Zigzag Street (9 page)

I wake when Jeff phones at around ten and asks if I could go to Le Chalet and pick up the leftover wine. He tells me this is my job as I live nearest.

I tell him I can't believe there could be any leftover wine.

Yeah. We didn't drink much. Not really. We just drank too much champagne at your place. On empty stomachs
.

Yeah. Good theory. Do you really think they'll be there now?

After what you did I expect they're still hosing out the toilet
.

Now, wait a minute. That wasn't me. That was fucking Dean Martin. That was nothing to do with me.

I think it might have been
.

Really?

I put on shorts and a T-shirt and impenetrable sun glasses and I drink about a litre of water, and I go outside. It's hot already and savagely bright. I am almost over-whelmed by an attack of seediness on my way down the hill, but I make it.

It's cool in Le Chalet, and incredibly dark. I stand holding the back of a chair and explaining my situation carefully to a woman who treats me with a cautious and unjustified kindness. She goes through the swing doors and returns with three bottles of wine. During her absence I have mentally constructed an apology, but it
falls apart on its way out. One of the bottles of wine is mine, and I give it back to her with a great sense of gesture and I thank her for her very considerate attitude.

I walk outside, back into the hot day, back to the steep, bright, unsteady hill. It seems harder to walk with a bottle in each hand and my thigh muscles become quite tired. When I'm less than halfway home I'm feeling like Burke and Wills and I realise I'm not going to make it.

I get to a bus stop and sit down in the shade. I put the two bottles of wine next to me on the seat and I take some deep breaths. I really need to lie down. I also notice that my bladder is filling and this, of course, presents its own dilemma.

Just when I'm thinking through the consequences, and thinking that I was brought up not to regard highly people who sit in bus shelters with bottles of wine and urinate, Jeff and Sal pull up in their car.

We've just been to he Chalet
, Jeff says.
You didn't sound up to it on the phone
.

I'm not. I can't go any further. I think I'm going to die here. But that's okay.

They drive me home. By car, it takes about a minute. On the way Jeff says,
Hey, how's Bob
?

For perhaps a second I have no idea what he's talking about. And then it all comes back to me.

I make a resolution. It comes in three parts. I decide to adopt a low profile, to think before I act and to respond to the trashing in the acceptable, conventional way of throwing myself into my work.

I tell myself Work is good, Work is good.

I open the After Dark files on my computer and I change my screen saver. I trash the Can of Worms and I open the message option and I write Work is good. Then, for emphasis, I change it to Work is GOOD. Then I change tack entirely and end up with the much more cryptic Remember the Three Part Resolution.

While I go to make coffee this chugs across my screen. It occurs to me that if I went missing now the last people would know of me is the compellingly obscure Remember the Three Part Resolution. Who knows what three parts they'd come up with? Three parts that bring down a government. Three parts that sink a currency or a stock exchange, or begin a religion. Three grand acts of terrorism or altruism. And it occurs to me that a lot of the great conspiracy theories might actually have been nothing more than misunderstandings of personal reminder notes.

It should also occur to me that I'm flattering myself that, in the unlikely event of my disappearance, my screen saver will be given a moment's thought.

I decide to lunch alone. Tim has given me his copy
of Veny Armanno's book
Romeo of the Underworld
and I started reading it yesterday, the first of the low profile days. Like work, reading is good. That's what I've told myself. Work and reading. Two of the activities of healthy, normal people. Healthy, normal people whose grasp of consequences probably doesn't lead to them thinking that their screen saver might propel them onto the world stage.

I go to a different coffee shop. I eat a bagel and read. I always wanted to be cool enough to be one of those people who was comfortable sitting alone in a coffee shop and reading. I always thought they had a special allure.

Just as I'm in the process of dismissing allure and deciding ‘loser with a book for company' is a better fit, a girl says,
Mind if I sit here
? and indicates the other side of the booth.

I tell her, Go ahead.

She is twentyish. She is a babe. I glance around. There are plenty of free seats. She chose to sit here. And I tell myself this could be the knock of opportunity, and that I should put a lid on my very disabling ambivalence for once. I should say nothing more, go back to the book, pump up the allure.

Her food arrives. I try to stop reading the same line over and over.

Is it a good book
? she asks.

Yeah. (And then a judicious pause, the pause of a cool person, the pause of allure.) Yeah it's good. A friend of mine lent it to me. I play tennis sometimes with the guy who wrote it.

Really
?

Yeah. He actually inscribed it with a personal remark. Want to see it?

Sure
.

I show her the personal remark.

Wow
, she says.
That's not the sort of thing you expect someone to write in a book
.

No.

I'm doing okay. I can tell I'm doing okay. I just have to stay cool.

So you work in town do you
?

Yeah.

I'm sorry. I'm stopping you reading your book. You didn't come here to talk to me
.

She smiles. It's a good smile. I'd go some distance not to read a book in the company of this smile, some distance to sit in a booth opposite her confident conversation, her neat, pert, near-perfect body, her hint of impeccable cleavage. I close the book. She smiles again.

So what do you do
?

I'm a lawyer. I work for a financial institution. Which is why I'm sitting here reading a novel I guess.

