Zigzag Street

by Nick Earls

  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?

  5

  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.

  The dry sink thing

  I should have known it wouldn’t work out with Anna from the day we moved in together. We washed a lot of plates that had been wrapped in newspaper for the move and she told me, ‘If there’s one thing I have to have it’s a dry sink’. This is most significant as an example of difference as, until that moment, I was totally unaware of the dry sink concept. I think, if she’d even said, ‘If there’s one thing I have to have it’s an antimacassar on every seat’, or a gerbora in the bathroom, or even a gerbil in the bedroom, things would have been okay. But once the importance of a dry sink had been stressed to me, I had no excuses. If the sink wasn’t dry, it quickly became apparent whose fault it was. And it was highly unlikely that it would ever be Anna Hiller’s, as she was the one with the dry sink thing, and with the little towel on a nearby peg, especially for sink drying. We argued and I called her unreasonable and uncompromising and this didn’t go down well. She said, ‘Is it such a big deal? Such a big deal that you won’t take the trouble to remember to do this little thing for me?’ So ultimately I had a choice, and I chose to remember and to dry, and Anna was happy.

  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.

  6

  She handled it like a scientist, the trashing. Stepped back from it and took out all the emotion. Handled it as though it was the decision of some public authority, quite beyond the powers of the two of us.

  She gave me a list, typed on her computer at work, headed Suggested Division of Common Property.

  And she hardly made eye contact for several days. We stayed in separate rooms then. This was my choice. It was probably hers too, but I said it first. She said what we needed was a clean break, but I think sometimes even she was disturbed by the cold brutality of it all.

  Then I’d get upset and she’d get upset, but it didn’t change her mind. She’d taken the big step, pushed past the bewildering moment of trashing when the panang nua almost fell from my mouth.

  I just have to get away for a while. I just have to do some other things. There’s no-one else. No-one else. And then, eventually, not really so long ago, on the phone from Melbourne when I kept pushing, It’s over. Don’t you know what over means?

  Some of these sounds may never escape my head. I wake up and they’re there, they’re real, they’re here right now. As though, in Melbourne, there’s a mouth I know well making the shape of an O. Telling me Over Red lips, next to a phone. O-ver.

  I know what it means.

  I know what it means.

  I make toast, I give Greg his dry food breakfast right on time, I tell myself routine is good. Healthy. A good sign.

  I see red lips trashing me, just at a whisper, like they’ve done most of the night. And the toast doesn’t taste good. Not much tastes good at the moment, particularly toast. But that’s a different matter, maybe. When I first moved in the toast tasted very strange indeed, not dreadful, not as dreadful as it should have done, but undeniably strange.

  After several days of this, several days of thinking maybe my grandmother toasted rye bread and its influence was somehow lingering, I decided to clean the toaster. And a crispy, multiply-toasted mouse’s leg fell out. Just the leg, even when I cleaned the toaster thoroughly, just the leg. I had to sit down for a while, and in the end all I could face for breakfast that day was a couple of mouthfuls of Scotch.

  I have a new toaster now and soon, I imagine, this discovery shall be widely regarded as nothing more than an urban myth.

  7

  Sal calls me to suggest takeaway tonight. We thought we might pick it up and bring it over to your place, she says. And before I can say, When’s the latest I can let you know, she says, And don’t give me any of that when’s the latest I can let you know crap.

  My tail gets munched, and a particularly glamorous Sammy the Snake performance goes the way of all before it. The game dissolves in front of me and a groan comes out before I can stop it.

  What was that?

  Existential angst. Just the usual.

  So we’re coming round then?

  Tonight?

  Yeah, about seven-thirty. We might even bring Tim and Chris. Have you got any particular food preference? It seems they’re coming round.

  I’m not sure.

  So does that mean no, you have no particular preference? Or are you actually unsure as to whether or not you have a particular preference?

  I suspect that at present I can neither confirm nor deny whether or not I have a particular preference, and I may not be able to do so for some time.

  Does this mean I should pick?

  I’m not sure.

  I’m sorry, did I call you on a bad day for your brain?

  As opposed to other days?

  Okay, we’ll make this easy. Just make sure you have five clean plates, five glasses, five forks and a couple of spoons for serving and we’ll handle everything else.

