The Thompson Gunner (7 page)

‘Excellent,' she says, maintaining the smile she's had throughout. She checks her list again, and looks up. ‘Are you happy?'

The question comes without an agenda. It's the next
on the page. I've worked hard with chocolate, but the best I can do with happiness is a rather late, slow ‘Sure' with the emphasis on the unspoken ‘un' part of the word, and on the pause before it.

She wasn't expecting that. I've played the games I should so far and dealt creatively with questions that have called for it. She's surprised, I can tell, even though she's trying to hide it. I try to force a smile, as if the pause was only me dreaming about my own list, the long list of things that make me happy.

‘Is that any kind of question to ask a comedian?' It comes out of me in an almost on-stage voice, the sound of mock confrontation. ‘Aren't we all tapping into some deep seam of sadness?'

‘Very eloquent,' she says, acknowledging the performance, but with a smile as though the issue's disappearing, not an issue after all.

‘Or, alternatively, a bit of a cliché.'

‘But nicely put, nonetheless,' she says, tapping the end of her pen on her notepad, turning it end over end. ‘Your work seems very much about the everyday – about things you've done or noticed – rather than some deep seam of sadness. Even though some of the stories now are about TV or international travel, they're also about regular insecurities and have an everyday feel to them, if you get what I mean.'

‘Yeah, yeah, they're about normal embarrassment even if it's in uncommon places, little rituals gone wrong. Small things.' We're back on track, or back on some kind of track at
least. ‘And I don't really know why, to be honest. That's just what found its way in there and people started laughing.'

‘Early on it was more bitter and twisted,' she says with a half smile. ‘I get the impression you've refined it, in a way. You pick up on different things now, and some of that stuff's not as prominent.'

‘I lead a different life now. Maybe that's it. Alice, I was just a fool who once had a drink too many and got up at an open mike since it seemed like an invitation to slag off the last half-dozen shitty men I'd bumped into. And I have to say it felt pretty good. Quite cathartic. Sadly, in my mind I would probably have categorised that as very much about the everyday back then.'

‘Really? Give me an example. Some cruddy everyday guy story from back then. Something that really happened.'

‘Something that really happened? That sounds quite unwise. But what the hell. It's a long time ago. I did honestly go out with one guy who had a birthday when we'd been together four weeks, and I wasn't too sure how it was going and I didn't know what to get him. I didn't want to send the wrong signal. So I asked him for suggestions and he said that things were a bit tight for him at the time and, if it was all the same to me, he'd prefer the cash. And how did fifty bucks sound? But he was a shocker and I should have known it all along. Denial had been the glue in that relationship for at least three-and-a-half of the four weeks. He pissed in the shower too. Some men think anything's a toilet. But there was always other stuff in the act as well, except for that first night maybe. Soon enough I had something reasonably coherent together, and off it went from there. And I'm lucky it did. The coffee-shop thing never worked for me, no matter how hard I tried. And I did try, with a lack of success that could verge on the spectacular on a bad day. I make shithouse lattes, and that was the least of my worries. I needed the comedy to work, for my own sanity.'

She's
right though. Whatever I might say about having other material, I gave the bitter-and-twisted chick stuff a good run when I started, and Felicity was too polite to point it out to me, back at the hotel. I stood up at that first open mike and I mouthed off, and I'm sure I'd had more than one drink too many that night. The problem wasn't always with the shitty men, of course.

‘You were born in Northern Ireland,' Alice says, the end of her pen now touching the bottom question on the page, ‘but you came to Australia with your family when you were young. What made your family move to Australia? Do you remember anything from before you came here?'

‘Yeah. I was eight when we left, nearly nine.' That's the statistic, a standard stat and I'm used to saying it. I expected we'd go somewhere with my ‘shithouse lattes' remark but we didn't. I realise, too late, that the stat alone isn't much of an answer. ‘I shouldn't be having this beer. It's giving me pauses.'

