Joel & Cat Set the Story Straight

by Nick Earls

  She nods now and puts her chin down like a sad labrador puppy.

  ‘And look, you can read the emails.’ I scroll up the screen. ‘See, there’s no chitchat. Joel’s just being his usual dickhead, arrogant self. And you should see the stuff he’s writing for this assignment. God knows how he ever got accepted into Extension English.’

  I look at Emma and she nods again and says, ‘Okay, but, you know, don’t be nice to him or anything.’

  ‘I won’t. No niceness coming from me. I promise.’

  She leans her chin on the top of the cubicle divider. ‘Please, god, tell me that your mum packed you some brownies in your lunch today.’ She gasps. ‘Which reminds me – hey, I’m sorry I couldn’t talk to you on the phone last night. My English tutor arrived early – he’s making me write haikus. Total nightmare. And they’re not even English poems. Anyway, you were saying something about your mum when I had to go…’

  ‘Oh, look…’ I smile, waving the matter away with my hand. ‘Doesn’t matter. No biggie.’

  ‘Are you sure? It sounded important. Did you want to talk about the police-station thing?’

  I stare at her for a moment, figuring out what to say. Can I talk about this? This is my chance to tell her about Mum leaving. About how Dad’s turned into a crappy version of that guy from Ready, Steady, Cook. About how weird it is not having Mum there when I get home from school. What if I start crying? Every day I don’t tell her makes it harder to bring it up. But just when I’m about to say something, Prue walks up.

  ‘Hey, apparently Ms Turner is downstairs in the quadrangle and she brought in her baby.’

  ‘Oh my god – Olivia!’ says Emma, her eyes lighting up. ‘You coming, Cat? I totally want to see Ms T and her baby.’

  I tell them that I never had Ms Turner and that they should go ahead without me. Prue and Emma walk off together and I hear Emma saying, ‘God, I wish Ms Turner was still teaching English. Miss Gibbs sucks.’

  With Emma and Prue gone, I turn back to the paragraph and type my response to Joel the Dickhead.

  Joel,

  I’m DULL? I’m sorry, but so far all your character has done is plummet through the air. It would be good, Joel, if Max could, you know, have some time on land. Or is your whole story going to be based midair? Your writing is a clear and BAD rip-off of Matthew Reilly. Except Reilly at least knows what he’s doing. Your story is lame and unfulfilling and so far set entirely inside the head of your character and IN THE AIR. I’m really beginning to wonder how it is that you were accepted into Extension English. Clearly it is above you.

  Nice touch with the Cat drowning in the custard. Hilarious. Fell over laughing at that one. Your genius knows no bounds. Clearly.

  Cat

  Elizabeth hears a thud. She puts down her teacup and wanders over to the window. There she sees a man with an unopened parachute strapped to his back lying motionless on the front lawn, his arms and legs askew like a dropped rag doll. Elizabeth calls for Alfred to dial for an ambulance, tightens the belt on her robe and makes her way outside. Under a clear, blue winter sky, Elizabeth stares at the dead man on her lawn, repulsed by his numerous warts and fishy smell. She contemplates the stranger’s penchant for polyester until the ambulance officers arrive, then she sighs and says a prayer, realising that the knife the poor fellow had been carrying in his mouth had cut off his tongue. Even if this mystery parachutist had survived the fall, he would never have been able to speak again.

  – Tuesday

  Oh my god. I tell her her story’s dull, and she kills Eislander.

  Kersplat, and he’s dead on the grass. And separated from his tongue. And where the hell did she get the knife in the teeth from anyhow? I didn’t write that.

  Sure, there was the hallmark Davis stupid inconsequential reference to tea, and some of the inevitable tedious sighing, but…

  Okay. I’m stumped. Nothing occurs to me on the walk to school. Nothing occurs to me all morning. Eislander’s dead. My carefully wrought ice-cold killer of a character is tongueless and dead, and I’d rather be the same than write the next paragraph if all I’ve got to work with is Elizabeth sighing and pondering. This is just wrong.

