Zigzag Street

by Nick Earls

  So how’s it going? he says, in a way that makes it seem very like a standard opening remark.

  Fine.

  How’s the cat? Did it turn up?

  Yeah. The cat’s fine.

  He looks down at my file, as though trying to work out where to take it from here. He clicks his pen a few times, but writes nothing. Your address, he says. I used to look after the woman who lived there.

  Yeah, my grandmother.

  This wasn’t … This may sound a little strange. The cat. It’s not an orange cat, is it?

  An orange cat called Greg, yes. The cat my grandmother named after you. That’s the one. He’s very nice normally. Just not a fan of the flea bath.

  Who would be?

  So you’re saying that cutting me to ribbons would be the reasonable response of any orange Greg in the circumstances?

  He laughs, though in a slightly unsettled way, as though I might be offering to flea-bathe him. We miss your grandmother round here. She was certainly a character.

  Yeah.

  She always used to bring biscuits. She made them herself. I always looked at her and thought that’s what I’d like to be like at ninety.

  Yeah, me too. I thought that. There she was, ninetyone and still putting shit on me. You’ve got to respect that.

  So, how do you get to be living in her house?

  It’s a complicated set of circumstances. Well it’s not really. It’s actually pretty simple. I was in a relationship. It ended. I had to live somewhere. I stayed with my parents but, you know.

  Yeah, I do. I do know. I worked in England for a while and when I came back I stayed with mine for a few months. I hadn’t lived with them for maybe ten years. It was very strange. Too strange. They ate dinner really early, and took an intense interest in my day.

  Yeah. That’s it. That’s it, exactly. They’re great but they’ll drive you crazy. And you want to shake them and say, These things are just habits. They don’t matter. You can get over this. People can eat dinner after dark. But you know they wouldn’t understand. They think there’s something really Bohemian about you because you don’t want to eat till seven-thirty.

  In the end you have to leave, don’t you? You’ve got to get back to some place that’s your own.

  Yeah. Or in my case my grandmother’s. But it’s fine now. I’m settling in.

  And the relationship?

  It’s over. That’s been made clear to me. So now I’ve got to make it clear to me too, and then work out what happens next.

  He says these things can be rough. Sometimes they’re all you can think about and you can feel them weighing you down, but in the end you pull through, even if there are times when you don’t expect to. We talk a bit more, probably until he decides I’m safe, until he believes his feline namesake caused the harm that brought me here two nights ago. And he says that we could talk again, if I wanted. That I can come back if I notice I’m not coming to terms with any of this and I want to talk to someone who’s not part of the situation.

  And right at this moment I realise that sometimes I still work on the assumption that I’ll be fine. That something will happen, or nothing will happen, and this will all lift from me and I’ll be fine.

  I walk home up the hill. Right now I don’t feel bad.

  18

  On Friday Deb asks me what plans I’ve got for the weekend and I tell her I’m going to a thirtieth.

  And she says, Fuck, thirty, slowly and breathily as though it’s almost inconceivable. You’re not thirty are you Ricky?

  No. I’ve got nearly two years left to do all the ‘before I’m thirty’ things.

  Thirty. I can’t even imagine thirty.

  You don’t have to. It happens anyway. It’s like that.

  So what are you doing?

  Going out to dinner.

  No, you’ve got to do more than that.

  I’ll give you the guy’s number if you want. You can call him and tell him he’s fucking up his only shot at a decent thirtieth.

  I start working, start looking through this contract again and wading my way with some discomfort to a few things that might become ideas. My phone rings. It’s Deb.

  You know what I’d do for my thirtieth, Ricky?

  What?

  I’d get one of those bouncy castles, one of those blow up ones you see at church fetes, and I’d have the party in there.

  Good plan, Deb.

  Yeah. Thanks babe. You’ll be there won’t you?

  Sure.

  You’ll have to take your shoes off. That okay by you?

  Fine. I bounce way better with my shoes off.

  Cool.

  We all plan to meet at my place for drinks before dinner. Sal decided this a couple of weeks ago because it’s near the restaurant and, besides, it would give everyone a chance to see how my renovations are going. Back then there was nothing ironic about it, I fully expected we’d be standing round admiring my handiwork. I wonder if I can keep everyone down at the end of the verandah with the two and a half painted railings long enough to get away with it. I doubt it.

  So instead I hide the two and a half painted railings with a table and I try to distract my guests with champagne and the presentation of the gift. And the house is so profoundly unrenovated that the inspection aspect of the visit is entirely forgotten. I extol the many virtues of popcorn. I tell them it’s easy, it’s healthy and the choices of seasoning are limited only by the imagination. Jeff asks me what seasoning I’m going to try first with mine and I realise I haven’t thought this through.

  Good imagination, he says.

  We go into the kitchen and he loads up both our machines with corn. Within minutes the popcorn is pouring into a large mixing bowl with butter and curry powder and Jeff gets quite excited about the result, but the general consensus is that it might not be quite right with the champagne.

  And we do seem to drink quite a lot of champagne before we head off down the hill to Le Chalet.

  They seat us at a table for six, with Jeff and Sal on one side, Tim and Chris on the other and me at the end, sitting opposite a distant empty chair that I try to tell myself is not symbolic. Jeff calls one of the staff over and says, I wonder if you could take that chair away. It’s making my friend uncomfortable.

