The Thompson Gunner (28 page)

My mother had by then stopped being surprised by me coming home injured after time spent with my friends. Not that it was a common occurrence, but it wasn't exactly rare either, for any of us. In the year or two before, I'd had the usual cuts and bruises, but I'd also had a nail go right through my foot when running around among the McKendrys' trucks, a greenstick forearm fracture when I'd fallen from one of the apple trees in our garden, and probably more. I didn't have the best grasp of consequences, perhaps.

My mother decided to see me as an ‘active child'. That's how she put it to her friends. ‘If there's trouble brewing, Meg'll be in the thick of it,' she said, and I was annoyed about that since it wasn't how I saw the situation at all. We never stopped talking about how I had to be more careful, and learn my limits. But at the same time she would say that I had a sense of adventure and a great imagination, and that they were assets and I could do anything if I put my mind to it.

I
have no idea where it was that I saw the doctor that day. It might have been somewhere else in Belfast, it might have been Newtownards, it might have been neither. It might have been a hospital, or somewhere smaller. It was probably a hospital, the doctor was probably young, though I wouldn't have known it. There were a lot of injured people, I think, and I would have been among the less important. He picked at my hand and scalp with an instrument, picked away looking for bits of glass. There was an antiseptic smell. I was lying down on something, but I was a long way off the ground. Paul Macleish had a cut on the cheek, and a big piece of glass in his shoulder. I saw it come out. There was a commotion then, in the corridor, and the doctor was called away. I can't remember if anything happened to the others, but maybe it didn't.

There was a leg on the road. I remember that too, from when they picked me up. I thought it was a man under a car but it was just a leg, dressed like the leg of a farmer, in for the show and minding his own business.

But there's wreckage and clamour at times like that, and you're never too sure what you've seen. You're lifted up half-wondering if the leg was there at all, half-knowing they'll be back later to put it in a bag.

And you're carried to the hospital, and fixed, and you move away from there and put together a life in the new
country, from new parts as much as possible, but you end up accepting that you have learned a vigilance that you can't forget.

There are some things that will never be safe for me – the unattended bag, anything in the middle of a road, the empty carpark. I can deal with them – all of them, and without difficulty – but dealing with them is my second thought. My first is always the thing that will never happen. That it means a bomb.

There won't be a bomb in a Coke can on the road outside home, and I can run it flat if I choose to and my aim is right. There won't be a bomb in the shopping centre carpark. I won't stick my key in the door of the car or in the ignition and set anything off.

But of course I can see how it would go, the ball of flame and smoke pressed flat by the low ceiling, bursting out from me and my car, the jolt of the blast smashing windscreens all over and knocking people to the concrete in various states of damage.

No one else thinks about these things, as far as I'm aware. I do, and I have to. That's how I am. They're a normal built-in part of me. Keeping them in mind has become as innocuous as a habit, and I'm fifty times more fucked up than I thought.

Felicity sits next to me on the minibus, worried about my hand and whether or not it should be elevated, telling me I honestly don't have to perform tonight if I don't feel up to it.

Today Murray, back from Shanghai, will have been moving boxes out of our flat. He's taken a new place nearby. It's a temporary thing, he told me, till something more permanent gets sorted out, something still in the same part of town though, since it's close to Laura's and that's better for Elli.

All the way to the sponsors' showcase, that's what's in my head. Murray packing clothes, books, who knows what? Who knows what would count as a short-term need? A carton of wine, with the bottles separated by underpants and socks, a shirt or two shoved on top, his non-travelling toothbrush dropped vertically into a corner – maybe that one box would do him for the moment.

There are fairy lights in the trees outside the venue, a gallery and restaurant in East Perth, and the guests are moving inside as we arrive. I sit at my designated table for eight, with two lawyers and an accountant and four people too many chairs away to work out, and we're served a porcini mushroom tartlet and then salmon and then a trio of sorbets, and I drink a lot less than usual because I've had more than enough to drink this past month.

I explain that I'm on strong medication for my hand, so I shouldn't really drink at all and, if I seem a little vague, I hope they'll forgive me. They laugh, because I'm a comedian, or because of the way I said it. They tell me they think it's great for Perth, great that there's a festival like this. Two of them give me business cards, and another says he didn't think to bring any and then he looks through his wallet just in case.

I
have something planned for my turn at the microphone, and it starts with a clear reveal of the bandaged hand – perhaps I'll adjust the microphone with it – and the line ‘This hasn't been the easiest of weeks for me.' Then I'll tell them they don't know the half of it. They think I just made a dick of myself canoeing today. They haven't seen my spectacular new porcelain tooth. Then on from that anecdote to Elliott, the accident at paintball, and the three stitches he has in his cheek to match the three in my hand from the canoeing. Honestly, what are they thinking? They seem to be turning this comedy festival thing into an extreme sport, and I hope they're proud of themselves.

‘You're not looking well,' Felicity says. ‘And I don't want to sound like your mother, but have you eaten any of the dinner?' She's claimed the seat to my right, now that the accountant is up talking to someone. She's sitting side-on, facing me, frowning. ‘You're scheduled to be on in ten minutes, but we could

‘I'll be fine,' I tell her. ‘I'll be fine. I'm just going to go for a walk and think it all through.'

Outside, the evening breeze has picked up. It's rippling the surface of the river and it feels cool on my face. My napkin's in my hand. I pushed my chair back and strode away and forgot to put it down. I start crying again. It just wells up from somewhere.

I sit on a rock on the bank and put my face into the napkin. Breath jerks in and out of me, and there's nothing I can do to stop it. I cry till the wetness comes through to my hands.

‘It's
okay,' Felicity says. She's standing behind me, on the path. ‘We've got someone else ready to go on. I've told people you've reacted badly to the drugs. That was the line, wasn't it?'