  I go to put my case to Mr Ashton at lunchtime, and he stops me before I can give details and says, ‘Just general terms. I don’t want to buy into the specifics. So, what’s your question? Your question that can’t wait until class…’

  He’s standing in the doorway to the staff room with the door half open, an egg-and-lettuce sandwich in his hand. There’s a card game going on behind him on one of the crowded desks, three teachers with their heads down, their cards kept in tight fans in their hands. One of the other English teachers, Mr Kerswill, sits by himself reading the paper and scratching his bald head.

  ‘Well…’ I try to work out how to put it in a balanced, general way. ‘What if one person killed another person’s character off. We wouldn’t be allowed to do that, would we? That wouldn’t be fair, would it?’

  ‘Tandem, Joel,’ he says, and I know instantly that he’s going to give me nothing. ‘You might want to analyse the way you’re looking at things. It’s not your characters and the other person’s characters. You’re sharing this story.’ He stretches the ‘sharing’ out and says it as if I’m a moody two-year-old clutching a toy. ‘Two great minds working together. Maybe we should talk more about this in class.’

  ‘I’d really rather not.’

  ‘Well then, I think it’s up to you, isn’t it? To take that vivid imagination of yours, battle through and, in the spirit of teamwork, offer your partner something great in return. This is all part of the challenge, remember? And great material for the companion essay. Think of it as an opportunity. As far as the story goes, what does it give you? Why did Cat kill the character? Ask yourself that.’

  Because I drowned her in custard in the previous paragraph using a kitten as proxy, obviously. That’s what I should say, but I stick with, ‘Thanks, sir. That’s great.’

  ‘That’s no problem, Joel. I’m keenly awaiting your response.’ His eyebrows seem to jiggle up and down, and I think he stops just short of a wink. He goes back to his lunch.

  It was her own custard, so I think that was fair. I wasn’t the one who brought custard into it. But it was me who decided to start with my character plummeting, and I guess I should admire her for killing him off with the landing. She never gave me a chance to land him, though, with all that ponderous tea talk. That’s all her fault. I was totally ready to load Eislander up with more guns and ammo than a Matthew Reilly character ever had, ready to cram in more action than he ever does. Ready to see the name Joel Hedges in chunky silver foil over a picture of a blazing aircraft carrier or something. Sure, Reilly’s good, but he’s at least thirty now. His days at the top are numbered.

  We could have done something with these characters if Cat wasn’t such a slow-motion Jane Austen wannabe. And ‘lame’? ‘Lame’? I’m not happy about ‘lame’. I wanted so much action there wouldn’t even be room for adjectives, but what chance did she give me? Wallpaper has more narrative than most of her paragraphs, and she calls mine lame.

  But killing Eislander, and cutting his tongue out? That’s good, and I can’t deny it. It’s quite a move. I’m kind of shitty about the warts and the fish smell, though. I don’t know why we needed that.

  Luke’s dousing three tuckshop sausage rolls in sauce when I find him.

  ‘How’d you go with the dobbing?’ he says. He’s had far too much time to reflect on it while I’ve been up at the staff room. ‘Which, by the way, is very cool. It’ll certainly stop her wanting you.’

  ‘She doesn’t want me.’ It snaps out of me like a volley at the net – too fast. ‘And, more importantly, I wasn’t dobbing. I was just… seeking a point of order. That’s legitimate.’

  ‘Sure,’ he says smugly, and then he puts a sad look on his face and goes on in a whiny voice, ‘Mr Ashton, nasty Cat Davis broke my character. Boo hoo. Can you fix it, Mr Ashton, and tell her
she’s bad? Boo hoo.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘No. Of course it wasn’t. Boo hoo.’ He takes a bite at his sausage roll, and sprays some greasy flakes of pastry when he laughs. Some of them end up on my pants. I should never have told him about my trouble with Cat.

  ‘It’s easy for you. You’re tandemed with Aaron Bligh, who has no imagination.’

  ‘Hey, who said Aaron had no imagination? We’re doing fine.’

  ‘You said he had no imagination.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ I look like I’ve won a point back, until he says, ‘And then I went and told Ashtoe all about it in my whiny dobbing voice and… oh, no, hang on a second. That wasn’t me at all. That was someone else. Different issue.’

  I pick up one of his sausage rolls, take a bite out of it. ‘Arsehole.’ Some pastry flakes spray back his way when I say it.

  ‘Sure, spit my lunch at me,’ he says, and laughs again. ‘That’ll make you the winner.’

