The Thompson Gunner (17 page)

‘Honestly,' my grandmother said once after a bout of this, ‘those sisters of mine – they go to funerals of people they don't even know. They're forever looking them up in the paper. Could they not do something useful for the world instead of getting up to their nonsense?'

My mother laughed. The car wasn't even out of their street by then. I twisted around and looked through the back window, but they'd gone and the gate was shut. My grandmother kept talking as though her sisters had irritated her since about 1912, my mother kept laughing.

There were toys in the attics in those old houses, and people's best dresses from the 1920s kept on mannequins or in boxes, everything saved in case another generation might have a use for it. But there were relics in every room – old board games, a collection of spoons, a cabinet of trinkets and treasure from the world wars. It was the great-aunt who missed our Eddie who collected those, and she gave me my two favourite pieces before we left for Australia – a matchbox holder made from a shell casing at Ypres and a booklet of pictures from Hitler's glorious tour of the Rhineland at the end of the thirties. And she'd tell me how to pronounce Ypres and that soldiers called it ‘wipers' as a joke, and she'd thumb through the Hitler booklet and shake her head and tell me about the neighbour's boy, who they'd lost in the D-Day landings.

Mostly though I'd sit still and eat cake, and adult conversations would be had. There were sometimes threads
of stories that I could pick up afterwards – times past that were only alluded to, so I knew I should hold my questions until we were in the car and on the way home. There was, for example, my grandmother's cousin who married a doctor who went off the rails and had another family in another town and also took some of his own strong medicine. Which is where I thought the expression about giving someone a taste of their own medicine began, but his case seemed particular. They'd put him away for that, but he was also long dead by 1972, a figure on old peripheries and not much talked about, only talked about at all to explain the surname that my grandmother's cousin had.

All these houses are huge when I recall them, and they weren't. But I know that's a universal experience when remembering childhood places. All their staircases go up and up, and they didn't. But that's what it's like to go in there at six or seven or eight and fix that picture in your mind. If those memories are all set at eight, grandfather clocks are all twelve feet tall.

I
'M WOKEN IN THE DARK
by a male voice singing. It sounds like a nursery rhyme, but
I can't make out the words. I can hear it through the wall, interrupted by the buzzing of an appliance. There's a female voice in the background, sounding completely bored. Maybe it's people, maybe it's a TV in the next room.

They're gone when I go to the gym in the morning, even though it's early. There's a dishevelled breakfast tray outside their door, toast with a few big bites out of it, a napkin in the cereal bowl. Maybe it was the sound of shaving during the night. Why were they leaving so early? Are they going somewhere? Another city? Back to their respective houses, slipping in quietly while it's still dark? I won't ever know. I get too many fragments of stories in this job.

I let it occupy my mind for my first few laps, in case any of what I saw and heard might be clues, but it successfully keeps its mystery. Did the voice actually wake me, or did I wake first and then hear it? I don't even known that.

I'm learning more about tumble turns, learning that if you work the last stroke and pull into the wall with the turn, rather than stopping, your legs tense like a spring. The power in the turn comes because you don't stop. I can lap in nine strokes when it works well.

Months
after we met at the dinner party, Murray and I worked out that both of us had been made a clear promise by the couple hosting it that there would be no set-ups, so we figured then that it must have been one after all. We had each said that we didn't want to meet their single friends and that, if we were to meet someone, it would happen in its own good time and of its own accord. I was tired the night of the dinner party, quieter than usual and perhaps a better observer because of that. I liked his hands and the way he gave people time to tell their stories, even when he was desperate to interrupt. I recall that I liked his pert butt when he went to the bathroom too, and I had to turn around to see it so I'd obviously noticed a few things by then already. I'm all class, all class. I could cry into my goggles if I'm not careful.

I roll into my final turn, swim to the other end and get out. My phone is under my towel, and there's a new text message when I check it: ‘It's paintball tomorrow – Em.'

