Portable Curiosities (12 page)

Overjoyed, Silvia beamed at her eleven bridesmaids of the pursed lips and lipped purses, who were also swathed in photorealistic, life-sized sunflower gowns. Ralph couldn't bring himself to look at the dozen floating heads and their painted smiles
.
He stared at his trusty sneakers and bounced up and down on the balls of his feet, as if he were a lunchtime runner in the CBD, sporting a company T-shirt, short shorts and hairy legs, and waiting at a traffic light for the little man to go green.

At the reception, Ralph watched Silvia giggle as her bridesmaids arranged her train, helping to prepare her for the throwing of the bouquet. He turned to his PA.

‘Put the divorce in my calendar for a year from now.'

‘Pardon?' said the PA, who was hitching up her dress to jostle for a good bouquet-catching position on the dance floor.

‘Look at her fussing over those flowers,' said Ralph. ‘This one's too slow for my liking.'

The PA wondered why Ralph had a problem with Silvia's speed when really what he should have been concerned about were the myriad ways in which Silvia's face looked like that of a powdered horse.

As Ralph watched the sunflowers arc through the air, he resolved that one day he would find and marry a girl from a wealthy racing family, who understood the need for speed – someone unlike this woman with the slow red lips, who looked like a thoroughbred but was sure to usher him to a premature death-by-boredom in between sips of Lady Grey in the tearooms of endless swish hotels.

*

After Silvia, there was a procession of women. Ralph chose them as young as they legally came until it dawned on him that their youth was making him feel older, not younger.

They would look at him out of the corners of their eyes, toss their hair to one side and smooth out the laps of their assorted dresses, asking:

‘Bill Gates? Is he a comedian?' and, ‘Which Korea is evil, East or West?'

Ralph was strolling one day down his hallway of cover shots when he stopped suddenly. He stepped over to one of the more recent pictures and put his face so close to it that his real nose touched his magazine nose. Staring deep into his own eyes, Ralph realised that the photographs in these platinum frames had been recording not just his career successes from year to year but also his physical deterioration.

He hurried back to the very first picture and walked again down the hallway, scrutinising each photograph. He saw for the first time how the two lines on his forehead were settling into position, how the groove between his eyebrows was deepening into a chasm and how the skin on his neck was growing more and more like that of a plucked chicken.

After that day, he refused all cover shots. At least in the world of glossy print, Ralph was preserved at a trim, blue-eyed fifty.

*

Old age, when it truly arrived, made Ralph spill cups of tea and fall off ladders. It put glue in his eyes and made him smell like old coats. His knuckles swelled and his skin turned to creased leather, marked with inexplicable stains. He played unwilling host to stray white hairs that reached out in curls from his nose and ears. The hair on his head turned to straw. It sat at strange angles and couldn't be brushed flat into an acceptable hairstyle. It rustled in the wind, like bamboo, and dropped off with the autumn breeze in accordance with a schedule to which Ralph had not agreed.

Ralph began to wear a promotional cap from the Whistling Lakes Golf Club,
where he was a member
.

‘I'm getting a thousand a second to wear this,' he declared to anyone who would listen, though the real purpose of the hat was to keep each hair on his head for at least a solid day longer than its use-by date.

To accompany the line, he would mime a golf swing and squint out at the horizon.

‘A physical representation of my financial hole-in-one,' he would add for those who stared at him without comprehension.

They were justifiably confused about what the old man was trying to mime. His agility wasn't what it used to be and the swing ended up looking more like a prolonged tai chi
move that might be called Painting the Upside Down Boat Rainbow of the Emperor's Blue Mooncake.

Although Ralph's finances were doing brilliantly on his metaphorical golf course, they were, in reality, heading for disaster.

Ralph had once been considered a game-changing entrepreneurial wizard. The business model on which his company was founded had been copied so frantically across the globe that commentators declared there had not been a craze this crazily crazy since the Dutch tulip mania of the 1600s.

