Green (36 page)

‘And you, you my friend, are the policewoman centrefold. You're the schoolteacher stripper. You're the med-student hooker.'

‘Come on, they're just a user-pays kind of family. That's all. It's how she shows she's happy. There's no harm in it. And, anyway, they're loaded. They've got heaps of cash, even if Ron is whingeing about the World.'

‘Right, so this is political now? A kind of redistribution of wealth? You're some kind of sexual Robin Hood?'

‘That's not how it works. She's a very sophisticated woman. You don't . . .' He shakes his head, as though I'm annoying him. Me and my lack of sophistication. ‘I always knew I was the kind of guy who'd have an older woman phase.'

‘How do you get to know that?'

‘It's been apparent for weeks. And she's pretty stylish, you've got admit it. She might even be about to start a column on style for their suburban newspaper. Style File, she's going to call it. Except she doesn't know whether it should be Stile File with Is, or Style Fyle with Ys.'

‘Well, stile with an I is a means of getting over a fence. A couple of bits of wood.'

‘There you go then. Y it is.'

‘Isn't rhyme enough? Don't the two of you know when to stop?'

‘Hey, how's this for cool—Style Fyle cool—sometimes, if she sees a white top she really likes, she'll buy two of them, but she'll change the buttons on one so that it works for a different set of occasions.'

 

 

 

15

 

 

 

S
ome
days
I think there's a whole world in Frank's head to which I don't have a visa. And it's a place med students could go to do psych on their electives, but they might never come back.

I give up running a morals argument, since it doesn't counter much of Frank's reasoning, anyway. I tell him about the Todds—the important parts of how I see them—and at least he listens, but I don't think it'll change much. Not immediately. They're a family, that's the thing. He's messing with a family now. It's not one of those times when he inserts himself into someone else's month-long relationship, figuring that if it breaks up that's where it was heading anyway.

Maybe there are some problems between Ron and Zel. Maybe that's how Ron ends up talking to me. Or maybe there aren't any of the problems Frank thinks there are, and there's a lot of Ron invested in his self-made-man status. He doesn't want the World to let him down, he doesn't want to be toothless. He wants to keep Zel in her endless wardrobe of white clothes and her gold jewellery and her tan so deep it looks like it took medical intervention rather than mere sun exposure. He wants to keep Sophie admiring him the way she does, and wanting to be a success in business because he is. He doesn't say that, and he doesn't need to.

I don't quite know how I end up being a part of it, but someone has to be on his side right now. And the food's not bad. I shouldn't have mentioned Michael's to Frank. It's the best restaurant I've ever been to—the only restaurant like that I've ever been to, and maybe the best in town. I decide not to tell him about the brush that was brought over to sweep the table between courses, or the prices, or any of the other mad fanciness of the place. Frank'd love all that. I think it's the lure of proximity to that kind of life that might be partly what draws him to Zel. Something must.

The other reason I don't tell him too many details about lunch is because I watched Ron put his teeth into their last pepper steak, and it only made me realise that the problems won't be fixed by a place like Michael's. Not the teeth, not anything else. All the money spent today hardly bought him a diversion. And, since money's one of the problems, I understand today's spending of it even less. I felt guilty about eating, matching him course for course all the way to the profiteroles, but there's no doubt that it's what I was expected to do.

So instead of telling Frank what Ron spent to buy his teeth their second-last lunch, I tell him he should be fairer to that family. But he doesn't see that he's being unfair. He doesn't see that fairness has anything to do with it.

If this gets out, Ron will fall apart. That's my prediction. Ron will fall apart, Zel might openly be with Frank until that falls apart, World of Chickens will fall apart and I can't imagine how Sophie would struggle through it all.

But that doesn't occur to me until later, when I'm in my bedroom in the dark. Lying here, not sleeping, having eaten far too much today. Lying here, being quietly angry with Frank for saying things like: ‘Look, it's not such a big issue. Shit like this happens all the time.'

