by Nick Earls
He says, Hi. He says his name is Greg. He has profoundly orange hair.
He looks at my arms and I tell him a cat did it to me, and I almost tell him more. Greg, the orange cat, the cat I am sure is named after him, my grandmother’s cat, etcetera. But that would only lead me back to the trashing. So I just tell him a cat did it to me.
Some cat, he says. What were you doing to it?
Flea bath.
He fiddles around, washes my arms with a pink solution, seems not to mind about the on-going bleeding. He talks about sutures and says he thinks we can get away without them. He closes some parts with strips and calls the nurse in to give me a dressing with some pressure. He talks about the possibility of an infection and says I should come back tomorrow or the day after to have the wound checked.
And he’s looking at me as though he’s trying to work something out. As though his mouth might be saying something mundane and procedural, but his brain is off on a tangent. Just when I’m assuming he’s feeling the end of a long day and his mind is merely elsewhere he says, So how are you? Other than this I mean.
What?
How are you feeling? How are things? Generally.
Fine.
Good. That’s good. So, no other problems then? Nothing else you’d like to discuss while you’re here?
No. I don’t think so.
You’re not … you’re not depressed at all, he says, as though this can masquerade as casual enquiry, or anything?
Well … no. I’m fine.
But I blew it. I paused and I blew it. If I was fine there would have been no pause. I would have laughed. And now we’re both looking at my forearms as though the bandages are hiding wounds far deeper than cat scratches.
Well, look, you really don’t seem very happy to me. And I’m a bit concerned.
What do you mean?
I know what he means.
Well, those wounds. If they weren’t caused by a cat, if it was something else, that’d be okay. We could talk about it. Things can be sorted out you know, even when they don’t look good.
It was a cat. It was a cat, really. You want me to bring it in and show it to you? We can do the forensic thing and get the skin out from under its claws. Except I think it’s run away. We could have done that if it hadn’t run away.
So there’s no cat now?
There’s no cat now. Now. But there was a cat earlier this evening.
So these wounds were caused by some kind of temporary cat?
No, no. A cat. A regular cat. A cat who didn’t like the flea bath, and I think he’s gone now.
Okay. He pauses, I have to ask you something, and I don’t want you to be offended, and I want you to answer honestly. Regardless of the cause of these injuries, okay, regardless, can you tell me that if I let you go home now you’ll be okay?
It was a cat.
Fine. It was a cat. And can you give me an undertaking that if you go home now you’ll be okay?
I’ll be fine. Fine. I’m a bit worried about the cat though. I hope he hasn’t run away.
Yes. Me too. Will you promise me that if you’re worried about things, particularly if you’re worried you might, you know, harm yourself, or anything, you have to promise you’ll contact me first.
I promise. That’s fine. I promise. I’m really quite okay. Okay? My life might not be at one of its high points at the moment, but I’m fine. I’m getting through this. I’m going quite well. I’m working and renovating, and it’s all going fine.
Good. I’m glad. I’m very glad. And I’m glad that we’ve had this chance to talk. Now, I think it would be good if we could talk again. So what I’d like you to do is to come back and see me, maybe in a couple of days. And we can take a look at those wounds, see how they’re going, and we can talk. Okay?
Well, I’m a bit busy.
Cat scratches can be prone to infection. I really need to look at those wounds again.
Okay.
Okay.
Thanks.
He smiles, but with some gravity, and he walks out of the treatment room. The nurse reappears and says, All done in here? as though she wants me to know she doesn’t know what the talk was about. She shows me back out to the counter, where I sign the Medicare form.
Now, did you have to make a follow-up appointment? the receptionist asks.
No. No. Everything’s fine. All sorted out.
The intercom buzzes. She picks up the phone, says, Yes, yes, okay, and turns back to me.
Doctor says he would like you to have another appointment.
Oh, right, I must have misunderstood.
Yes. He said a long appointment in two days time would be fine.
Oh, good.
Now, he’s working during the day on Thursday, eight to five, and the morning’s filling up.
I could be a bit busy on Thursday.
Yes. Let’s make it Thursday afternoon. How about four-thirty?
Four-thirty’s fine.
She smiles, and only then lets me go.
At home, Greg (the cat) is waiting on the front steps, as though nothing has happened.
15
I wake every time I roll over. My arms are burning, throbbing, like a red neon light saying Dickhead in very large letters.
I turn up to work wearing a T-shirt and looking like crap. I have worn my best T-shirt, since this is work after all, but unfortunately my best T-shirt is a partially luminous Felix the Cat, given to me for my last birthday by everyone on the fifteenth floor. They made me put it on as soon as I’d unwrapped it and Hillary said, It glows in the dark, look, and she cupped her hands against my chest and looked through the eye hole made by her thumbs. And I had to stand quite still while seven or eight people stood around me, looking through their cupped hands at Felix the Cat and going, Hey yeah.
Christ Rick, Hillary says when she sees me, what’s wrong?
Nothing, really, nothing.
It doesn’t look like nothing. What have you done to yourself?
Nothing. I have done nothing to myself. I want that to be totally clear. This is not something I’ve done to myself.