I call her and she says ‘You know, paintball, skirmish, little guns that fire globs of paint' as though that clarification is all it will take.

‘Would you sound half as relaxed if it was you doing it?' There's water still blocking my left ear, and I'm not yet loving the prospect of running around in battle fatigues with Elliott King.

‘Of
course not,' she says brightly. ‘Come on, Mega. Your chance to shoot some TV people. That doesn't come along every day. And it's just little globs of paint. They're really keen. I'll can it if you want me to, but I think they see it as a bonding exercise, a chance to get out and have a bit of fun before working more together.'

‘What about that thing you do with an empty milk carton where you all stand in a circle and try to keep hitting it up into the air? That's a bonding exercise.'

But the deal is done, and I know it. And there is a certain appeal to the idea of splattering TV boys with high-velocity paint.

I wonder how it'll be this time if it comes off, trying TV without so much pressure to be funny, or immediate. A writer on a comedy show once told me that the host monologues she put together had to have a laugh every two-and-a-half lines, and she meant teleprompt lines and there's not a lot of words to one of those.

When my own show went to air, it lasted five weeks and three timeslots. The media campaign ran for longer than the show. There was a two-line mention in everyone's January article on what was coming that year, along with one listing as a ‘Hot New Show', one more as a ‘Watch out for . . .' but not much else. The network had hoped for better.

The optimism – the mistaken optimism – only kicked in in the weeks before we went to air. There was wide newspaper coverage then and a lot of radio, since comedians work well on radio. There were network parties and plenty of other manufactured opportunities for me to have my photo taken. I held a lot of champagne that month, and kissed a lot of air.

The
first proper whiff of doom blew in around nine-forty a.m. on the morning after the first show was screened. I was rating a full twenty per cent below expectations. I never clawed it back and, without me knowing it that day, we were already only two weeks out from going through the motions.

When the show was axed, one of the network execs said, ‘You should have come from Sydney or Melbourne. We think that might have made it easier.' So that was what it was down to – my dumb parents, migrating to the wrong city in 1972.

The show is often not specifically remembered now, but it's there in the air when people talk to me, as some vague sense that I'm closer to genuinely famous than I once was. Sometimes I see them struggling with the vagueness of it, and I want to put them out of their misery and go, ‘TV. Remember? I was on TV in a semi-regular brief capacity. That's why I'm one small step ahead of the pack.'

At least one magazine listed my show as a ‘heroic failure' in its TV picks for that year.

A few months ago, I was trying on clothes in one of those annoying stores that doesn't have a mirror in each cubicle, and a woman started talking to me. I must have walked past her three times by then to take a look at different outfits. What she said was innocuous enough, and I've forgotten it now, but I noticed her daughter getting that agitated embarrassed look that parental behaviour can provoke in teenagers, and when I went back into the cubicle I heard her say, ‘Mum, stop it. You're hassling someone who's borderline famous.' That's where I am. Borderline famous.

And
why would any sane person wish for more? The most vacuous ambition in the world is ‘I just wanna be famous'. Be famous to sell your product, be famous to do something useful, but don't go wanting it for its own sake. Get a life. A life can be good, and is much underrated.

What's it all about, anyway – the pursuit of fame? Money? Neediness? I'd settle for a good-sized Lotto win and regular positive feedback from the right half-dozen people. That'd be enough, surely.

Not that I buy that talk from the genuinely famous about yearning for the simple life. If they did, they'd walk. Maybe they yearn for simplicity on a press junket between the day's fifteenth and sixteenth interviews, but not most of the time.

Sure, I'd take the simple life, and I can see it now – the rainforest setting, a creek out the back, a garden of mixed legumes. But I'd take it on top of the Lotto win and the positive feedback, and I'd have a guy to work it for me. And his name would be Julio, and he'd be muscular, yet lithe, and always shining with the first sweat of a morning's work. And I'd watch him hoe. Hoe, baby, hoe. Tend my vines. Already it's vines now . . .