I'm a student
, she says. And before I can pick up the baton and ask the obvious question, What are you studying? she says,
Do you like movies
?

Sure.

Good. Cause I want to go and see
Pulp Fiction,
but I've got no-one to go with
.

I can't believe this. This girl, this twentyish student babe, appears to be asking me out. And of course I'm going to lie and tell her I haven't seen
Pulp Fiction
.

Do you want to go
? she asks.

Sure. Yeah.

I think about possible appropriate timing. I can't look too eager or too blase.

Maybe the weekend, I say, or some night next week.

The weekend might be better. My parents don't like me going out on week nights. Once school's started. She senses concern. It's okay. I'm nearly seventeen
.

This, of course, is killing me. She is aware of my struggle, and trying to smile me some reassurance. Now the smile, the smile that had such appeal, merely makes her look younger.

I'm not sure it's really such a good idea. I'm not sure how your parents would feel. I'm, well, I'm well into my twenties.

That's fine
.

I'm not sure that it's fine.

She's sixteen, and already some bastard's trashing her. And it's me.

Look, don't get me wrong. Don't think that, in a lot of ways, it isn't a great idea. Don't think this is easy. But, I really don't think we should do this.

You think I'm too young
.

There's nothing wrong with being young.

You're not taking me seriously because I'm young
.

No, that's not it. It's not that I'm not taking you seriously, okay? It's just that, well, my life has been a little confusing lately, and I've decided I should think things through more. Okay? And when I think this through, you, me,
Pulp Fiction
, a lot of it looks great. But then I think, you, me,
Pulp Fiction
, your parents, our very different levels of life experience …

Now you're talking down to me. You're treating me like a kid
.

No I'm not. I'm not. Throughout this discussion it has not occurred to me to think of you as a kid. Trust me. Look, I think I'd better go. I think it would be better if I went.

You'll regret it
.

Yeah, I expect I will. But I think I've got to go. Please, don't take this personally. Don't think it's any reflection on your desirability, okay. But I don't think it would be a good idea for either of us. I'm not in great state of mind at the moment.

She smiles, and continues to smile when I get up. As though she's won some moral victory over me, as though it's not her preferred outcome, but she's ahead on points. And even though I am surely the moral victor in all this, all I feel as I walk out of the coffee shop is some heavy kind of defeat. How can she smile? How can she end such a mutually unsatisfactory exchange by smiling? Perhaps she is still a survivor, an optimist, having not yet
endured her twenties. And a significant part of her teenage years. I'm not finding this easy.

I cross the street and keep walking. I am appalled that this involves a struggle against the urge to go back. I tell myself that this must only be because someone was nice to me, made me feel, for a moment, desirable. I tell myself any compulsion to return has nothing to do with the fact that she was a babe, with flagrant disregard for the sixteen problem. I tell myself, you don't do this, you just don't do this, you don't keep thinking of these things, these pert cleavage things, as though they might happen, as though you might go back. And while I'm busy telling myself all of this and reinforcing my weak moral position, I realise that in my haste to leave the coffee shop, my keys must have dropped out of my pocket.

So now I have to go back.

Just for the keys. Just the keys.

This will present its own problems. She will see me approaching, she will think I've changed my mind. And I'll have to be even clearer than before, and this is quite unfair to her. It would be cruel, and I am, after all, endeavouring to diminish my capacity for cruelty. It occurs to me that I should think about the possibility of arranging to see her, maybe once or twice more, just so I get the chance to be clear on all this. Just so she knows it's not her, so it doesn't have any impact on her self-esteem. And then I think, what about her parents? How would they feel about that line of logic? I'm sorry, I had to have sex with your daughter. After I dropped my keys it would have been unfair not to.

I go back to the coffee shop, saying to myself, just the keys, just the keys.

And she's gone. Now I have no dilemma. I look and I see just the keys, but somehow this is not the same concept as a moment ago. It's gone from, Be strong, choose just the keys, to, You have no choice, just the keys. This is morally easy but nowhere near as good. I
look out the window to see if she is nearby, and it doesn't matter that I'm telling myself I shouldn't be looking. She isn't there.

I pick up the keys.

I notice a pair of sunglasses on her seat.

The dilemma resumes.

My decision is that I don't actually have to go back to work yet. That, providing there are no interruptions, I can quite reasonably expect to finish the chapter before I go back. I sit down. I look at the page. I read not a word.

Hey, excellent, my sunnies
, someone says.

I look up as an incredibly unattractive woman leans her way into the booth. She notices me looking at her.

I left them here an hour ago. I was sure they'd've gone
.

I smile through the pain.

Hey, is that a good book
?

Yeah, it's fine.

And there's no way she's going to get to see the personal remark. Before she can ask about
Pulp Fiction
, I look at my watch, feign concern (and I care not that this ploy is offensively obvious), say something about being lost in the book and late back to work and I run out.

I run about a block and a half, and I'm not certain why.

Back in the office, after the last snuffing out of this glimmer of unkind hope, I phone Veny Armanno. I tell him what just happened, trying to focus on the babe part, and he says,
It happens to me all the time, sixteen year olds coming up to me while I'm reading and asking me out
.

Really?

Yeah, sure, all the time
.