Okay, okay, she says, backing off almost physically. I just meant it like Hey, what have you done to yourself, you know? What’s happened to you? That kind of question.
Sorry.
Okay, so we’ll try it again. This time you answer, like a really calm, normal person. Hey, Rick, what have you done to yourself?
And she’s making gestures, as though this is a role play.
I gave the cat a flea bath.
She laughs. I can’t help but smile myself.
It’s a very tough cat.
That’s it? Really? A flea bath?
Yeah. That’s all there is to it. Well, the cat did get slightly upset. I have to leave early tomorrow afternoon for the doctor to check things, if that’s okay. He said cat scratches get infected easily.
Sure.
After some more reassurance that from the elbows up I’m no better or worse off than yesterday she lets me go to my office to start work. I can see I now have a new dimension to the trashing story, as it has become complicated by the need to deny any suicidal urges. This is not what I was looking for.
And coupled with badly broken sleep it makes today feel less real than usual. I rest my arms in my lap and my chin on my Felix the Cat T-shirt and I lean back in my chair and sleep fitfully for nearly an hour.
I meet Jeff for coffee. He laughs for quite a long time at the chaos that seems to have swept across me overnight, the random hair, the bandages, and he refers to my wounds as a characteristically pitiful gesture of selfharm.
It was Greg, I tell him. I think he was trying to effect a mercy killing.
And I have to tell him the whole story, including the other Greg and his obvious concerns for me.
The Night of Two Gregs, he says. What an evening of distinction. I think only you could have an evening like that.
Sometimes I surprise even myself. I think I’ve come up with the
gold standard for crap and then, out of the blue, another personal best.
The Bradman of crap.
The Bradman of crap. I always knew there was something Bradmanesque about me. I just had to find my calling.
So does this mean you’re out of tennis tonight?
Yeah. Yeah, I think it does. I think I’d burst open and bleed and my friend the GP would probably take me for a breaker of promises and put me away.
My arms begin throbbing again in the hot sun on the way back to work. People watch me as I walk through the mall, watch me as though they are watching one of the mall’s resident mad people. They stare as I walk past, as though I’m so mad I won’t even know, and I want to stop and say to them, Look, I’m not mad, I’m a legal counsel for a big bank you’ve never heard of. And then I think, why does this make me any better than the mad people? Why should I want to be separated from them because I’m going to an office now and not staying in the mall, finding my place in the shade and staring intently at passers by?
Back in the toilets at work I look in the mirror, and my hair is like the nest of a confused bird. I want to go into the mall again and explain to everyone that, supportive as I am of the resident mad people, I happen not to be one of them. I happen simply to have a temporary combing problem. But this, like all other stories, works its way back. Combing problem, forearm pain, trivial injury while flea bathing, grandmother’s cat, grandmother dead, trashed. So I’ll just have to live with it.
My hair has never been easy, but usually its disarray has signalled nothing more than slackness, a windy day, a lost comb, a big night. And I can live with all of those. It’s only today that I’d like things to be a little different.
Automatic Hair
Some years ago, Jeff came up with the notion of Automatic Hair to describe the phenomenon occurring on his head. Automatic Hair changes for nothing, for no-one. Automatic Hair is impervious to outside influence. However treated or mistreated, however slept on, sweated through or swum in, his hair automatically assumes the position he thinks is a style. He says it responds well to washing but has no need of combing on a regular basis. And he thinks this is a good thing. He also thinks people as lucky as he is are very rare. He thinks he may be the first white person since Elvis to have Automatic Hair. He thinks Bronwyn Bishop would like us to think she has Automatic Hair, but you don’t have to be an expert to know otherwise. And he cares not at all that, perhaps for the rest of his life, he will have the Automatic Hair of the 1980s.
Today I would happily settle for anything styleless, anything automatic, probably any hair other than the madness on my head. Any kind of hair at all that has no association with trashing.
I make myself another cup of coffee and talk to people in various countries about the Thai project, with the aim of achieving the delicate balance I have promised Hillary. And I talk to them like a man in a dark suit, and they have no idea that things are less than perfect. On the other hand, this is the first time it has ever occurred to me that my understanding that they are darkly suited during all our conversations is merely an assumption.
I wonder if I should say to them, I’m wearing a Felix the Cat T-shirt, I have hair like the nest of a confused bird and I’m bandaged from my wrists most of the way to my elbows and I was just wondering how you were looking today. And Harvey, the American expat in Singapore, says, Well it’s funny you should ask me that Richard as today I’m wearing only a cowboy hat and a garter and I think I just lost a grapefruit in my rectum.
But they all talk like the darkest of dark suits, like men who are very serious about work, garments and fruit. And I can match them in this, every step of the way, as we talk with an unnecessary earnestness about the kind of document that will make us all happy.
16
If you stare at the Can of Worms screen saver long enough, you don’t see the worms at all. You see the screen opening up black spaces in front of you, shapes arising with the appearance of order and then metamorphosing into other shapes. Such is the way of the worms.
