Zigzag Street (18 page)

Tonight I can't cook. I can't even face ordering takeaway from Baan Thai and going through the Hiller shit. And I don't want to walk up to Waterworks Road for Lebanese cause it's uphill. I get in my car, thinking I might drive till I find something that suits me. At West End maybe, somewhere interesting. Somewhere cheap and Vietnamese and all by myself.

The car doesn't start. I've flattened the battery by not shutting the door properly and leaving the inside light on last night after tennis.

I call the RACQ.

They tell me half an hour at least.

I have almost no food. I wonder how a can of Greg's Prime Beef and Turkey would be on toast. I've already eaten all my biscuits. I realise it's Thursday and I should be at Toowong late night shopping. But I can't. And even when the car's sorted out I won't.

I sit out on the bonnet with a big pile of toast with Vegemite on it and I drink tap water. So much for the idea of driving till I found something that suited me. Heading off into the night uncertain of my destination, a pointless non-plan that I think I wanted to romanticise into something more deliberate: me and my old Laser and just a hint of road movie. Me and my flat battery and toast on the bonnet at home. Me and the smells of
other people's cooking and the slow pathos of slide guitar, when the wind blows gently from the west.

It occurs to me that this might be the sort of thing I deserve. That I should suffer in a succession of pathetic ways like this, and all by my own thoughtless hand.

I finish my toast and I find I'm singing along to the slide guitar wafting down from Kevin's kitchen louvres. This is not something I want to do, and I don't find my familiarity with the words at all reassuring.

The RACQ mechanic arrives and jump starts the car. He tells me the battery might survive, and that I should drive around for a while to try to re-charge it. There is no point in explaining to him that I have eaten my fill of toast, and I now have nowhere to go.

I drive. I drive and I sing along to Triple J. This is becoming a habit, and it's not a good one. Even people who sing in cars think people who sing in cars are losers. Jeff and Sally are at some family dinner tonight, so I drive past their house without stopping and out around the uni campus, still singing, past pre-season football training and the tennis courts, past the colleges and back out onto the road, through St Lucia and Toowong and then towards home. And I wonder if I've driven long enough yet. I realise I'm close to Tim's place, so I drive there and leave the car outside with the engine running and sit with him on his front verandah drinking coffee.

When I go to his toilet my constipation still gets the better of me so I do a lot of sitting and not much else. It occurs to me that this may be the price I am to pay. That I will never shit again following the Sydney incident, and that I will grow progressively more uncomfortable until I explode. I wonder if the same will happen to Hillary. I wonder if the same is happening to Barry Greatorex. Maybe he isn't obese at all, just in an advanced stage of faecal retention because of some indiscretion that precedes my own. This might explain why his eyes are beginning to bulge and his concentration is
so poor. The idea of Barry Greatorex exploding is very unattractive indeed.

In Tim's toilet, where most people might have an old
Who Weekly
or two, he has a copy of Kyd's
The Spanish Tragedy
. I suppose that shouldn't surprise me. Having nothing else to do but wait I read the first few scenes, then I realise I could all too easily spend the whole evening with my pants around my ankles engrossed in one of the less famous works of Elizabethan theatre, so I skip to nearer the end, and there surely is a lot of tragedy in this play.

Interesting toilet reading, I tell him when I'm back on the verandah.

It's a great play
, he says, as though this makes it reasonable to keep in a toilet.
I read it all the time to my eighteen-month-old nephew and he always asks for more
.

You read it to him in the toilet?

Yeah. Well, when there's no-one else here and you have to go, he has to go too
.

You have to take him with you and read
The Spanish Tragedy
?

Well, the play's probably optional, but he is a bit of a fan
.

Are you in the habit of taking children to the toilet and reading to them?

Only very young children
.

I'm not sure that makes it all right.

My car battery, if it will ever be charged again, should surely be charged by now. I drive home and park, and I make sure I shut the door properly tonight. I want to try to start the car, to see if the battery has charged, but I'm not sure if this means I would have to go for another drive. I suppose I could always take in a few more scenes of
The Spanish Tragedy
. Maybe I shouldn't have looked at the end.

I don't sleep. I seem to have stopped sleeping now, and to have replaced the process entirely with angstridden, guilt-ridden unproductive thought.

At around two o'clock I walk up to Wee Willie Winkie's on Waterworks Road (Open Twenty-Four Hours a Day, 365 Days a Year) and I buy a packet of Tim Tams. I stand outside the store eating them and watching the occasional cars speed past, heading out of town and down the hill into Ashgrove. An old man wanders up to me muttering something incomprehensible, so I give him a couple of Tim Tams and he wanders on. I watch him go, wobbling off down the hill in a long smelly coat all wrong for this hot night. He veers around things that aren't there and shouts at them in a tangle of sounds that mean nothing to me. Just when I think he must have nowhere to go, he crosses the road to a hostel, and someone lets him in. Before the door shuts I can hear a voice saying quite clearly,
Where have you been
? and the gruff peculiar sounds of the man in reply.

I buy a banana Paddle Pop and eat it on the walk home.

I watch TV, a repeat of ‘Grizzly Adams' (who would have thought they'd repeat ‘Grizzly Adams'?) and a movie called
September Gun
(synopsis: A nun hires an aging gunfighter to help her move a group of unwanted Apache children). I think the three star rating the TV guide gives it borders on the generous. But who'll be watching it anyway? Me and parents feeding infants and maybe some people on night shift. No-one expecting quality. No-one who stayed up just for this movie, or taped it for later.
September Gun
is just what's on.