‘But I've got a plan,' I tell her. ‘It's new material. Things from this week.'

‘Don't make a liar of me. I've got your bags and, the way I've told it, we're off to the medical centre to see if you're fit to fly.'

She waits to see if I'm going to fight her, but I don't. She calls a cab. The side of the restaurant facing the water is all glass and people are back in their seats, ready to be entertained. When I stand up, a business card falls out of the napkin and cartwheels along the path in the breeze.

Felicity starts to move after it, and I stop her and say, ‘You're already my hero. I don't need the card.'

She sticks with me all the way to the check-in counter at the airport. I ask her if she thinks I can't handle it myself, and she says she's sure my chances would be at least fifty–fifty.

I want to say something meaningful, but every thought I have sounds clumsy and better off not turned into words.

‘Call me,' is the best I can manage, ‘if you're ever in Brisbane. We could go out for a drink. I could stop lurching from crisis to crisis, you could stop saving me . . .'

We spent half the past week together, and I don't remember asking her anything about her life or what she's hoping for.

‘Call you?' she says. ‘Sure. I will. That'd be good.'

‘Or email me
at least, in the meantime. Who knows when we'll be in the same place, or where it might be? I really owe you, you know, for the past few days.'

‘Don't hurt yourself on the plane,' she says, and smiles. ‘It's a long trip.' She hugs me. ‘If you cry I'll cry, so don't.'

As my carry-on bag passes through the scanner and I'm emptying my pockets, I look around and see her going through the doors and towards the cab rank. I would have cried if I'd said any more. She was right about that, judging that it could happen all too easily.

In the Qantas Club I realise how little food I ate at the dinner, and I get myself a bowl of pumpkin soup and a glass of mineral water. I sit in front of a TV that's set to Fox Sports, and I watch two clay-courters slugging it out in a tennis tournament somewhere in Europe.

I've never pulled out of an event before. Never.

I find Claire's number and I call her and thank her again for seeing me through my craziest day. For giving me ice-cream, letting me cook, hearing me out, as far out as I wanted to go.

‘Yes, well, I did rather make it up as I went along,' she says. ‘How are you going now? Are you okay?'

They're calling the flight. I tell her I'm fine.

On the plane, the flight attendant takes my bag and says she'll put it in the overhead locker for me. She asks if my hand injury is from the canoe race, and says they played the paddle-dropping bit on the news several times in slow-motion. I don't tell her about the glass.

I've been true to my word, my word that I gave when
I was eight and everything in the world seemed to be riding on it. How could I tell Murray now, or my parents, about the glass in my hand, how I feel when I see things lying in the road? Where would I begin? It should be over. It should have been over long ago. No more glass, or dreams, or ideas that don't apply. New memories have come along and been cast on top, and they work like a whole story most of the time, but not all of it.

My doll's house came out here to Brisbane, then I got the Partridge Family bus for my ninth or tenth birthday. I passed it on to Elli, and to her it was just a bus and there I was, with a five-year-old, doing my damnedest to explain the Partridge Family.

‘Maybe when she's a bit older,' Murray said. ‘Contemporary five-year-olds aren't always great at grasping the cultural significance of the seventies.'

And when he said that, I thought about being young and how I had gone about grasping the significance of things, and I remembered old houses, tall clocks, display cabinets of knick-knacks – though I had been more like seven then, and the knick-knacks were from the thirties or earlier. But there was a sense in those places that if something was behind glass it was significant, and that's where your grasp of significance starts – with other people's meanings and how they get them across.

Murray has a cricket bat of his grandfather's that's too heavy to use, as well as his two World War One service medals. He has a book of poetry that his father studied at school, mainly by memorising. He has three mismatched horseshoes
from the property his other grandparents lived on until the sixties. He has a Bible someone gave him on a forgotten occasion, and which he kept because it was the only book he ever had that zipped up, and it had gold along the edges of the pages. Murray has a picture of the cart he built at the age of nine, taken earlier on the very afternoon that he stacked it and broke the front axle and took the skin from his forearms on the bitumen road.

In the photo, the mood is clear. There's pride in the construction and excitement about the ride to come, no hint, of course, that the afternoon would end the way it did.

‘But you've got to be a kid,' he said, when we'd known each other a while and he showed me the photo. ‘You've got to feel invincible and sometimes come a cropper.'

And he showed me scars on his arms, which were next to invisible, and the blueish hints of pigment below the skin where flecks of bitumen had gone, and stayed.

But I told him nothing, showed him nothing. There's a past I started keeping from him that very day, him and his cart story, and once you start keeping it, your choice is made.

‘You're getting my full story,' he said in one clear moment of anger, or at least anguish, ‘and I'm not getting that from you, I don't think.'

And he looked at the floor, and Janis the counsellor looked at me, and I said, ‘I don't know what you want. I'm not going to make up stories because you haven't heard enough. People are different. That's what this is.'

It was meant as observation, not as a catalyst We could observe difference, and accommodate it. That's how I meant it. But it was a big one for Murray – Murray whose self-disclosure was absolute and who, if pushed, would say that he found any other way dishonest. So I'd set us on the track to a conclusion, just by rounding off my response.

It's
well into night now, and this is the notorious red-eye flight – out of Perth late, into Melbourne a few hours afterwards, at dawn. I chose, two months ago, to take it just this once, since it was the very soonest I could be home. My life was only weeks away from changing then, and I can't believe I didn't know.

I should sleep, but I don't want to sleep.

I
CAN'T PLACE
it in time, that trip to Belfast. Not on a calendar, since that's not how life worked for me then. There were school times, and school holidays. Short days, and long days. Time for planting, time when things grew, harvest. There was a time when the people who fell from boats at sea would not last long at all, and that was winter. I read that in the bank, next to the lifeboat.