I've got an answer for your question, I want to tell her, and it runs about six lines. Usually it comes right out without thinking, but not today. And it's no more the whole truth than the rest of my answers, but it is the truth and it does the job, and lets us knock the topic off in one go, every time.

It'll be there
tomorrow, automatic as ever. Why couldn't we be talking tomorrow?

I had latte anecdotes, bad coffee shop experiences to talk about, but she missed her cue.

I
WAS EIGHT
when we left, nearly nine, and anyone who asks if I remember anything didn't change
countries at that age. Eight years is a lot of seasons, a lot of school, real friendships left behind, TV, music, rain, snow, sometimes sunshine, blackberries, barley harvests, plenty. Wet dogs and the wind off the sea, the slippery bladders of dark weed on rocks, wheel ruts in lanes, foxes, plenty.

And airports – Belfast, Heathrow, Teheran, Karachi, Singapore, Darwin, Melbourne, Brisbane. Days of that, with two dawns at least, Teheran and Melbourne. One with the sun breaking over purple hills and fans on stands marking rickety time in the airport waiting area, the other cold and clear over flat country as we wandered around the terminal, smacked with jet lag, waiting for that final connecting flight.

In Brisbane we were met by a man from my father's company. He had his hair slicked back and a box of chocolates and fat cufflinks. The chocolates had no list of what was what, and I'd always had a clear preference for soft centres. It left me with the feeling that this country mightn't be as easy as I'd been promised.

But
that's the end of the journey, the end of my time in the other country, not the start.

I laid my earliest memories down in my first summer when the laburnum tree in our garden was in bloom and I was in my pram under it. I was wrapped up well and looking up at the bright yellow flowers, then on my side, nose against a seam in the plastic, feeling the pattern in the plastic, rough on my cheek. And the wind whipped up as it often did and flowers fell down onto me, dropping from the tree and landing in my pram. And that was confusing, exciting, strange, another new thing in the world to come to grips with. Along with birds – gulls flying in from the sea – bees out pollinating, the sound of my father's car arriving at the front of the house, wheels turning on gravel.

This is all still real, every bit of it, somewhere back and deep in my head. Just as real as everything that followed it.

We had whitewashed walls, and I'd get in trouble for picking at them, for picking at the bubbles in the whitewash and their flaky broken edges.

We lived four doors down from the local shop, and the man who ran it was huge and bald and always told my mother it was lovely to see her, a real pleasure.

My mother made her own skirts and took time with her hair so that she'd get it just right, and she was the woman in the village who looked most like Jackie Onassis. That's what someone's mother said once, and I remembered it, and it was true. Admittedly none of the others looked anything like Jackie Onassis so she had a head start, but she also had magazines that came with the right patterns and a sewing machine with all the features you could hope for.

She
was a teacher, but not at my school, and I'd seen no other teachers who dressed quite like her. I never knew if that was a good thing or not, but she stood out in a shop where half the people had come in from farms, still with their boots on. She'd be there in shoes with real heels, and big round sunglasses and a pastel knee-length skirt with matching jacket.

There's a photo of me in those sunglasses and a pair of her shoes, and I'm wearing the dress that became known as my ‘party dress'. It was cream and covered with dozens of red cherries, most of them in pairs. My mother made it too, and it was my favourite thing in the world when I was six. I would have worn it every minute of the summer in 1970, if she had let me. By 1971 it didn't fit and I'd moved on. She made me clothes that year too, I think, but I don't remember them.

By then when I went to parties I was content to look like everyone else there, and not like the different one with the special dress. If there was a special dress that year it was worn by a girl called Christine, who I never much liked, and it was made of royal blue velvet and had long sleeves. She was, as my mother said, ‘a girl who was far too fond of herself', and we lived in a place that didn't suit attitudes like that.

The village wasn't much more than one street, two rows of houses roughly paralleling the shoreline, a place where cars might slow down a little but not stop. There were farms
almost all around, though at one end the last few houses backed onto the woods.

