The Full Ridiculous (15 page)

As Declan’s final exams draw closer, he seems to be studying less and less. Wendy initiates a program where he brings his books to the kitchen table and works under her watchful eye. Sometimes she joins him at the table, doing her own work.

Sometimes she prompts him as she prepares dinner. ‘Have you finished your maths revision?’ ‘What page are you on?’ ‘You’ve been on that page for a while, haven’t you?’

As the questions proceed, an ambience of general annoyance sets in. Declan is annoyed by the questions. Wendy is annoyed by having to ask them. But there is no question that Wendy must indeed
ask
the questions. Declan is capable of staring at a page for fifteen minutes without reading a word. They both know this but it doesn’t stop the situation from becoming unbearable.

Within a couple of weeks Declan is irritated by the mere sight of his mother and takes to avoiding her. Whenever she forces an interaction he answers in a bored monotone, which clearly hurts her feelings. You snap at him not to speak to his mother like that and Wendy snaps at you because you are not being helpful.

Your niece, Mel, is ten years older than Declan and he adores her. You all adore her because she enlivens your house with her funny stories and infectious laughter. Mel is a qualified teacher but is currently completing a PhD in psychology with the intention of becoming a school counsellor. She’s looking for part-time work until she graduates at the end of the year and so it seems the perfect solution to offer Mel a job as Declan’s tutor.

She comes each day as he arrives home from school. Together they complete the ritual of afternoon tea and then commence a couple of hours’ study before dinner. You hear them bantering as Mel asks pretty much the same questions that Wendy asked only days earlier. Only now there are peals of laughter and furtive giggles and long periods of silence while actual work is done.

‘Read that paragraph.’

‘I’ve read it.’

‘Okay. Turn the page and read the next one. And don’t you roll your eyes at me.’

Declan flicks Mel’s pen across the table. It clatters onto the floor. Mel punches him on the shoulder and tells him to pick it up. He holds her gaze, smirking, and then scrambles on the floor for longer than is necessary to retrieve the pen. He resurfaces and attempts to balance the pen on his nose. Mel removes the pen and points to the page. Declan reads. And so the miracle unfolds—Declan studies without resenting you for making him do it.

Mel has an inkling of your financial position and tries to refuse payment. She usually stays for dinner and attempts to mount a case that this is adequate compensation. You argybargy back and forth and eventually settle on an hourly rate that is far below what she is worth and far above what you can afford. Later, when you discuss this with Wendy, she remains strangely silent. When you press her she says, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to pay for it.’

You don’t know how you’re going to pay for it either, until Ingrid calls and says Mel has told her about coaching Declan. She says that she thinks it’s a great idea but she knows things can’t be easy financially. ‘So why don’t you borrow a few grand from your cashed-up big sister,’ she asks, ‘just to tide you over?’

You don’t even make a pretence of refusing. Knowing you’re feeling uncomfortable about it, though, Ingrid adds, ‘I know you’d do the same for me, kiddo.’ If she were standing in front of you, you would kiss her feet.

When you tell your architect friend Felipe about your niece’s daily sessions he accuses you of outsourcing your parenting responsibilities.

‘It’s your job to make sure your kid sits down and does his work,’ says Felipe, ‘not your niece’s.’

You suppose he’s right but you don’t care because it’s working. And anyway there’s something about Mel being your niece, about keeping it in the family, that makes it seem okay.

Later, in the shower, it occurs to you that in many societies, extended families play this role in the raising of children. Aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents all muck in to share the load with parents. You make a mental note to tell Felipe that he is pigeonholing you as the patriarch of a nuclear family when really you are engaged in a much broader family structure. You’re imagining the defeated look on Felipe’s face as you tell him this when you realise that Felipe won’t actually give a flying fig. Felipe will, in fact, have completely forgotten the conversation. Felipe pretended to be excited by your hospital ceilings epiphany but had no clue what you were talking about when you raised it during the crazy cop crisis.

What a sad little man you have become, financed by your wife and big sister, gloating over non-existent victories in the bathroom mirror.