  And tonight, Sal says emphatically, as though she has planned to, no intellectual wanking. No excluding reasonable people with that boy’s crap.

  But it’s my birthday, Jeff says, and that’s my favourite thing.

  Well that puts me in my place. Your favourite thing is it? Okay, for the birthday boy, for the boy who clearly has an interest in beginning his thirty-first year with a vow of celibacy, wank away. Go on. See if I care.

  Excellent.

  But nothing about longitude. We’ve all had enough of fucking longitude.

  Debating the Discovery of the Longitude

  The on-going debate concerning the Discovery of the Longitude has come to symbolise the pointlessness of all our many on-going pointless point-scoring games. The unspoken ground rules appear to include a necessary lack of any ultimate worth in the topic, and certain minimum and maximum levels of knowledge, so that we each have sufficient material for the game to begin, but none of us ever has enough to bring it to a conclusive end. And this has taken us through all kinds of subjects from sport (obviously), to worm reproduction, to forgotten pop classics of the late seventies, to possible interpretations of the line ‘Stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni’ in its historical context, to the likely effects of Eratosthenes’ Error on early cartography and ultimately to the Discovery of the Longitude. This is one of the best because we all know nearly nothing about it, but we each claim to come at it from a valid perspective, Jeff with a Masters in Maritime law, Tim with his history PhD, and me, courageously, with no more weaponry than a single quote from the Notes to Gulliver’s Travels mentioning substantial sums offered by the British Government from 1714 for a means of measuring longitude at sea. And the rest of my position i
s determined by nothing more than fragments and lies and a loud unreasonable confidence. Despite this, my argument has evolved into something of quite extraordinary detail, and has the respect of all. Of course, when fully sober, none of us is totally sure of his position, and after a few drinks the course of events is dictated solely by a process of flagrant contradiction and one-upmanship. This is usually only brought to a close by Sal shouting, ‘You’re making it up. You’re lying now. That’s the lying face. If you don’t stop now I’ll have to hit Jeff in the balls’.

  I drink quickly and the entrees are a while arriving. The others say I’m talking loudly and sounding tense and I tell them, for no known reason, Well of course I’m tense, wouldn’t you be?

  This only focuses the attention more clearly on me. Everyone seems to be talking at once and I can hear Jeff making remarks about my tension and its probable sexual nature, my hundred and eighty days of celibacy, the likelihood that I am an expert snake-handler by now, which he gleefully workshops into the concept of ‘going the Ram Chandra’. I deny this, and he calls me Onan the Barbarian. He appears to be speaking from a list of Famous Masturbatorial Identities.

  I take him up on this and we become quite competitive until we reach a point where I seem to decide that my best weapon is to turn the argument on me, and I find myself declaring quite loudly that I am impotent and that my penis is a plumb bob capable of pointing only to the centre of the earth.

  And Sal, slightly more controlling than usual when she’s drunk, is saying to Jeff, Little sips, little sips, and he’s giving me a look that suggests I might now be called Bob for the rest of my days. I can see him saying it, Bob, and smiling as he’s trying to drink, trying to negotiate his mouth to his wine glass as both her hands hold it down.

  But things don’t go too badly until I declare that I want to make a speech and I headbutt the woman arriving with our mains as I stand. She pirouettes and loses nothing, and the others at the table applaud. I hear my voice shouting quite loudly that Jeffrey is the most handsome of my friends and then I hear myself saying that I need to do a wee now.

  The others all start going, Ssshh, louder than I think they need to so I say, What do you mean Ssshh? It’s only a wee.

  They Ssshh even louder, I Ssshh back and soon everyone in the restaurant is going Ssshh and I’m shouting, You all do wees, don’t ya?

  Shortly after that things deteriorate.

  I know I make several trips to the toilet in the next hour, because making trips to the toilet isn’t easy. The number of chairs in the way is quite incredible, and crowds of people I don’t know cheer every time I stand. Some of them I think, or perhaps I just fear, whisper, You all do wees, don’t ya? as I go past.

  On one of the trips, perhaps the last, the toilet door is shut. I can hear someone on the other side singing ‘That’s Amore’. The door opens and Tim lurches out, makes a very rough kind of eye contact, seems surprised that it’s someone he knows, says, Oh, hi. You know that thing? That thing when you’ve had a few drinks and you look in the mirror and you see Dean Martin? Yeah. And he gives me a friendly pat on the shoulder, then he does the same to the wall and he makes his way back to the restaurant. I go into the toilet, and of course he’s pissed on the floor.

  When we leave, someone at the last remaining table shouts, Make sure you look after Richard to the others, and they undertake to do so.

  I wait till their cab arrives, and then I set off on the climb up to Zigzag Street. This is a much more confusing task than I remember and I can’t help thinking of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, not a film I can say I ever understood, but I have never felt more empathy with the wordless Kaspar than I do at this moment. Almost to the point of being sure I can hear Pachelbel’s ‘Canon’ as my mountain sways in front of me.

  I fall several times, mostly onto the pavement and only once into the gutter, but that begins as a fall onto the pavement and ends with a gentle roll to the right dictated by the contours, which in places require vigilance.

  But I come to no harm, and in the morning I wake in my own bed.

  19

  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.

  20

  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.