  ‘Well, we’d be even, then, since you’re the winner when it comes to the chicks. I assume you’ll be scoring again this weekend? Unless you’re a bit light on for cash, of course.’

  He pushes half a sausage roll into his mouth. ‘Yeah, nice,’ he says, in a muffled kind of way. ‘Picking up Davis’s scraps now.’ Then he smirks and a flake of pastry falls from his lip. ‘I’ve got no idea why I’m not constantly banging chicks.’

  ‘Sure. We both know you’re quite a package.’

  We start playing handball before he’s swallowed his last mouthful. I work up a serious sweat. On the way to our next class, my shirt front’s sticking to me and my socks are slipping in my shoes. Fish? Do I smell of fish? Every day after lunch, after handball, do I turn up at the next lesson lathered with foul repulsive fishy sweat? Cat must have got that idea from somewhere.

  Okay, cutting the tongue out? Clearly a metaphor for silencing me and stopping me writing my story. Fish smell? Clearly a metaphor for fish smell – me, fish smell, real world. Is anyone going to go to the formal with me? Anyone other than a fish? Or at best a mermaid?

  I try to take a subtle sniff at my armpit, though no species can do that. Is this where it went wrong with Emma? Fish stink? No, don’t go back there. But is it?

  ‘Can you smell fish?’ I find myself saying involuntarily to Luke as we walk into the classroom. ‘What I mean is, my mother’s using this really weird laundry powder at the moment…’

  So he gets to laugh again at my expense. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you today,’ he says. ‘But please, keep it up. The rest of my life’s kind of dull right now. Aaron Bligh’s got no imagination.’

  ‘Okay, here’s the plan,’ my mother says. ‘And I don’t want you to misunderstand or say anything negative, because he’s a really nice guy…’

  Her mood has changed. We’re riding a giddy upswing right now – at least that’s how it feels. She’s speaking quickly and hand-talking. She could take an eye out with this conversation. There’s a new man, dammit, a new man already.

  ‘You know how I said support group went well?’ she says, urging me to back her up.

  ‘A really useful catharsis – was that how you put it?’

  ‘Well, that too. But there was a new guy…’

  I knew it. I knew the catharsis story was a cover. She was far more optimistic after support group than any catharsis would make her, and I bet she spent the whole trip home in the car trying to come up with the right word to cover the fact that she was cruising the meeting for a date.

  ‘He seemed really nice,’ she says of the freshest piece of wreckage washed up on the beach. ‘And we’ve chatted a couple of times since. He’s really down at the moment. Or he was. He’s a little bit brighter now, but you know how it is with these things. Lots of ups and downs. You’d like him. I know you would. Which is good because…’ There’s hesitation now. Her mouth starts on a few words, but doesn’t finish them. Then she blurts out, ‘Because tomorrow night we – as in the you-and-me type of “we” – we’re going to meet him.’

  ‘I’m sorry? I have to go on dates with them now?’

  ‘Oh, no, no. Not a date. How funny.’ Forced laugh. ‘No, no. It’s a support-group thing.’

  ‘So you’re all going out somewhere?’

  ‘Oh no, not all, no. This is just a spin-off. He really needs some support and I think he’s stuck at home and that does you no good, so I thought it would be nice for him to get out. In a definite non-date type environment. So we’re going to Sizzler. Tomorrow night, with him and his children.’

  ‘Some guy and his kids at Sizzler?’ She’s done brilliantly picking the non-date environment. ‘Are you seriously telling me that I’ve got to go to Sizzler? And hang out with some gloomy guy who’s down on his luck?’

  ‘There’s an unlimited salad bar with every main. You know how you like bottomless food deals.’

  I can’t fight her on that. I grapple with a Homer Simpson moment, contemplating the bread-and-butter pudding. There’s a thought bubble with a huge juicy tray of it, right above my head. My stomach churns. I need dinner now. ‘I don’t have to make friends with these people, do I?’

  ‘Oh, no. It’s not like that. It’s just about putting something more normal in his life. I think his children are young, anyway. Very young. We’re just being supportive.’

  ‘So, this is a good deed. You and me doing a good deed.’

  She’s telling me he’s her latest project. I ask if we can have Thai takeaway tonight, right away, and she says we can. With that, it seems that we have a deal about Sizzler.