If I was paying any less attention to my work I would probably be drooling. I expect that by this time next week the ever-considerate Hillary will have fixed a bib to my chin.
I know I’m not doing as well as I used to. I know I’m not kicking out of this just yet. I know that for every little thing I can interpret as an encouraging sign, there are probably several that suggest the exact opposite. And some of the examples of this are obvious and undeniable.
Christmas party, PJ Shelton Bank (Aust), 1993
I drank to moderate excess, as did many others. I sang all the words to ‘Khe Sanh’, while wearing my tie around my head. I won a prize in the caption competition, though I can’t recall the caption. I danced on the pool table. I left at midnight with my caption prize, a collection of Christmas goodies wrapped in green cellophane, and on my way to a cab I tucked it under the arm of a shoeless man sleeping in Albert Park.
Christmas party, PJ Shelton Bank (Aust), 1994
I am unsure how much I drank, and unsure of the consumption of others. I sang ‘The Ship Song’ with such intensity I made Nick Cave look like he was only kidding. I sang Morrissey’s ‘The More You Ignore Me’ during some strange dance with Hillary, who, fortunately, laughed a lot. I was not placed in the caption competition. Specifically, the picture of a starving toothless refugee was not seen to be fittingly represented by my entry, ‘I s’pose a fuck’s out of the question’. I vomited in one of the pockets of the pool table (mostly fluid, but it did manage to hold several of the larger chunks). I was put in a cab early, without a prize, and without great awareness of my surroundings. The 1994 Christmas party was for many the first big hint that I was coping quite badly with Anna’s departure.
I want things to be better, but they aren’t yet. Some days have an inertia about them. And those that move at any speed seem to move also without any control. I have always liked control, and any lack of it does cause me some discomfort.
I have always liked control. It makes me sound like some control freak.
I hope, in my life, for a reasonable level of control. That most days will be manageable, and that most random events that arise should offer me opportunities rather than harm. And I think all that’s okay, within the bounds of acceptability in a person, or a partner. That’s what I hope.
I am not Jeff Ross, who correctly understands himself to be a creature of routine. A creature for whom change is an enemy. This man’s development, as he well knows, was thrown out at the anal stage. He lets nothing go. If sphincters could arm wrestle he’d be a world champion.
I have suggested to him I should change. That maybe I should make myself a nicer person, maybe that would work. But he says nice is dead in the nineties, that this is an age of irony and maybe even cruelty, particularly the cruelties of ambivalence and indifference, and I should run with it. He says that perhaps the only change I should make should be to ease up on the enormous amount of cruelty directed inward. He tells me I dwell too much on the idea that I have been cruel to others, and I now seem to be championing their cause and being very cruel to myself.
He says that the best you can do in the nineties is to be ironic and harmless (that is, to choose to discard the cruelty on offer), to find a small number of people you like and trust, to expect wine of quality and regular tennis and to hold out little hope for the world. I think he is the sort of person who, in the time of fortified cities, would have been quite comfortable during a long siege.
I told him he should write a self-help book, and tour internationally as a guru to the lonely and crapulous. That regardless of his own stated choice to look inward, he had a gift and a duty. He had a special thing to share. And I told him I could see him drawing crappy people from their modest lives into stadiums where they would sing and hug and chant his truisms and learn to love their disease.
A few days after I suggested this, he scared me a little by proving that he’d given it some thought. He said we could do it. He said we should st
art with bumper stickers. Bumper stickers that said, in very large letters ‘CRAP’, and then, below, in smaller letters, ‘and I’m proud’. He seemed to see this as a very liberating notion.
I am one of his friends. We share tennis and wine and the siege mentality of the age, but that’s not to say he doesn’t worry me.
He turns thirty tomorrow. I go out at lunchtime to buy him a gift.
I browse, and by the time I absolutely have to go back to work I have nothing. I am standing in front of a shelf of popcorn makers. I tell myself not to dismiss the popcorn makers lightly, and I take myself so seriously I buy two. My theory is that one will make an excellent gift for Jeff, and the other will facilitate diversity in my diet. Over the last few weeks I have noticed my culinary repertoire constricting, and I don’t think this is a good sign. Reading the pack, the popcorn maker looks straightforward. Add corn. Turn on. And the corn spins in hot air until it pops and pours out into your catcher, then you have all the options in the world.
I leave the store with one under each arm and I go back to work.
Corn will be good. Popcorn will help me. Popcorn and its many possibilities. Maybe I’m better than last Christmas, at least in some ways.
17
At four-thirty I’m back at the medical centre, where I’m told, Doctor’s running a little behind, so please take a seat.
I sit near the TV and kids with runny noses and palpable fevers clamber across the furniture and tip over a pot plant. At least in the medical centre everyone around me thinks it’s fine to have bandages, and probably only the relatively small number of people over the age of ten think I’m wearing them because of some failed suicide attempt.
At five-fifteen my turn comes. Greg’s door opens and he calls me in and inspects my wounds in a very business-like way and says he’s pleased with the progress. He says we could probably leave them open, but it might be an idea to cover them just so they don’t get bumped. Then we sit down for our chat.