Zigzag Street (3 page)

And so passes another day of minimal accomplishment.

I make limited progress with the power station thing, and I'm secretly hoping someone else will find a reason to trash it before I have to understand it fully. Secretly wishing the US dollar ill.

When I get home there's a message on the answering machine, and I can tell just how well I'm coping when I still have to deal with the fleeting hope that it'll be Anna, telling me she got it wrong.

But it's my mother, telling me she drove past today and
didn't notice much renovating, Richard
(note the use of the full name for disciplinary reasons),
and the garden's beginning to look like a jungle
.

I give Greg his dinner and while he's eating I wonder if he's bored all day, now that he lives with someone who goes out to work. I wonder if I'm being as attentive as I should be, or could be.

So, telling myself it's a small step on the road to renovation, I perform a minor task of tidying with him in mind. I clean out my sock drawer. I take all my old socks and I stuff them into one and I knot the end. I find a fat green Nikko and draw a face on the sock, a smiling, simpleton's face with a lazy snake tongue, and I take it to him and tell him I feel bad about abandoning him so often, so I've made him a sock friend. I tell him that this friend will be non-judgemental and will always
be there for him, and that its name is Purvis. Now, where that came from I don't know.

Of course, it concerns me that the creation of Purvis the Sock Friend is the pinnacle of my day's accomplishments, and I only feel worse when I try to tell myself that it's better than nothing.

I introduce Greg to Purvis and they seem to get on. I now notice that Greg was so bored before Purvis came along that he went out and made friends with about a thousand fleas. I'm sure he never had fleas before I lived here.

I re-heat my Baan Thai leftovers a little too aggressively in the microwave and seem to enamel some of the sauce to the plate. I eat every part of it a fork can lift and I decide I can figure out how to get the plate clean later.

Tonight, there is no time for renovation. Tonight there is tennis, Jeff Ross, Freddie Stuart, Gerry Venster and me, and a Queensland Uni tennis court from eight to eleven.

Jeff's there when I arrive, sitting on a bench outside the tennis centre and wearing, as always, his black cap with ACE in blue across the front. Not that this cap should be taken as a sign that the ace is in any way part of his tennis repertoire. Jeff manages to ace someone on an almost annual basis. The cap says more about the impressive hint of cruelty in the humour of its purchaser, his wife Sally Gore, who presented it to him on his twenty-ninth birthday, almost a year ago. While Jeff happily missed the point and wore it proudly throughout dinner, someone asked her if it had been too expensive to get the shop to put GROUND STROKE on it, in order to give due acknowledgement to his finest, dull, relentless weapon.

And the ACE cap cuts deeper than that. Jeff has a very dubious story, set some long time in the past (before we met him), that involves a fleeting appearance at the fringes of serious tennis in some crap capacity in some
nowhere tournament where someone thoughtlessly gave him the wild card that will allow him to bore his friends for the rest of his life with the story of his fight through to the semis (or maybe even the final) as he played his best tennis ever, until he dislocated his shoulder hitting a smash. And he blames the subsequent shoulder repair, from which he does at least have a scar, for taking the power right out of his game, and making him the person on court least likely to serve an ace. So the ACE cap in fact mocks the whole unlikely story of his moment in the sun, not just the grim play of the present.

He knows we hate him for all of that grimness, for the grinding, talentless way he almost never loses singles, by off-setting a visibly low level of ability with a very low error rate. He has the mental game of a chess champion, and probably the physical game of a chess champion too. But against flamboyant recklessness he wins almost every time.

But some of this is probably unfair. His tennis is no different to the way he plays the rest of his life. He is not a risk taker. I've challenged him about this, and he didn't seem challenged at all. And my tennis is known for its long periods of complete crap, punctuated by flashes of a very random glory.

G'day Miniature
, he says when he sees me.