  Later she tells me it’s too soon, far too soon after Jorge, for her to even think about another man that way. Then she tells me her favourite thing about Sizzler is the toast, and how it has a fried-cheesy crispness on one side but it’s often buttery on the other.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I tell her. ‘I’m going. I said I’d go.’

  When I go to write my paragraph, there’s an email from my father, with the usual pictures of my Canberra family – Laurel and a friend dressed for tennis and posing reluctantly, Charlotte working on a painting – plus tandem-story advice and a couple of websites he thinks I should look at:

  Most sites seem to deal with one case – probably a joke – where the two writers were completely incompatible. I’ve seen it attributed to students from five US universities, so I imagine it’s a joke that’s done the rounds as an email. There’s also some material that might be useful, though. It’s interesting to see how the partnerships can work (or not). Hope all’s well with your mother. It’s getting cooler in the evenings already, here – probably not the case with you.

  (Or not.) That’s where my partnership with Cat is – the brackety part. The partnership is working so well that I’m panicking about whether I smell like fish, and the best tactic I can find to divert Luke from talking about Cat is to take a mouthful of his lunch and spit the shrapnel in his direction. I’ve been checking the backs of my hands for warts all day. What’s wrong with me? She’s making it up – that’s the job. It’s not about me.

  On top of all that, I’ve got my mother to deal with. Every day at the moment she’s some new person. But she’s out to do good, on a mission. No way would I be going to Sizzler with her if this was any kind of first date. Surely.

  I stare and stare at Cat’s email, and then I stare a bit longer. Then it hits me. She might have killed Eislander, but he’s there in her story now. She blinked first. No custard, no capes, no madness – he’s there in the flesh.

  It’s not over yet…

  Hey Cat,

  Thanks for the Matthew Reilly comment. I can see you’re gearing up for your companion essay. It’s quite a tandem, matching the new Matt Reilly with writing vaguely reminiscent of Jane Austen (except substituting tea for ideas, narrative drive, talent, etc.). But welcome to the dark side. I’m glad Eislander is now real to you. Though you may, like many before you, have underestimated him.

  J

  This was surel
y the greatest disguise of all. Inside the latex death costume, Eislander stirred. Every detail had been worked out, right down to the cow’s tongue and the capsule of fake blood he had carried in his mouth. He barely felt the fingers of the ambulance crew on the rubber sheath over his neck and wrists as they searched for a pulse, and soon they were gone. He stood, disengaged his chute, cut himself free of the costume and moved into the shadows. He made his way to the open door unseen. He took the old man out on the steps with the knife and, as the silver tea tray hit the ground and the teapot shattered into a million pieces that could never ever be stuck back together, he rolled an XM84 stun grenade through the doorway. There was a flash, a crack and smoke, and as the smoke cleared he saw him. Heckler. In a flowing dress and an auburn wig, and holding an ivory-handled hairbrush. Heinz ‘Hands of Doom’ Heckler, gone to ground months before and surfacing on the other side of the world as Elizabeth. Heckler was about to hate Tuesdays big-time. But only very briefly, as he was about to die.

  PS – Okay, the Jane Austen remark was mean, but once I typed it I couldn’t resist sending it. Frankly, I’ve got to admire you for killing Eislander. And the tongue thing was a nice touch. I think we’re really onto something here.

  – Wednesday

  ‘CAT! GET A MOVE ON, PLEASE. I DON’T WANT TO BE LATE!’

  I roll my eyes, even though my father can’t see me. How can you be ‘late’ for Sizzler? It’s Sizzler for god’s sake. Who cares when we get there? It’s a buffet of mediocrity. A bit like my life right now. I pick up my foundation and give it a shake. I have an enormous red zit in the middle of my forehead. That’s the thing with me – I finally get rid of one problem, and something else crops up.

  ‘CAT?’

  ‘ALL RIGHT!’ I yell back, and put the bottle back down. I’ll have to go au natural to dinner, but it’s only Sizzler. T-shirt, jeans and no make-up it will have to be. I give myself a quick glance in the full-length mirror and make sure my fringe is covering up my pimple. Then I grab my handbag and yell out, ‘I’M COMING!’ as I head for the car.