We walked in the woods when I was very young, before guns were banned. People could still shoot foxes then, and they sometimes did. I remember the taste of the plastic of empty shotgun cartridges, and what they were like to chew. How young was I then, if that's my first memory of them?

My father took long loping strides on those walks, and his stride seems shorter now. He wore an old tweed jacket, and it looked like a farmer's. He'd often be ahead of me, his hands clasped behind his back as he walked, and he'd call out if there were puddles I should watch for. He'd find flowers even if they were very small, and signs of animal life – badgers, foxes and pheasants – and he'd crouch down to show me and I'd smell the tobacco that had once been in his jacket. He'd smoked a pipe, apparently, when he was younger.

I can remember the freckles and the fine hairs on the backs of his hands as he'd turn a feather over, or show me where the tracks of an animal went under the hedge. I can remember the smell of mornings like that, how they felt on my cheeks, how the daytime moon looked when there was just a pale white sliver of it over the trees.

And there are faint squiggly lines that I can see if I look carefully at nothing or at a plain surface or a clear sky, and that come, I think, from looking right at an eclipse. I wasn't a habitual rule-breaker, but I broke the obvious ones. I told lies when it was in my interests – but never in a big way, or a way that caused harm to anyone – I talked in class, I climbed
higher than I should or climbed things I shouldn't, I patted dogs I didn't really know, I looked right at an eclipse.

Why did we leave? A lot of reasons, hard to weigh and package and sell as an anecdote. Life is often less anecdotal, less convenient, than we'd all like to think.

I
T'S A QUESTION
that comes up often enough on tour though, particularly in print interviews
when they're trying to plumb deeper depths.

Why did you leave? Can you remember it? It's a Chinese-water-torture question, one that falls like a drip onto your bare forehead day after day and becomes nothing more or less than a way to spoil a perfectly good conversation about Old Jamaica chocolate or Spanish mission beer caverns, or some other topic you haven't talked about a million times before.

Are you happy? That's one that doesn't come up a lot either, at least not reduced to its three most direct words.

The Spanish mission beer cavern is near the Internet cafes Felicity marked on my Perth mini-map, so I picked up some lunch nearby after the interview and came back here to the better of the two. There's the usual spam to weed out, a few I can deal with next week in Brisbane, a photo of an acquaintance's new baby – still creased by the struggle of birth – and two new emails from Emma:

subject: nw

Hey Mega,

Got a call from
NW
. I
think they want to do/are doing a story on you. Sounds feature size, so it might mean talking to other people for background. Shall we leave till you're home and talk about it then? That's not so long now. Em

subject: elliott k

Hey Mega,

The lovely Elliott will be in Perth with a director and others checking out locations for another show with a scout. He says he wants to ‘check in'. He thought he'd round up a few people worth impressing and you could ‘do something'. Sounds excellent, no? I hope the I/Vs are going well.

Em

There's nothing from home. No Murray, no Elli, even though I emailed her days ago.

The lovely Elliott. Emma lives with me through every shift in the quicksands of TV, and we share complicated views of Elliott King.

How many of my character's subtle human imperfections will I still be holding onto if and when the cameras roll? Soon they'll be hiring a wardrobe consultant for my kickboxing classes and sending along a photographer, and there's no subtlety by then. Who am I kidding? There's not a lot of subtlety now, outside the notes I make on planes about character nuances.

Here's
what it's reduced to: Eric Bana did Chopper and became a big star, ipso facto, comedians taking on serious roles works. And the head of drama at the network has taken to referring to my character – with an enthusiasm verging on the feverish – as ‘an Australian Lara Croft'.

‘Don't you get it?' he said, actually thinking there was something down that way to get. ‘We could have something pretty special here. Lara Croft is
big
. And sometimes Australia's big, too. I'd like to see us go with this, and if we get the timing right we could even get a US presale, and that just doesn't happen from here. I mean a network. How about that?'