After ‘General Hospital' I change channels for the ‘ITN News', ‘Daybreak News' and the ‘Today Show', which has a story about Liz Hurley scoring a multimillion dollar contract with Estée Lauder. So does this change her status from Celebrity Partner to the Helena Christensen category of Celebrity Partner (Supermodel)? Clearly the whole celebrity partner game moves far too quickly for me. I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever be a part of it, despite the plan that recently seemed so clever.

At work, Renee from the
Westside Chronicle
calls.

The medallion's ready. Could I drop in to give it to you and maybe take a few photos
?

She comes at around eleven with a photographer who takes about a dozen shots of me holding the medallion next to my face, grinning.

Too easy
, he says.
That'll do me
.

Renee says she'll catch up with him later, and he goes. She turns back to me, looking not entirely comfortable, and says,
My church group's having a barn dance this Saturday. Are you doing anything
?

I think I might be working.

And for a Saturday night it's hard to find a worse lie than that.

Oh, I'm sorry. Are you involved with someone at the moment
?

No. Well, no. I don't know.

Okay
, she says, the complexity of my answer only making things less certain.
Well, call me when you know, maybe. If you want to have coffee or something
.

Sure, yeah. Sure. That'd be good.

Only if you want to
.

When she's gone I call Jeff. I tell him about my medallion, and he says he should see it as soon as possible. And I tell him about Renee and the Christian barn dance win-on.

She asked you to a barn dance
? he says, as though he needs confirmation.
On account of you and the stump
?

My act of Christian charity. She's clearly very confused.

What is it with Christians and barn dances
?

I plan never to know.

So you turned her down
?

Hey, she's got the Lord. She'll get over me.

At the counter in the coffee shop he makes me open the purple velvet box and take out the medallion, and the girl making our coffee watches it in my hand.

Is that a medal
? she says.

Yeah.

What did you get it for? If you don't mind me asking
.

I tell her, quite calmly and for no good reason, I pulled a kid out of the surf.

She refuses to charge me for my coffee and says,
It wouldn't be right to take money from a hero, would it
?

You'll have to tell her the details before you go
, Jeff says to me when we're sitting down.
I think she has a genuine interest in heroic deeds
.

Yeah. Me too. And some bits of that root were pretty tenacious.

So here I am with my medal, won in perhaps my crappiest year and for a singularly unspectacular act. Jeff sits turning it over in his hands.

So how many Rs would there usually be in Derrington
? he says.

Two, usually in the middle.

Not at the
Chronicle. And he shows me the single R Derington.

Oh, that Richard Derington. I think he's the one who pulled a kid out of the surf. What a joke. What crap. And do you know what I've read these last couple of days? Shoshanna and Jerry are on. Helena and Michael are on. Liz Hurley's signed a multimillion dollar contract with Estée Lauder. What do these people think they're doing? They get my hopes up, give me some sense of purpose, then they change the rules of the game.

No, no you've got it wrong. That is the game. Don't be fooled. Celebrity partnering is ruled by falsehoods and shadow plays and temporary alliances. If you view anything, anything at all, as permanent, you just aren't a player. Don't be put off by reconciliation. Don't even be put off by marriage. There are reasons for these things, reasons that are much smarter than any plan of lifelong union. When one of the players marries, you don't forget about them. You just drop their name a little further down the list and wait your turn. It's better if they marry. It makes you much bigger news when it's over and your turn comes. You should look on this as just a hiatus
.

This is a hiatus? There I was thinking I was sinking and it's just a hiatus. Can you believe they gave me this medal? I dug up a fucking tree.

Sure. And they put your photo in the paper with your neighbour and it is truly gloriously bad
.

And the crap goes on, I tell him, because it does.

You're being unfair to your crap again. You just don't understand it do you? Your crap is special. Crap defines you as an individual. Your crap makes you desirable, and right about now you must be one of the most desirable single men in the world. They all want you. You know they all want you. The girl making coffee, Renee from the
Chronicle,
the sixteen year old with a passing interest in books and a pleasing interest in trousers. Who knows how many more? They're queuing up and you're pushing them all back. Breaking hearts all over town. You and your penis pointing to the centre of the earth. And why do they want you? What is it that gives you this strange, crumpled desirability? Your job isn't special, your law degree isn't special, your soon-to-be-heritage-colours worker's cottage isn't special. It's your crap that's endearing. It's the basis of any relationship, way beyond even the choice of who wins on to whom. It's crap that sustains things. The mutual vulnerability that comes from knowing each other's crap. How shallow would we be if we only felt things for people on account of their successes? How likely would that be to survive? I don't understand why this is making you so uncomfortable right now, why you think you should fight it. This time of glorious failure and perilous achievement is probably your finest hour, but it's not as though it's come out of the blue. I don't know what kind of glamorous past you would like to have had, but you didn't have it. Your life, like mine, is a series of conventional successes that don't count for much, plus good times and crap. And we both know some of my best stuff is crap, and that's why we like me so much
.

And he has not so much outgrown this crap phase as come to terms with it. And I'm sure we could talk him into another tilt at the world record even now, if they'd give us the courts for nothing. I'd have to do no more than suggest it and within minutes he'd be saying,
It's only four days, how hard can that be
? As a kind of mad enthusiasm overcomes him.