Unfortunately, it also turned out that the crazily crazy craze in companies that bought and sold companies that bought and sold companies was unsustainable.

The bubble burst with Ralph inside it, mid-swing.

On the day Ralph's fortune performed a vanishing act in the top stories of every major news outlet, Ralph's latest wife – who had been raised in a greyhound-racing dynasty and had the glint of acquisition in her eye – became distracted by an attractive piece of man meat. In the instant it flashed by, she decided to seize the opportunity and leave this doddering fool behind because if time was fleeting, she would beat it.

*

When it came time for Ralph to move to a nursing home, only Two was left to guide him into the waiting taxi.

Razza was long gone. He'd sat down and calculated, with a spreadsheet, the future growth of his corporate career, consequently jumping ship before the bursting of Ralph's bubble, and taking up a new gig as an avatar, Bazza, for the mining magnate with the penchant for steamrollers.

As for One, she had long since used the skills she had gained from the Ralph Method to escape across the ocean.

At fifteen, she had practised her getaway by swimming Bass Strait. Ralph had hired a film crew to record the attempt. The waves on the day had been high and treacherous and it looked like One would have to give up.

In a short window of calm across the water, Ralph had used a fishing rod to lower a bottle of liquid breakfast from the boat to his daughter. One trod water and drank from the bottle. She had been daubed in sunscreen and still had streaks of it on her cheeks and chin.

‘Drink it all,' shouted Ralph.

‘Yes, Ralph,' said One.

When she was done with the breakfast, Ralph lowered a replacement pair of goggles.

‘Make sure you get the goggles on right,' shouted Ralph.

‘Yes, Ralph,' said One.

‘Just ninety-two kilometres to go,' said a commentator who had come as part of the crew hire package. ‘Do you think you'll make it?'

‘Do you think I'll make it? One day I'm going to swim so far you can't catch me,' said One, and she looked dead straight into the camera.

Ralph twitched.

‘It isn't humanly possible to swim from here to another country,' said Ralph as One resumed her freestyle. The camera stayed on him as he concentrated on winding up the fishing line. ‘She's delirious from the swim. Delirious from the swim,' he repeated over and over to no one and everyone and himself.

He maintained this conviction until the day she really did jump into the ocean to swim far, far away.

One had left Two a note sticking out of his Freud.

Some things just can't be fixed
, it said,
and Ralph is one of them.

When Two discovered that One had swum away from home, he refused to leave his room for weeks.

His life, he knew, had been ruined by scrawny arms. If he had been stronger and better with a paddle, One might have decided to take him with her.

He had always assumed they would make a break together, in one defining moment when the past would drop cleanly away. But now he was stuck here, alone, on this great fucking island continent, a failed disciple of the Ralph Method.

Two spent all his time watching an old Hollywood farce on repeat. The plot of the film involved a gumshoe who was hot on the trail of an international double agent in a purple cape and waxed moustache. A dashed line on a cartoon map tracked for the audience the movements of the villain from Belize to Cairo to Saint Petersburg to the East Siberian Sea, where the line finally petered out and was replaced with a big white question mark.

And Two, in the darkness of his room, would begin to cry, no longer knowing the whereabouts of that one person who would have put her hand on his shoulder at a time like this.

*

On the day the taxi arrived to take his father to the nursing home, Two was already fifty. Decades before, he had made what Ralph had declared to be The Most Irrational, Economically Humiliating Career Choice Possible For This Historical Moment. He had become a poet.

To pay the rent, he worked six days a week at the country's fastest-growing gym chain. His job was to make phone calls to individuals who had signed up in shopping centres for free gym trials. Sometimes he managed to arrange for them to come in for a personalised introduction to their local branch; other times he was told to shut his face,
you Indian call centre freak
.

Two worked nights on his poetry and had chronic injuries from typing, so that he went around with his wrists permanently in bandages. At first, his colleagues at the gym thought he had been overdoing the wrist curls, but given his demonstrated lack of interest in physical activity, as well as his enduring inability to achieve any of his annual performance targets, they later came to believe that he was such a failure in life that he couldn't even succeed in committing suicide.