  Five, five, five and two. Got it.

  Some days my concentration is quite poor. People catch me when my mind is swimming among ideas and not able to grapple easily with conversation. Today I am endeavouring to make headway with the power station thing, and I am endeavouring not to clutter every moment with thoughts of Anna Hiller. But anything that reminds me of anything in the last three years reminds me of her. I am managing to construct an entire universe in which she is central, but absent.

  And I’m well aware that this is a particularly stupid thing to do.

  At home, I prepare the seventeen items expected of me and I place them on the red Laminex kitchen table. Sal and Jeff bring wine, so I drink quite a bit of it for them and feel more relaxed than I have for a couple of days. And the conversation moves briskly from one topic to another and I wade slowly after it, lurching in from time to time to offer some remark that is only just no longer relevant.

  I have trouble moving on, I tell them. Trouble committing to a new topic.

  And I’m watching these four people, these two couples, at least as much as I’m listening to them. And being the only presently trashed person among my friends, I seem to spend a lot of my time in odd-numbered groups. Nights with five plates.

  While Jeff and Tim debate first the value of the adversarial talk show as a social document and then whether or not there’s a cricket career to be made out of the backspinner, I’m privately focussing on the coupling issue and not saying much.

  Jeff said to me once, when I asked him (when I said to him, Tell me exactly why and give me detail), She’s smart and she’s strong and I like that. Sure, it’s not always straightforward, but straightforward never really worked for me. So it has its challenges but that’s okay. We’ve decided she’s forthright. We have a deal where I can refer to her as forthright but not uncompromising. She’s generous, more generous than me. She does things for people who matter to her. And then he shrugged his shoulders and said, And all that’s great, but so what? It sounds like a reference. Really, it just happened. One of those things I guess. The L thing, you know. And for the L thing he offers no theory, and that’s rare.

  Naturally I haven’t let it rest there. In my own time, in my own head, right now in my own mad, troubled swimming among ideas, I’ve tested all kinds of hypotheses, trying to work out what goes right, what goes wrong. Comparing Sal to Anna, comparing Jeff to me. Comparing Anna to Jeff and Sal to me and Sal to Jeff. I’ve learned very little of course, but the processes of comparison are sometimes inexorable. And still the most appropriate comparison is usually me to a pair of Steelo underpants and a hair shirt.

  Should I try to pursue a relationship with someone like Sal, or with someone quieter, less power
ful? Should I call Anna, just one more time and …

  And what about Tim and Chris? What about the other relationship in front of me right now? Tim and his PhD (Cantab) in history and his Radical Responses to the Queen Caroline Agitations (J Brit Stud, 1995) and his policy job with the state government. Tim and his fondness for recreational theorising and pulling his socks up when he plays tennis. Tim and the thing Sal refers to as his one big moment of ‘wanker fame’, his credit in the Oxford English Dictionary for discovering the first reference to the term ‘rumpy-pumpy’:

  Dr Timothy Dylan Carstairs Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary

  Rumpy-pumpy: from ‘rumpy’, a popular rum-based aphrodisiac in Elizabethan times (the recipe no longer extant); the deliriously protracted intercourse said to follow its use, first noted in the correspondence of Robert Greene (also Green), author of ‘Greene’s Groat’s Worth of Wit’ (1592), in a letter to the playwright Thomas Kyd concerning the behaviour of a mutual acquaintance, at that time in the Dutch seaport of Vlissingen (Flushing): ‘ … and then they partook of the rumpy and made proceed to the performance of the famous rumpy-pumpy, surely until the dawn hour was near upon them, stopping only when they had rattled every sword in the garrison and laid shameful cracks upon the town walls, and all, ‘tis said, for the price of a Dutch shilling’. TDCM

  Chris and her quietness, placid non-meaningful quietness. Chris and her complete ignorance of the part of English history we refer to, somewhat strangely, as ‘Tim’s period’. Chris and her job at a Flight Centre, where they met when she booked a trip for him once, a trip with his previous girlfriend, though it’s now referred to as My trip to America.

  How do they couple? How do they fit together? How did it even cross their minds, and how is it still going now?