Low moonlight comes in through the window and glints from the black plastic underside of a Wellington bomber on a night raid to Bremen. Clearly, my mission has at least two objectives, and must remain covert. Ron is freaking out about the teeth, and it's up to me to give him some support. At the same time, I have to work on Frank. I have to chisel away at his affair with Zel until he sees it's not right, and ends it. I am the moral guardian of the World after all, dammit.

First, Ron. I go to the pay phone in the kiosk at lunchtime on Tuesday and I give him a call to wish him luck with the teeth. It doesn't go so well.

I tell him if he keeps breathing like that he should sit down and put his head between his knees. He writes that on a piece of paper as a two-step process. He asks if he can have a contact number in case of emergencies and I tell him I'll be home by four-thirty.

 

*

 

At four twenty-eight I'm walking in the door and my mother's on the phone. She's scribbling something on a piece of paper. An address, other details.

‘Hold on a moment,' she says. ‘He's here now.' She puts her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Mister Todd. Not so good after his dental procedure. This is the receptionist I'm talking to. They're wondering if you could catch a cab into town and drive him home in his car. He says he'll pay for the cab there, and the cab home later, after dinner. Is that . . .?'

‘That's fine.'

‘Fine? Really?'

‘Yeah.'

She lifts her hand and says, ‘Tell Mister Todd he's on his way . . . Yes . . . Yes. Thank you.' She nods at the phone, and hangs up. ‘Philby . . .'

‘Sorry. I should have told you this might happen. Ron's having a full dental clearance today. He's going to end up with dentures. He's been having a lot of problems with his teeth.'

‘And you're . . . he's calling you?'

‘I said he could call if he needed any help. It seemed to be a pretty foul thing to be going through, that's all.'

‘Oh. Well, that's . . . very nice of you.'

‘Don't look so surprised. I can be nice sometimes.'

She offers me a lift but I tell her it's okay, we'll stick with the plan. There's no need for her to put herself out.

My mother has a nose for a story, and I have to keep this one from her. I can't let her lure me into her car for twenty minutes, and then crack under questioning and tell her I'm putting in an effort with Ron because Frank's sleeping with Zel. It's the people with story noses who are the worst with secrets, and I have to take the no-risk position on this one.

In the cab on the way to the city, I know I'm right.

When I get to the dentist, Ron's lying across three seats in the waiting room with a towel on his face. The receptionist says, ‘Mister Todd,' and he sits bolt upright, like a vampire from his coffin in an old silent movie. The lazy dribble of blood from the corner of his mouth doesn't help. She dabs it away with a tissue, and he blinks his heavy-lidded eyes at her, not sure what's going on.

‘Numb,' he says on the way to the car, squeezing his mouth. He slumps into the passenger seat and struggles distractedly with the seatbelt until I sort it out. His lips move, he's working at saying something. In the end he gets there, precisely and slowly. ‘I've been very heavily medicated.'

Then his head swings to the side and clunks against the window, and I don't hear much more from him.

‘Anything I should know before I drive the car?' No response. ‘Any tricks? I've never driven a Merc before.'

There's a loud spluttery snoring noise and he half lifts his head, quarter opens his eyes and says something that sounds like ‘incoming' and clunks his head against the window again. From then on, it's up to me. I check mirrors, I check the seat position, I check where everything is. I do all the checking I possibly can and then there's nothing to do but drive. Ron slips into fidgety drug-addled flashback dreams beside me as we pull out of the parking station and into the evening traffic.

The Merc, it turns out, isn't hard to handle.

‘So, Ron, are you up to giving me directions?'

Apparently not.

At the first red light, I take a look in the glove box and find registration papers with his address, and a street directory which I open in his lap. I wedge his fingers around the edges to hold it to the right page, and I discover that there's a special passenger-seat lap light for navigating. That's the kind of car this is.

The traffic moves slowly, bumper-to-bumper as we make our way to George Street. There are tapes in the glove box too, and—having never been a big Mantovani or Herb Alpert fan—I go for The Animals, some kind of ‘best of' album. I push the tape in, turn the volume up a little and wind my window down. From outside this must look like me and my coma buddy on a road trip. At the very least, it's my turn for a scene from a frat-house comedy, so I decide to play it the way any reasonable free-spirited frat-houser would and I'm singing along to ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place' as the Merc cruises down the freeway and the wind blows into my face.

