job's a privilege. You know what Dad says.' She puts on a serious look. ‘You're a beaut young climber, Frankie. It's a bloody tragedy to waste a skill like that.'

‘Well, we're all just going to have to live with it, aren't we?'

‘No need for climbing when you're a surgeon,' she says. ‘Unless you're a tree surgeon.'

Frank laughs. ‘True enough.'

Big Artie hoped so much that Frank would be part of the family business that he even got him a personalised Green Loppers T-shirt, something formerly reserved for full-time employees. Frank had put in five years work on holidays and weekends by then. For the last two years he's been trying to stop, since he says it's not worth the hassle. All he has to do is climb one tree and Artie dreams about retirement. Plus, the way Frank sees it, he's not a flash payer. Which he admits is good business, but not if you're the employee.

Vanessa goes inside to get another Diet Coke. ‘They should make even taller glasses,' she says.

‘Another business that I don't think is going so well,' Frank says when she's gone. ‘Green Loppers.'

‘But does your father really think you'd stop doing medicine now to go into it?'

‘No . . . I don't know. It'd be fine if he had a climber. I think if he had a climber we'd find that a lot of these weekend jobs could be done on weekdays. You only need one climber, really, if you've got the back-up. A couple of blokes cutting stuff on the ground and feeding it into the shredder and looking after ropes and shit. And one boss, who knows exactly how a tree'll fall. That's what the old man's good at. But the others? Nev. Nev's older than Dad and weedier than you, and he's famous for one thing and it's not tree lopping. Have I told you about this? I don't think so. There was this big philosophical bind he got into. There was one time when he paid twenty bucks for a blowie on Brunswick Street and then he found out he'd got it from a trannie.' He stops, raises his eyebrows in a how-about-that kind of way.

‘I don't see the philosophical bind yet.'

‘It was a blow job the like of which he'd never had before, the eye-roller to end all eye-rollers. So what's a man to do the next time he's got a lazy twenty in his back pocket? It's all right for the likes of you and me, who could practically audition the chicks if we had the inclination, hey, but Nev only gets it if he pays for it. And the story gets worse too.'

‘That's hard to believe.'

‘The trannie had lost his front teeth going over his handlebars when he was a kid, and for an extra five bucks he'd take his plate out.'

‘Do you know how much I want you to be making this up? I want to stop thinking about it right now.'

‘I reckon Ron Todd's got a plate.'

‘And I don't want to think about that, either.'

Frank laughs, and I'll probably never know if the Nev story is true or a scavenged urban myth, or something Frank made up as he went along.

At the top of the steps, the screen door to the kitchen swings open and Big Artie's there with trays of meat and sausages.

‘The boy's here,' he says, and Arthur junior follows him out.

AJ's hair is slicked back and he's wearing a white T-shirt that looks too small, and Ray-Bans sitting high on his head.

‘Been working out?' Frank says, also noticing the new look.

‘Oh, when I get the chance. How have you guys been?'

‘Pretty good. We've finished surgery and we're onto obstetrics. You realise you can see your nipples through that shirt?'

‘I've just got myself a tan, that's all. And moved to a non-bevan part of town where not everybody dresses like a tree lopper. Is that, um, girlfriend of yours coming over? Sorry, what was her name?'

‘Hardly relevant now.'

‘Really?' AJ looks at me, probably figuring I'm his best chance of an unbiased report.

‘I don't think she's coming over. They had a misunderstanding a week or so ago.'

‘A free man, hey?' he says to Frank.

‘That's right. I was about ready for a change, anyway. She was a bit too immature for me.'

‘Surely not.' AJ laughs.

Vanessa and their mother, Dorothy, come down the back steps with several large bowls of salad and at least a dozen bread rolls. As always, there's far more food than we can eat.

‘Arthur made the potato salad,' Dorothy says. ‘Didn't you?'

‘Yeah.' AJ looks coy about it. ‘I thought it'd be good to bring something.'

‘It looks like a pretty flash potato salad too. What are the green bits, love?' Dorothy is calling his bluff. We all know AJ well enough to know that he's no food preparer.

He takes a look into the bowl and calls the green bits chives, but without much conviction. ‘At least, they should be chives. We've got chives in a window box, and it's not as if anyone mowed the lawn today.' He knows he's blown it. ‘Oh, all right, Rod made it. He's got lunch at his family's place today too, so I just got him to make twice as much.' Then he tries to reclaim some ground, pitch it as a positive. ‘I mean, potato salad, it's one of your fussier salads, isn't it? So, if someone'll make it for you, why not?'

‘He's a useful flatmate, that boy,' Dorothy says. ‘I hope it's not all one-way traffic. I hope you're pulling your weight.'

‘Yep, I iron his jocks, mum. I wash his sheets and I make his bed with hospital corners, just like you taught me.'

‘Well, that's better. That's worth some potato salad now and then.'

AJ was first in line for Green Loppers, but he was never good with heights. Big Artie used to joke around to try to get him over it, but it never worked. He used to say that when AJ took over they could rename the company Theresa Green's, since AJ was such a girl when it came to climbing. Heights, lopping and Sunnybank Hills were all wrong for AJ. They seemed wrong when he lived here and they seem more wrong now. Paddington's right for him—restaurants, a couple of nightclubs (the Underground and Cafe Neon), the city just five minutes away. That's his kind of world and now he comes back here, back to the burbs, dressed like a person from somewhere else.

Dorothy sends Vanessa back upstairs for cutlery, Frank fetches beers for the three of us and hands one to AJ.

‘Hospital corners,' he says, and shakes his head.

‘Never made a bed in my life,' AJ tells him, and he clinks his stubbie against Frank's as if he's toasting the declaration, making a commitment to it for the future.

‘You're good, very good.' Frank's always admired people who have things done for them. ‘You don't go anywhere without a slave, do you?'

‘I don't go looking for them. They come to me.'

‘Style wins out over substance yet again.'

‘As it should. Substance is tedious. Style's the only thing that distinguishes us from apes.' For some reason, we all look around at Big Artie at that point, and he's hunched over the barbecue flipping steaks over, back hair poking out over his singlet, one hand swatting at flies. ‘Like I said.' He raises his stubbie in another toast. ‘You and me, brother. Down from the trees.'

Vanessa puts a handful of knives and forks down noisily on the table and walks over to us, clinks her Coke glass against AJ's beer and says, ‘Welcome.'

‘Thanks, Nessie. How have you been?'

‘Pretty good.'

‘And the flower business?'

‘It's okay.'

‘Just okay?'

‘Okay is okay. It's not bad.'

‘Maybe one day you'll be the actual florist rather than the helper, and that'll be better.'

‘Yeah. There's a lot to know, though, to be a florist. Flowers, man,' she says, as if it's all a puzzle. ‘What are they about? And what do I do if I don't do flowers? It's a bloody mystery.'

‘Ness, it's a mystery for most of us,' AJ tells her, getting in just ahead of Frank. ‘You're not even seventeen until next month. A lot of people who are years older than that don't know what they want to do.'

‘Frank knows. Frank wants to be a surgeon. Phil probably knows too.'