He says it loud enough to make people look around and to be confused by the person of a very standard height who is coming their way and responding to the name. And I'm not going to tell them that it's one of his jokes. That when your parents call you Richard they leave you open to all kinds of names. Miniature, though, is one of the more obscure, and is a fond abbreviation of Jeff's invention, Miniature Dick.

From him this is no surprise at all, as penis size seems to figure prominently in his thinking, we suspect because his own penis is very small. This was substantiated at a dinner party once when Sal said something like,
Well, how big is average? Three inches
? and, far too late,
declared herself to be a child of the metric system, and asked how big inches were. By the time she was saying that her guess was that inches were a very large unit of measurement, perhaps the same as a cubit, she was already looking only at Jeff, her face a mask of horrendous apology, as though a bad secret was out. So now whenever he makes remarks about other people's likely anatomy, we just show him three fingers, and he realises he is not speaking from a position of strength. Or at least length.

Freddie and Gerry arrive while we're hitting up, so Jeff crosses the net and takes the backhand court.

It amazes me that Freddie and Gerry play together, since they already live together and work together. I don't know how people can do that, how their lives can be so overlapped and yet they can still play on the same side of the net at tennis.

They write romance novels, the two of them combining on each manuscript and bringing it out under one female name. They seem so different I can't imagine how this works, how each book looks as though it's written by one person. But I can't understand how any two people can do so much together without driving each other crazy.

My concentration is not good tonight, and the harder I try to concentrate the less I can. I cream enough volleys into the net for Jeff's serve to be broken twice, and I know how much he hates that. I apologise and I tell him I don't know what's going wrong today.

And he says,
Mmmm
, and tries not to glare at me and says,
I'm telling myself this is only a game. That this is fun we're having, okay
?

I hit a screaming winner down the line, I hit a pine tree, I hit a cyclist. We're two sets to one down when we run out of time.

The others buy drinks and I buy an Ice Graffiti Icy Pole. Gerry, a cup of Gatorade in each hand, tells me I should be more responsible with my fluids.

After he and Freddie leave, their fluid responsibilities duly discharged, Jeff says to me,
How'd the renovating go on the weekend? Same as usual
?

Yeah.

At least you've always got your tennis. If all else fails you, you've still got your very special gift on court
.

One day, just wait, one day it'll all come together. I will understand my gift and the game will be mine.

Yeah
.

I can tell I'm at least half forgiven already. That generous allowance has been made for my mental state and in a matter of days he'll partner me again, and again he'll begin with the unfounded hope that things will be different.

When I get home the house still smells of satay and
panang nua
. Still smells like the usual order for Hiller, like our flat did on Baan Thai nights. And I want to tell her she's wrecked my tennis, and I want to say to her, If you leave me, why don't you leave?

Tuesday seems moderately fucked by ten.

I meant to get up five minutes earlier this morning to iron my shirt, but I only remembered when I was on the bus. I'm sure Hillary noticed, said nothing, looked a little sad for me. And I'm also sure she's worried I'm about to sink anything I'm working on through rampant inattention. At least, if she's half the manager I think she is, she's very worried.

Worried about deals going down the tubes, calls from Sydney, New York, Singapore. All trails leading back, inexorably, to my office. And Hillary up on the next floor, trying to put it all into perspective for the state manager, Barry Greatorex, who is not a man we like to deal with at the best of times. And the best of times came and went a while ago.

I meet Jeff for coffee at twelve-thirty. We meet for coffee, not for lunch, as Jeff makes his lunch every day. He is sufficiently fond of money that he is rarely inclined to spend it, and in fact makes lunch every day for both himself and Sally. Sal, I know, on occasions dumps hers in the bin and goes out with friends, but I'm sworn to secrecy.

I do not make lunch. This means I am left with all the possibilities of the coffee shop, and today I go for a big piece of cheesecake. Jeff looks at this unnecessarily
disparagingly and tells me how easy it is to get a roll together.