Two was visiting Ralph in the nursing home when Ralph asked, as he often did, what had become of Two II.

‘Council worker,' said Two. ‘They pay him to get chewing gum off the footpath with a putty knife.'

In reality, Stefan had given up lying for marbles and now worked in a glass tower, lying instead for thousand-dollar dress shoes to go with his thousand-dollar suits.

‘What have you been up to?' asked Ralph.

‘Funny you should ask,' said Two. The reason for his visit was to announce to Ralph that he had had a piece accepted by the arts magazine
Human Waste
. The magazine's point of difference from other underground publications was that it was printed on recycled toilet paper and came in a roll.

Two unwound the magazine to square twenty-three, on which his poem was printed, and showed it to Ralph.

‘It's only eighteen words long,' said Ralph.

‘Twenty, if you include the title.'

‘How much did they pay you for it?'

‘A six-pack of blank toilet rolls.'

‘So, a third of a roll per word,' said Ralph. ‘They got a good deal there.'

‘But,' said Two, ‘what if this poem is the answer to the meaning of life?'

‘Is it?' asked Ralph. ‘Is the answer in this line about the difference between spiral and flat pasta?'

Two saw his point. But what they both failed to realise, like all those who miss the secret of the Universe even though it is right under their noses, was that the answer lay in the enjambed line about the extra virgin olive oil.

Ralph, on his own initiative, conducted hourly tests of the nursing home's emergency call system.

‘Just confirming response times are on the bleeding edge,' he would explain when staff arrived.

He was on pills to regulate his heartbeat, pills to thin his blood, pills to reduce his cholesterol levels and pills to strengthen his bones. He was on pills to regulate his anxiety, pills to numb his depression and pills to make him sleep. His legs had given way completely, everything sounded to him like he was stuck at the end of a padded tunnel, and he peed every time he sneezed.

Two became acutely concerned about all that was not going on in the old man's brain. Ralph's mind had begun to forget everything at an accelerating rate. In the space of a day, he had lost the ability to read the difference between three and nine o'clock. Once, he had even gone missing from the home and was found outside a chess convention attempting to bully a table lamp into taking him back.

The nursing home's resident psychiatrist was sent to observe Ralph's conversations with inanimate objects. Ralph assumed the psychiatrist was his PA and ordered her to send for Razza to be old and sick in his place, because Ralph didn't have time for all this crap.

Ralph's mind deteriorated to a stage where there was no way he would even be able to pick his nurses out of a line-up, which later became a problem when one really did need to be picked out of a line-up for putting Ralph's Culturally and Linguistically Diverse roommate, Anastasio, in an acid bath.

Two visited every morning. He would retie the shoelaces of Ralph's sneakers, switch on Ralph's hearing aids and whisper in his ear: ‘Let's go.'

He would haul Ralph into his wheelchair, spin it around and run him up and down corridors at unnatural, dizzying speeds.

Then they would rest. Two would spoon porridge into Ralph's mouth as they sat outside under a hexagonal pergola, next to a shrivelled woman with crimped hair who was convinced she was inside the command centre of an Unidentified Flying Object and had been sent to beg the alien-Two for mercy on behalf of the human race.

The porridge would dribble down Ralph's chin while Two talked to him about speed. About how fast Freud had come up with his theories, even though they were the work of a lifetime. About how you can only truly appreciate how fast a car is going by watching from the side of the road, rather than having your foot on the pedal.

And every day Ralph gripped the seat of his wheelchair and felt like throwing up, but he managed to force a smile as he waited for this young stranger's little romantic scene to be over. The boy, after all, was wearing bandages on his wrists, and Ralph knew to be careful with suicidal fools.

Ralph couldn't stem the bleeding of his heart but he didn't know why. All he knew was that he had on his getaway shoes but there was nowhere left to run.

*