Peripheral Vision (12 page)

Serenity Prayer

In the make-up room, a woman with hair dyed black and glossy as a crow pushed tan foundation into Carly's pores as if she was puttying a cracked wall. She had already whipped Carly's hair into a concoction the shape of a soft-serve ice-cream. Now she coloured Carly's eyebrows mahogany and her eyelids wine-grape purple.

‘The studio lights bleach colours,' the woman had said. ‘If I don't do this you'll look like a ghost.'

Carly closed her eyes as a tissue was pasted to her face. When the make-up woman peeled away the tissue, the imprint of a colourful clown came away with it.

‘All done. Enjoy the show.'

She unclipped the napkin from Carly's neck and stood back, waiting with her hands on her hips, while Carly gathered her handbag and coat and tried to get up from the chair without seeing her gaudy make-up again in the mirror.

Next room down the hall was the Green Room.

It is exactly where she knows it will be. A table beside the door is loaded with plates of half-eaten crusty old sandwiches and limp slivers of canteloupe and honeydew melon. A grey-haired man sits in the far corner of the room tapping on a laptop. He is probably an actor or director Virginia worked with at the Queens Theatre.

‘Hi,' Carly says, not too loudly, but loudly enough for an older man to hear.

He looks up.

‘I was just going to introduce myself. I'm Virginia's sister. We might have met?'

‘Virginia?' His fingers are still tracing along the trackpad as though his brain has gone on worrying at a problem while he gazes blankly at Carly. He could be a fixture of the room, an automaton. He'll be working at that computer into eternity as other guests come and go, as programs rise and fall in the ratings, as television itself disappears into electronic obscurity.

‘Virginia Sherman. Who the show's about today.'

‘No, I don't know her.' He returns his attention to the laptop.

The door swings open, knocking Carly further into the room.

‘Jesus, sorry! Are you all right?' A young man presses his hands gently on different parts of her body as if he is checking for broken bones.

Without warning Carly wants to cry.

This is what she expected to happen. She would walk into a television studio and tell a funny story about her talented movie-star sister to a crowd of adoring fans. Next week this scene would be broadcast to a national audience in the millions. Carly's painted face, her cone hair, would be splashed across the nation while she relived the nightmare on the couch in her lounge room as the hard drive recorded her for posterity. She'd push aside the comforting arms of her husband and cry in jags and sob about having been born the dumpy, awkward sister, the plain one, the failure. This is what would happen when she stepped onto the stage of
This Is Your Life
. Her resentment, her jealousy, rolling across the screen for the entertainment of friends, enemies and strangers. What could be worse?

‘Yes, I'm fine,' she told the young man, slipping back into her usual acquiescent self. ‘Let's get this over with.'

‘I'll take you to the side of the stage. You'll be able to hear yourself being introduced. Step onto the white marker tape at the edge of the stage and wait till your eyes adjust to the studio lights. Then you'll hear Mac ask you to come on stage. Someone will escort you to your seat.' He was saying all this as they wound their way through dark corridors that smelled like old cheese.

‘I'll never find my way back,' she joked, but it wasn't a joke. She thought of poor lost Persephone. When she taught the Year Tens the Persephone story, one boy told her it was no big deal to live half the year in hell. ‘We already do, miss,' he said. ‘It's called school.'

The kind young man smiled. ‘That's all right. I'll come and get you when you're done.' His hand touched Carly's elbow to prompt her each time they had to turn a corner. He had a downy blonde fuzz where he was probably trying to grow a beard, and his pants were too short. He was an innocent child guiding her into this dirty world of entertainment.

They pass through a section of the corridor where the lights have failed. The sudden darkness leaches sight from her eyes. Carly grasps the sleeve of the young man. He whispers to her to be brave, that if she can stay strong it will be over before she knows it. Endurance, that's all she needs – to play out every step until things reach their natural end. Carly isn't sure exactly what he's talking about.

They come into light again and she laughs with a sick feeling in her belly and she almost wants to turn back into the darkness.