I eat the first mouthful. What does he think I am? I can't even iron my shirt. A roll takes ingredients. Ingredients take planning. You have to be on top of your whole week before you can get a roll together. What does he expect of me?

Looking cheery today
, he says.
Looking as though we dressed in the dark in a very crumpled place again
.

I dress for comfort.

And don't you look comfortable. All the contentment of a man with Steelo underpants
.

What, they're showing?

Peeping out under the hair shirt
.

What a life. What a fucking life.

A life of quality
.

A life that can be appropriately defined by the least attractive of undergarments. This is what I'm destined for?

There's that negative self-talk again. It'll do you no good
.

Good? What's good?

Good might be what happens next. Give it a chance. Don't condemn yourself to a life of punishing undergarments. Sometimes it just doesn't work out. It might next time. It might not too. You won't know till it happens and that's the way it goes
.

But how do I know?

You don't. It's always a risk. And when you're ready to take the risk, you'll take it
.

I can hear what he's saying, but what am I supposed to do? What course of action does this give me? He's sitting there, nonchalantly offering me bagfuls of nothing, like some Zen philosopher. The world's most contented man, telling me about risk, and I've never met anyone less likely to take one.

Look, he's saying, you and Anna. There were things there that worked, but you were also very different, and maybe she just decided that it wasn't right for her
.

What do you mean? What do you mean different?

What? You're going to try to tell me now that you were the same? You and Anna? What about the dry sink thing
?

You always mention the dry sink thing.

It's a very good example. I don't have to list a hundred and one differences, I just have to give examples. And the dry sink thing just happens to be a very good example
.

Jeff's not talking about dry sinks. He's talking about compromise and surrender and compatibility. He's saying, and I know this because he's said it before, that if you start giving in entirely when it comes to bizarre
things like dry sinks, in the end there'll be nothing of you left. And it's true.

We'd go to friends' houses, Jeff and Sal's even, and I'd notice the sink wasn't dry, and I'd want to give it a bit of a going over before there were any problems. Wet sinks, sinks with huge, bulging, ugly globs of tap water sitting on them, came to mean trouble, even though Anna didn't care about other people's sinks. Once she even took me aside and said,
Look, I know we like dry sinks, but in other people's houses it's up to them, okay
? I've never told Jeff this, partly because it was his house, and partly because it would give him a triumphant new dimension to his favourite example of incompatibility, control and the loss of the self.

So now I live in a house with a wet sink, and I'm coming to terms with it.

Later, back at work, I'm still reconstructing the past. Still wondering if I'd done things slightly differently, would we still be together? This direction of thought does not impress Jeff. He sees it as counterproductive. He may be right, but sometimes it's unavoidable. Some days, everywhere I look I see her face. Jeff's a great theorist, life, tennis, whatever. A great theorist, but sometimes I think he hasn't a clue. Sometimes when I'm deep down in the middle of all of this it just isn't possible to use any of his irrefutable logic to dig myself out. I'm probably the greatest frustration in his comfortable life and I think we both have the same sickening feeling that I'm not about to make it easy for him.

Most days I come up with some new idea. Something I need to call Anna about right at that instant and tell her, just in case it makes the difference. There was a time when I even thought it was the sink. For several days I wanted to call her and tell her I'd keep the sink dry forever, even when I was using it, if necessary. I think I'm over that now.

But I keep rebuilding the past in all kinds of different ways, and she's been demonised and deified and re-interpreted so many times that I really have no idea what she was like any more.

Sometimes I have no idea what I'm like any more. Some days it seems I only have a past, and at the end of the past I was set adrift somewhere, on some terrible flat sea that seems to go on and on without interruption.

One day I told Jeff this, or something like it, and he said I would begin to make progress when I stopped constructing my lot in terms of crappy metaphors, and thought about mastering one or two everyday practicalities again.

He doesn't understand that some days practicalities are quite foreign to me, and I'm much more at home in a world described only in terms of the crappiest metaphors possible.