 

In your hands, the Merc positively glides around the freeway's curves. Night sets in. You glimpse the city, the light-stacks of its buildings, in the rear-view mirror. Sometimes you take lunch there, three courses with bottled wine. Sometimes it's you and the Merc and this endless open road. You wonder what drugs your coma buddy is on, what he could possibly have taken that could shut his brain down so completely. When you laugh, he can't even hear you. When you sing to the music, you sing well. Where would the road take you if you were not to leave it now? What is there, past the lights of the suburbs? Where does the world begin? Somewhere, probably, beyond Mount Gravatt.

 

In my psych term, I would have called this denial. The meeting at the Rec Club last Friday week was a lesson about keeping the parts of my life separate. Soon tonight it'll be me and all the Todds at once—three of my worlds colliding. My drugged-out toothless new pal Ron, my back-stairs chicken-sharer friend Sophie and the white-clad Zel with the dark secret she doesn't even know I know. Carindale, though it's quite a way out of the city, arrives long before I'm ready for it.

Ron stirs as we turn off the main road and into the recently-planned winding streets with their very English names and oversized brick houses.

‘Number seventeen,' he says, pointing to a nearby chateau. ‘That one over there.'

We park in the driveway, and the front door opens. Zel's hair volume is silhouetted by the hall light in a very ‘Charlie's Angels'-at-fifty way and her harem pants are back-lit like the Lady Di kindergarten shot. I don't even notice at first that Sophie's following her out.

‘Oh, you poor thing,' Zel says to Ron as he clambers out of the car. ‘I've got a big packet of Kool Pops like you asked me to. Now, come on in.' She takes his arm, and then half turns to me. ‘Thanks so much for driving him home, Philip. Sophie, why don't you give Philip a tour of the house while I get your father settled.'

‘Hasn't he been here before?'

‘I don't think so. When would he have been here before? You haven't, have you, Philip.'

‘No. Hi Sophie.'

‘Don't forget downstairs, Soph,' Ron mumbles as he's led away. ‘He'll want to see it.'

‘Sorry about this,' Sophie says. ‘But it's my job. Everyone gets the tour. It used to be a display home. It was one of the first houses in this bit of Carindale.'

Sophie, here in bright light and in her own home, isn't the same as she is out the back of World of Chickens. She's more subdued, and she sticks to the script most of the time. It's odd for both of us, walking through these rooms. Things feel much more normal at the top of the back steps of the World, between the storeroom and the train line. Much more normal when one of us is dressed like a chicken, peering out of a beak to do poetry or speculate about whatever comes to mind.

The house is everything it should be—sunken lounge, exposed beams painted mission brown, a feature wall. Why is it that the ‘feature' aspect of feature walls never seems to amount to more than a simple absence of plaster? If anyone doubts how smart decorators are, they should talk to the person who came up with that concept.

The place has been built only a few years, and Sophie says, ‘Mum's still pretty houseproud,' as an explanation for the plastic runners marking out where it's okay to walk across the shag-pile carpet. ‘Of course, she does have a couple of toy poodles that shit on the carpet more than you'd expect, but humans don't get to walk on it. Figure that out.'

‘See? Life even has mysteries in your own home.'

Zel, as Frank said yesterday, is ‘a true lady of the Dale'. I'd hoped it was sarcasm, but why would it have been? Zel and her home are ready and waiting for
Vogue Living
to ring the chimes at the front door, and it'd seem very unfair if she was left doing nothing more than dispensing a few hundred words of advice a week as the writer of a southside suburban paper's style file (sorry, Style Fyle).

Sophie saves downstairs till last, and it's everything in a room that my parents would never understand—the wet bar with jokey bottle openers and souvenir cork coasters from Tweed Heads, the tall Galliano bottle on a stand, a king's head dartboard (featuring Henry VIII), a series of dogs-playing-pool pictures. She tells me that Ron knows the pictures aren't quite a substitute for a table, but it came down to a question of size.