‘Endure,' he whispers again, pushing her in the small of the back with more force than she expected, propelling her forward.

They reach the maw of the stage. The boy nudges her forward a further few centimetres. ‘Hang on till you hear yourself invited on stage. I'll be waiting back here when it's over.' He turns and sprints away down the passage, leaving her at the threshold.

When Carly told the other teachers she was doing this they interrogated her. ‘Are you going to meet anyone famous besides your sister?' ‘When will it be broadcast?' ‘What will you wear?' They sent out sparks of excitement and anxiety and envy as if this was the most important thing that would ever happen to Carly, as if she was getting what everyone else wanted without having earned it. ‘But you hardly ever watch TV!' one complained.

From the shadows at the side of the stage, the lights were so bright Carly couldn't see who was there. There was only an eye-stinging brilliance and the sound of many hands applauding. She stepped onto the white tape that marked the boundary between this world and the next. Her eyes closed involuntarily against the glare.

The boy had said Mac would introduce her. Who was Mac? The usual host was Roger Young. He would stand to the side at the beginning of the show, holding the big red book and reading out facts about the person's life so you could try to guess who it might be before the curtains swept open and the chosen person was revealed.

‘And what did she say about this?' Carly heard a man say in a smooth caramel voice.

‘She doesn't know,' Virginia answered.

‘Well then,' the man who must be Mac said. ‘Perhaps it's time she found out?'

For a stupid moment Carly wondered if the episode was about her and her life. A pathetic flare of ambition, like her colleagues had shown when they heard she'd be on TV. As if she'd had any kind of life worth talking about.

Her eyes are adjusting to the glare. An audience of women on raked seats faces the stage. A man sits high on the steps in the aisle between banks of audience members. He is holding a microphone and speaking toward the stage. He has a head of hair a woman would envy: thick, curly and golden. The hair of a god, or a luscious incubus. His face is familiar, soft-focus familiar, in the way photos of movie stars are familiar or like a story that you're telling someone but you trail off in confusion as you begin to wonder if it was a dream or a sitcom plot or if it actually happened.

All she needed to do was give the speech and sit down and smile. Perhaps kiss Virginia on the cheek and hug her the way they used to do when they met in public.

The stage was nothing more than the floor in front of the audience. Virginia, Carly's glamorous actress sister, sat in a chair beside Carly's husband, cradling his hand on her lap. No, cradling his hand
in
her lap and gazing into his face.

When she sees this, Carly's body is caught in a strange willy-willy. Her scalp stings as if her hair is being torn from her head. She retches. Something is scratching at her ankles – claws or thorns or unkempt fingernails. Then the willy-willy passes, leaving her uncannily calm.

Mac lounged on the steps between two banks of raked audience seats. He invited Carly to come in as if they were in his living room. Like a starstruck teenager she stepped into the light. A slant to the floor caused her to lurch and totter toward Glenn and Virginia. Her husband and her sister. She repeated it in her head. Husband and sister.

Glenn couldn't or wouldn't look in her direction. She had only seen him three hours ago, at breakfast this morning, where he was his usual surly morning self, grunting at the coffee maker and pulling on his suit jacket while he chewed at a piece of toast. How could he be here?

‘Ladies and gentlemen, Mrs Carly Kantzakis,' Mac said, his voice rebounding from the studio's make-believe walls. ‘Someone help the lady.'

Amid a cacophony of whistles and shouts and jeers from the audience, a man in a tight T-shirt bounced over to her and gripped her upper arm with his massive hand.

‘This way, lady,' he muttered. He half lifted Carly to the podium, where an empty chair faced her sister and her husband.

She feels surprisingly flat. Perhaps it is shock. Perhaps you lose your sense of humiliation and rage under shockingly bright lights. She doesn't feel much at all, and that seems wrong. She crosses her legs, hears the rasp of stocking on stocking. Does it again the other way, hears it again. Time stops once more, a space of silence and stillness as she crosses and recrosses her legs in a queer seated dance. After a period that is nothing but the movement of her legs in their rhythmic nonsense scissoring, the sound comes back, distant at first – a crowd from afar, growing louder until she lifts her face and rage smashes up against her calm.