I complicated the life I had, back home. No Julio will bring that back.

Some time ago, I set off down the track I'm on because I wanted to do the work. I want to do good work. That's another one of those Hollywood things, like yearning for
the simple life. They all ‘want to do good work'. This is so wrong. I seem to come with the full set of Hollywood pretensions, but a fraction of the fame and none of the money.

One person who remembered me after my five weeks of heroic failure was Elliott King. I had his card – Elliott King, King Pin Pictures – from meeting him at an awards ceremony while my show was in production and soon to go to air.

‘You were the best thing in it,' he said, about one of my ventures that was already gone and hadn't been nominated that night. ‘If you've got any ideas for anything in future, I'd always be interested to hear them. And it doesn't have to be comedy, either. I'm sure you can do more than that.'

Seven or eight months later I called him, with Christmas coming, a new year to plan and my show axed long before, and I told him I had an idea. I'd found his card in my bag, where it had stayed since the awards night. I'd left it there and given it no thought at the time, since I'd planned for my show to run its scheduled thirteen weeks with a likelihood of renewal.

He flew to Brisbane and he took me to lunch. He heard my idea out, and he got it. He asked the right questions, made the right observations and at the end he said, ‘We can do this.' And I walked back to the station to catch the train home, realising I had confidence for the first time in months. Confidence that it wasn't just my own mad notion that I could stretch myself, try something new and make it work.

That's what I owe him for, that one clear moment on Ann Street. More than anything else, maybe. And it's not his
fault that two years passed before the money came through to let us start work.

Felicity is later than I was expecting, so I've eaten too much bircher muesli by the time she arrives. I've replaced the appetite centre of my brain with a publicist, and that can't be healthy.

It's Friday, the itinerary tells me: celebrity canoe race practice, two interviews and an afternoon off while Felicity runs around town with Richard Stubbs.

‘It's all okay,' she says. ‘It's the pick-up time in the itinerary, not the time we have to be there to meet them. We're on schedule.'

‘And it is just practice, isn't it?' I'm overloaded with food and not feeling competent. ‘Just technique rather than anything too vigorous?'

‘And a photo shoot, maybe. You and your partner.' She leads me out through the foyer to the taxi rank, stopping on the way to pull her sunglasses out of her bag. ‘That's okay, isn't it?'

‘Sure, but why me? I mean I'm fine with it, but there'd be bigger names in the race. How I do I get the practice shot as well as the hospital shot?'

She's around the far side of the cab now, and she stops with the door half-open to give me a look, as though what I've just said is a poor attempt at false modesty. ‘I don't know the whole line-up, but maybe some of the other big interstate names are still interstate.'

‘And
my partner?'

‘I don't know. There's no butterfly swimmers, so I tried to get you a footballer. But I'm not confident.'

We drive off down Hay Street, and I'm starting to realise I haven't paddled a canoe since school. I've used a rowing machine, certainly, but not a canoe, not anything in water. And I'm going to get screwed when it comes to partner selection. The comedian always gets screwed because it's allegedly funny.

The Barrack Street Jetty is only a few minutes away, hardly a cab ride at all.

As we go in search of the people we're meeting, I can't stop myself telling Felicity that my arms are a bit tired from swimming. I was lapping less than an hour ago, after all. It's my first pre-emptive move on an excuse, and she sees it for what it is and laughs and says, ‘Yeah, right.'

At the far end of the jetty there's a canoe being lowered into the water. I'd settle for a pole vaulter – they've got good shoulders – or a gymnast with the strength to do the rings. Either of those would be quite acceptable. But it's not to be.

‘Gawd, look at those divine arms. I think you'll be the engine, Darl, so you'd better take the seat up the back.' Those are the first words of my partner, a fey boy interior designer from a TV lifestyle show, just as I'd predicted. Worse maybe. This one would overbalance if his hair had to carry one gram more of whatever it is that's holding it vertical against gravity.