20

Despite the veil of medication—or possibly because of it—you are able to write again. You don’t care whether it’s good or bad; you’re glad to be writing again.

Actually that’s not true.
You care deeply whether it’s good or bad but you know that it’s important to let the words pour out. The words have come just when you thought they might never come again. If you continually ask yourself the dreaded question,
But is this good enough?
you will stem the flow. So you write. You just write.

The local paper,
Village Voice
, takes two of your reviews for recent movies and asks you to do a regular column on the art-house-ish movies run by the independent cinema a few suburbs from your home. The money isn’t great but it helps with some of the bills. Wendy is relieved and, not that Ingrid asks, but it feels good to tell your sister that you are generating income. It also gives you the confidence boost you need to return to ‘serious’ writing—your book.

Or so you think.

You decide to begin work on your chapter about Australian movie stars. You have interviewed most of them before and have all the relevant contact details for their publicists and managers, so you start to write emails requesting interviews. As part of the request, you try to paint a picture of what your book is about in broad brushstrokes.

And this is where you come undone.

Every time you attempt to do this, you sound like a self-important wanker. Again and again you try to strike an engaging tone but it all ends in a horrible road accident of not-quite-the-right adjectives colliding in overly elaborate sentences.

You ask yourself whether this is a symptom of a larger disease; maybe you can’t construct a strong paragraph about your book because you don’t really know what your book is about. Or maybe you know what your book is about but you don’t have clear enough vision to write it. Or maybe you have no talent and should just go back to bed.

Ah, yes, that’s it.

You have no talent. You
did
once but it’s gone. It was run over by a car and died.

You take your worn copy of
Zorba the Greek
from the shelf. It’s a touchstone book for you; every couple of years you re-read it for inspiration. You love the vivid language but most of all you love the character of Zorba. With his joyful, irrepressible lust for life, he is, in your opinion, one of the great characters of literature. And cinema; you loved the movie too.

Once Felipe asked to borrow
Zorba
and you handed it over reluctantly. Felipe didn’t read it but his wife Jools did. She told Felipe it was a load of misogynistic twaddle. You can see where she’s coming from but you think she missed the point. You prefer to think of it as a celebration of spiritedness. And a window into a pre-feminist world. As far as you’re concerned, Zorba is
the man
.

You open to one of your favorite passages, hoping to vanish into the glorious prose, but it doesn’t do the trick. You decide to clean your keyboard instead.

Days later you try to describe your writing crisis to your psychiatrist, Doctor Maurice, but even as you hear yourself crapping on about it, you are disgusted by its lack of importance in the grand scheme of things. You confess how embarrassed you are to be making such a fuss when far worse things are happening to people every day—to the war-torn, the sick, the poor (to mention a few billion). And most of them just get on with it.
Why can’t you?

Doctor Maurice asks you to stop comparing yourself to everybody else—you can do that eventually but right now it is important for your recovery that you focus on yourself. You need to ‘observe’ what is happening to you and accept it. You don’t need to ‘attach’ to the bad things that have happened; they don’t have to ‘define’ you. But you need to ‘walk around’ the bad events in your life and say, ‘This happened to me.’

Acknowledgement, he tells you, is the best way to move forward. Currently you are so busy shouting ‘Why aren’t I better? I should be better!’ that you are impeding your own recovery.

This makes sense, you suppose, so you decide to give it a whirl.

Rosie comes home, white and weepy. It takes you ages to coax any information out of her but it turns out that Eva Pessites has also applied to go to Mount Karver. Just when Rosie is about to make a fresh start at a new school, the very reason she needs to make a fresh start will be coming with her. Eva will poison this new well too.

‘Well, if she goes to Mount Karver maybe you could stay at Boomerang.’

As soon as you say it, you know it’s a dumb idea. Rosie groans and heads off to her room. You follow her down the hall with a second offering. ‘Maybe she won’t be accepted.’

Rosie looks at you in disbelief. ‘Dad. It’s Eva. She gets accepted into everything.’