Mac leaned in. ‘Carly, I think you've guessed what's going on here. How do you feel?'

The camera dolly trundled toward her. She wished she could wipe off the lurid painted face but it was too late for that. It was too late, wasn't it? Mac cleared his throat to get the attention of the crowd before he lifted the microphone to his lips.

‘Carly, do you have anything to say to your sister? Your husband?'

She raised her head. Why would they do this? Was Virginia broke again? Stupid alcoholic Glenn had no idea what he was getting into. Carly had lived with Princess Virginia and her neediness all her life.

The calls from the studio audience were gathering like a rehearsed chorus into a chant and accompanying clap.

‘Car-ly. Car-ly. Car-ly.'

It makes her smile. As if she is the famous sister, the one loved by the tabloids. Is this how it feels to be golden? People calling to her. Her name turned into a song. Everyone wanting her yet knowing hardly anything about her. Mac smiles as if he has heard her thoughts. She turns her face away, blushing. When she glances back he is still smiling at her. Space and time are curving around her body, tucking her into a tight uncomfortable fold
as Mac reads her mind and keeps smiling.

Carly could see the iris of the camera opening. She knew the kind of thing they were hoping she'd say, the weeping and shrieking they wanted her to do. She had grown up with television and its conventions. She had laughed at the women on shows like this who lunged at their husbands, tried to tear their hair out, who moaned and wept, who bared themselves.

But Carly didn't want to be one of those women. She was here on stage, betrayed, sure enough, but by a man she had already grown to despise. Sitting there, watched by a crowd of screamers, she could only come up with this one thought. The words popped out of her mouth, harmless missiles out of a peashooter. ‘Why didn't I leave you years ago?'

A small man holding up a large placard raced backward and forward across the studio floor in front of the audience. The placard said
Laugh
. Scattered on the floor at the side of the stage were more that said
Scream
and
Howl
and
Hiss
and other instructions for whatever he wanted the audience to do. Right now they were doing it all at once. A woman in clingy aqua pants barrelled down the stairs, arms flailing, calling out that Carly should punch the dirty bastard. She was caught at the bottom of the steps by two hefty men and escorted backstage to the cheering of the crowd.

Mac stood. He tamped down the noise with hand gestures until there were only a few catcalls coming from the back rows.

‘Glenn? Would I be wrong to say your wife doesn't seem as surprised as you expected?'

Glenn's lip curled in that special way that Carly used to find sexy. ‘Don't believe that shit. She's surprised all right. This is her fake “I don't give a damn” routine. The one I've put up with for nine years.'

‘Hey!' an angry voice shouted down from the top tier of the seats. A slim woman in jeans and a T-shirt with her hair in two girlish pigtails sprang out of her seat. ‘You didn't like your wife? Why'd you stay? Why didn't you run off with the famous sister instead of humiliating this woman here on TV?'

As the crowd applauded, Glenn looked off to the side. He sighed, the way he did with Carly when he had no answer to a question and he wanted to pretend the question was stupid to begin with. But the woman wasn't having any of that. She pushed aside the blonde next to her and clambered across three more people to reach the aisle, where she put her hands on her hips and her lips to the microphone that a stagehand had raced up the stairs to hold in front of her face.

‘You answer me, mister. Why are you doing this?'

Virginia lifted the stage microphone and murmured into it. ‘It's not his fault. We fell in love. We didn't know how to tell her.'

‘You shut up, you washed-up hack!'

Virginia shook her head, lip trembling, features emulsified into the vulnerable haunted face that got her into movies in the first place.

Pigtail woman jabbed her scarlet-nailed finger at Virginia. ‘A slut like you took my husband away too but at least she didn't go on national television to tell me.'