21

Elsie Schmetterling (the German word for ‘butterfly’, she explains to practically everyone she meets) is the personal assistant to Mount Karver’s headmaster, Doctor Ignatius Quinn. One very hot summer day three years ago, Elsie and Wendy engineered the canteen rosters together (Wendy as representative of the mothers committee) and they have been chummy ever since. She hugs Wendy warmly and appears to be thrilled to meet you and Rosie.

Elsie ushers you into a vast office where Doctor Quinn waits to greet you, standing at attention. Unlike Christina Bowden’s room at Boomerang, this place is designed to impress. Where her office is cramped and practical, his is gleaming and cavernous; unless you are a sultan or an emperor or a curator of antiquities you are not important enough to be here.

Doctor Quinn settles you into a cluster of wingback chairs overlooking the immaculately manicured front lawn, where a flagpole sprouts from a bed of riotous pansies. An Australian flag flutters majestically in just the right amount of wind. The three of you watch in silence while the headmaster checks some papers on the mahogany acreage of his desk. Scanning the collection of period Australian art on the oak-panelled walls, you calculate that if you sold just half of them you could live like a king for the rest of your life.

Rosie takes a breath to calm her nerves. You wink reassuringly at her. Wendy clears her throat and the headmaster sinks into the wingback chair next to you. He moves quickly from the sound of the mower on the front lawn, to the smell of freshly cut grass, to the gun incident outside the canteen. You try to make light of it without sounding flippant but he unnerves you by revealing that the police are ‘still making inquiries’.

‘About what?’ asks Wendy. ‘Are they questioning students?’

They’re not questioning students but they are talking to teachers, trying to determine the various procedures and permissions that allowed Declan to stage a fake robbery in the canteen. Apparently they are ‘put out’ because they weren’t given the ‘appropriate warning’.

‘Appropriate warning?’ you ask, feeling your hackles rise.

The headmaster is sympathetic, apologetic even, but wonders whether you may not have inflamed police interest by not allowing them to interview you directly. You didn’t know he knew this. The police must have told him about your refusal to go into the station for questioning.

Wendy steps in to explain that the hysterical performance of the cop that day convinced you that you could not count on fair or rational treatment and that you therefore felt it wise to remove yourselves from the equation and place matters in the hands of legal counsel. She does not elaborate about your dealings with Constable Lance Johnstone and Rosie prior to the gun incident, or add that he is the last person on earth you would trust.

Doctor Quinn listens, nodding empathetically, before he expertly wraps up the conversation and moves on to the real reason for this meeting: Rosie’s application for admission to Mount Karver.

As he turns his benign attention to your daughter, it strikes you that he is one of those people with a gift for making you feel like you are the only person in the room. He asks a couple of questions about Rosie’s interest in drama and her prowess on the soccer field. (This is encouraging because you know that Mount Karver is keen to win the interschool girls soccer comp.)

Rosie answers in a forthright but modest way that neither seeks to impress nor downplays her achievements. You feel proud of your daughter, of how she is handling herself in these challenging circumstances. It’s time for her to step up to the plate and that is exactly what she is doing.

Then, from out of nowhere, ‘Do you get angry very much, Rose?’ he asks.

You and Wendy exchange a look that says
Huh?

‘Do you ever get into fights?’

You and Wendy exchange a look that says
Uh-huh!

Wendy stops the interview. She asks Rosie to go outside while you talk privately to Doctor Quinn. Rosie looks startled and even the headmaster looks a little rattled. As Rosie leaves the room, traversing three thick Persian carpets, you once again sit in silence until the huge oak door clicks shut behind her.

Wendy turns from the door to the headmaster and asks why he is pursuing this line of questioning. Doctor Quinn pauses and in that moment you know for certain that he knows about the fight with Eva Pessites and that he knows that you know that he knows.

Wendy asks whether anyone from Boomerang has spoken to him about Rosie.

This guy is no dummy. He’s had years of managing tricky parents and you can’t help but be a little awed by the way he ducks and weaves through Wendy’s barrage of questions without giving any solid answers. You are left with three certainties: