Zigzag Street

by Nick Earls

  She orders breakfast.

  This is when we realise that we are naked and in the same room. That this is more than simply horribly incongruous, and that it really doesn’t matter whether or not it’s fine by the person who brings the breakfast.

  We should get dressed, she says. We should have a shower. There is a pause. Showers. I should have a shower, and then you should have a shower. That’s what I meant.

  She goes into the bathroom and leaves me sitting on the messy bed, facing a chair that has my today clothes thrown over it, looking like yesterday’s.

  When she comes out she’s wearing a towel and the fact that she’s covered at all makes my nakedness feel very inappropriate.

  I take my clothes into the bathroom and I shower using the one-use-only bottles of hotel shampoo and conditioner, and I shave with the hotel disposable razor. Today, I do cut myself shaving. I’m never good with new razors.

  When I go back into the room Hillary is fully dressed and breakfast is on the table. She’s looking unsettled.

  I just called Peter’s parents, she says. I told them I’d had a migraine. They said they’d love to pick up Dan from child care, so that’s all sorted out.

  Good.

  So come on, eat.

  I sit down and face the unfamiliar choice of fruit, toast and cereal.

  Wow, real breakfast.

  What do you mean?

  I tell her a bit about my diet.

  Doesn’t that make you incredibly constipated?

  Sure. I kind of hoped the popcorn maker would turn it around, but, you know, you’ve practically got to be in the mood to cook when you make popcorn, if you want it to have any kind of flavour. You’ve got to have a bowl and a utensil and butter and seasoning. It’s not as easy as you think. I tend to like the basics.

  Like biscuits and chips and soft drink.

  Flavoured mineral water. And you think this is why I’ve been a bit on the difficult side, down there?

  Yeah. You should think about fibre.

  So I eat the fruit, and the cereal, and begin my new plan to threaten my sluggish bowel with fibre.

  We try to tidy the room, but there are signs of last night that won’t go away. The bed will tell no lies for us when we are gone.

  You know, I say to her, they’ll probably think you had a wild night, and next door I slept so soundly I didn’t even crease the sheets.

  I doubt it. I can already hear the sound of two and two being put together.

  Only in this room, okay? Only hotel staff and only in this room. Whatever else happens is up to us. So stop staring at the wet patch as though your life’s about to end.

  And the last thing we do before leaving the room is stop so I can take over from her unsteady fumbling hands and fasten her pearls.

  She waits in the corridor while I put my shoes and socks on next door, in a room that smells as sterile as when we arrived.

  And when we’re in the meeting it’s as though it never happened. A few polite queries about her migraine, and everything else seems totally normal. I’m watching her perform, effectively, confidently, and my mind’s only on last night. People are sitting round the table making notes, thinking up questions, and I have to be ready for them.

  Hillary’s talking about how we might follow this up, the mechanisms we might set in place, who should be involved. She arranges for a group of business people from Singapore due in Sydney next week to visit us in Brisbane on the way. I’m beginning to realise I have more work to do.

  She’s tense in the cab on the way to the airport. I tell her she looks tense.

  It’s just the flying.

  By the time we get to the airport she’s worse.

  You’re quite small and about to become very crazy, I tell her. I think I’m going to have to kill you and take you as baggage.

  Then I remember some tablets for jet lag left in my toilet bag since I last went overseas with Anna. I think they have some relaxant quality. And I figure my toilet bag might as well be of some use this trip, since I don’t think I’ve opened it yet.

  I give Hillary the bottle and she looks at the label.

  These things hardly touch me.

  She takes three, washed down with a few mouthfuls of bourbon.

  Don’t do the bourbon thing again, I say to her, detecting an unattractive nagging tone in my voice.

  She just glares at me and sits sipping bourbon until we’re called to the plane. I have to help her out of the seat, and by the time we’re down the walkway, down the aisle and I’m buckling her in, she’s forgotten there’s a plane involved at all. By take off she seems to have passed out. So this time I have no need to speak of Bolivia and small vegetables.

  It still surprises me how much I care for her as she lies unconscious next to me, her head rocking against my shoulder with the slightest of turbulence, saliva dribbling from the corner of her mouth and onto my sleeve.

  I take a Who Weekly from the flight attendant. Helena’s back with Michael. Shoshanna’s back with Jerry. Clearly in this business windows of opportunity don’t stay open long. And somehow, despite the heroic pointlessness of the notion of Celebrity Partnering, this makes me feel even more crappy. Back when Jeff and I came up with the idea, there was a certain purity to my crappiness. Now I feel an overwhelming sense of seediness. Really crappy, really empty. I can’t believe what I’ve done.

  Hillary is still almost unrousable in the cab, so when we get to my place I can see nothing else to do but to lift her out, load her into my car and drive her home. I can’t send her off with the cabbie with her address pinned to her jacket like some smashed Paddington Bear.

  We drive through the post-peak hour traffic and she sits slumped and with her head to one side, her mouth open and snoring. All the time I’m hoping no-one will be home, and then I’m wondering what to do. Put her to bed and leave a note beside her? Dear Peter, don’t be concerned. Nothing of any consequence happened in Sydney. Your wife is only this way due to drug ingestion.

  Whether he’s home or not, I don’t expect this to be easy.

  No-one’s home.

  I drag Hillary and her baggage up the driveway. She manages to tell me, Purse, purse, when I shout Key. So I lift her up over my shoulder and I begin going through her purse. Thinking of the contents of women’s purses (and wondering why the fuck the keys have to be the last things you find) it occurs to me that last night’s sex could hardly be called safe. Not that I think she’s a risk, and I’m sure I’m not (unless you really can get it from toilet seats or drinking out of the same glass), but I realise it needs to be addressed. Or rather, should have been at the time. I think we both thought it wasn’t really happening.

  Just as I’m shaking her up and down on my shoulder and rifling through her bag and shouting various things about safe sex, a car pulls up in the driveway.

  A man, a man I have met once before and know to be Peter, gets out and lifts a baby from the back.

  Shit, bad migraine, he says.

  Yeah. I think it’s the medication too. And the flying problem.

  She told me she was over that.

  Not really.

  Is she all right?

  Yeah, she’s fine.

  He notices then that he’s standing with his baby over his left shoulder and I’m standing with his wife over mine.

  Looks like mine’s lighter than yours, he says, and smiles. Do you mind bringing her in, since I’ve got Dan already?

  He leads me down a hallway and into their bedroom. This is far too weird.

  I put her down on the bed and he kneels beside her, stroking her cheek and saying, Hill, Hill.

  Safe? Safe? she says. Of course it was fucking safe.

  She begins to open her eyes, sits up suddenly opening them wide and looking around. She looks like she’s about to scream. Her face makes all the right movements but is then overcome by sluggishness. She gives in to the unmanageable weight of her eyelids and her head flops back onto the pillow.

  The plane,
I say. I think she was very concerned about the safety of the plane.

  Oh, always. I’ve no idea where that comes from.

  She’s been saying very strange things since she took the flight sickness medication. I don’t know who gave it to her. But she’s been speaking an amazing amount of rubbish, really.

  Well, I’ll have to ignore everything she says till she sleeps it off.

  While this has all the potential content of a veiled threat, I don’t think the notion of threat has occurred to him. He’s just giving me a cue to go.

  To go and leave them here, this happy, mysterious family. To get back in my car, for the first time in two days responsible for only one person’s seat belt. I turn the radio up and I sing along as I drive back across town. To eat, play tennis. Just like normal, but all the way hoping they don’t play Nick Cave, ‘The Ship Song’.

  35

  The Westside Chronicle is in the mailbox when I get home.

  ‘It was nothing’ says our Neighbour of the Month

  Young Brisbane corporate lawyer Richard Derrington turned recently to his Christian faith when he saw his neighbour, eighty-four-year-old country music identity Kevin Butt, struggling to uproot a stump in his yard.

  Richard, who is living in the home his grandparents built in Zigzag Street, Red Hill and bringing it back to its former glory, spent the best part of a day with pick and shovel as Burma Railway veteran and balladeer Kevin kept him going with ‘a few of our old favourites’.

  ‘Our country needs more like this lad’, Kevin said when nominating Richard to be our Neighbour of the Month, and at the Westside Chronicle, we couldn’t agree more …

  Editorial

  … It is people like Richard Derrington who give us continuity, who show us Christian concern at a time when values are regarded as ‘old-fashioned’, who show us that the heart of this city is still beating …

  And a photo, of course a photo, the photo I had expected, with Kevin and his gleeful menacing teeth and loosely-slung guitar and me looking as though I am straining in some re-enactment of uprooting the stump or fighting against my worsening constipation. I read, and look, as though I’ll go through life with short back and sides.

  I eat Tim Tams in the car on the way to tennis. And I play the worst tennis seen since at least the 1520s. Tonight, people would rather have a disease than have me as a partner. So Jeff is stuck with me.

  Why? he asks. Why? Why?

  I don’t travel well, I tell him.

  But you only went to Sydney.

  It was a rough trip.

  I slow down the game in order to find form. In fact, I slow it down so much that my shots all sound different to everyone else’s. My serve becomes almost silent, and is referred to as the Stealth Serve once it is realised that it crosses the net undetected even by radar. I ace Gerry with a serve that actually stops. It sneaks over, plops onto the ground, bounces twice, rolls and stops. He shakes his head, says, Fuck, under his breath several times and kicks it back under the net.

  And this is the high point. Other than that my serve is so poorly controlled that Jeff tells me I am turning tennis into a game akin to hitting a wet sock with a slack hammock. And that that game never became at all popular, for very good reasons.

  Afterwards I am full of apology and the others are quieter than usual. I offer to buy all the drinks but they tell me it doesn’t matter. We sit on the benches outside the tennis centre and I eat my Ice Graffiti Icy Pole.

  You poor boy, Gerry says. Love has really done you harm.

  And I can’t tell him that right now he can’t imagine the harm. For some reason tonight he can’t just leave Love has really done you harm as a passing remark, and a round table discussion about love evolves over cups of Gatorade. And I’m so out of this I even have a problem with Gatorade now. I’m sitting there beginning to feel incredibly tired, focussing on the Gatorade logo on one of the cups and watching it peel off like a T-shirt. Right now my every muscle feels too heavy to lift, and love seems impossibly elusive.

  Of course, Gerry says, we argue about this all the time. The basis of our relationship may be love but that doesn’t mean we think it’s the same thing. I think it’s something glorious. Freddie’s hopelessly pragmatic.

  You make me sound as though I treat it like a transaction. Whenever you get into this stuff.

  Hey, if the EFTPOS fits … And Freddie just glares. Gerry goes on, when perhaps it would be smarter not to. Mister Strong Silent Type here always gets shitty with me when I talk about it in public.

  But only because you make me out to be emotionally bankrupt. You’ve got some quite impractical ideas. They’re lovely some of them, but they’re complete bloody fantasy. I think it’s wonderful that someone like you can survive in the real world.

  The real world? Since when have I sought any association with the real world? Haven’t I got your big strong arms to protect me from the real world?

  Always.

  So they’re smiling at each other now. They’ve made it into a joke, maybe even a joke at themselves, and it’s as though any glaring never happened. Gerry turns back to me.

  Look, I don’t know what Anna wanted, and I don’t know what you want, but I hope to god you find it soon. You just look so bloody miserable.

  At home I microwave my leftover panang nua. I can’t believe how much has happened since the first half of this meal, how different things feel, and not in a good way.

  36

  So how do I deal with this?

  When I was just a trashed person I at least knew where I stood. I was wallowing maybe, but now I look back on that almost fondly.

  Is Hillary telling Peter now? Right now as I’m sitting alone eating the re-heated half meal of a more innocent man is she struggling through the drugs and telling him everything? If she isn’t, why isn’t she? And if she does, what happens then? And if she doesn’t?

  This is what I hate most. I’m not letting go of last night. I’m telling myself it was a huge mistake, but I’m not letting it rest at that. I seem to be trying to nurture the tiny possibility that it was only the beginning of something. That she’ll call me any time and say, It’s over with Peter. Etcetera, etcetera. I run through the fantasy that when she tells him he unburdens himself about the affair he’s been having, and they agree to part amicably. Beyond this point, the fantasy rages totally out of control, Hillary and me, and Daniel even, this house, my safest place, the white wooden cottage with the red roof and flowers of all colours. My grandfather’s dream dreamt somewhere outside Winton in 1923. As though this is some legitimate end, justifying means, even though I’m not at all sure it’s what I want. But there were some things about last night that felt great, even though, in any rational mind, it could be seen only to have done harm to all involved.

  So maybe this is what I’m telling myself, that last night is okay if I hold some sincere feelings for Hillary. Because if I don’t it looks like a pretty awful thing. So I’m telling myself it couldn’t have happened if we hadn’t both wanted it to. And she wouldn’t have wanted it unless there were big problems with Peter. We didn’t mean it to happen, we didn’t expect it to happen, so it just did. And I’m feeling all the guilt I said I wouldn’t.

  I don’t sleep.

  I lie in bed but I don’t sleep. I walk around the house. I pace up and down eating biscuits until I run out of them and it’s still no clearer.

  The phone does not ring.

  The sun rises.

  I shower and shave and dress for work. I feed Greg and go. I’ve paced enough. By seven-thirty I’m at my desk. Sitting, waiting. Fiddling around in a document waiting for the sound of lift doors opening.

  For an hour it’s just me, then Deb arrives.

  Hey babe, she says. How was Sydney? How did the two of you go?

  What do you mean?

  Well you weren’t sightseeing were you? How were the meetings?

  Oh, good, fine. Yeah, good actually. Of course, it only means I’ve got more work to do.
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  I try to focus hard on the manufacture of normal conversation, and she can see it’s an effort. I tell her I played tennis till eleven when I got back, so I’m tired.

  And you’re still not doing too well, are you babe? You’re still not sleeping well. That Anna, she makes me so mad, you know. What she’s done to you.

  Hillary’s still not in by nine.

  I’m sitting, looking out my door, looking for any sign of her. My screen saver keeps telling me, Remember the Three Part Resolution and I have some recollection of the concept (it was something to do with the government) but not any of its three parts. I make myself another cup of coffee.

  Hillary arrives just after nine-thirty looking really bad, and she’s careful not to glance my way. I watch her talk to Deb and then go into her office. The door shuts.

  I open my vertical blinds a little and see only a back view of Deb. Nothing seems to be happening on the whole floor. In bad movies, this is the moment before ambush when someone says, It’s quiet out there, too quiet. Here it stays quiet, and there’s enough ambushing going on in my head.

  I sit back at my desk and drink my coffee. I play Sammy the Snake, but my heart’s not in it. I call Deb on the phone.

  Hillary in yet?

  Yeah. She’s in her office.

  Okay.

  Did you want her for anything?

  No. Nothing specific. I was just wondering if she was in yet.

  This goes nowhere and I can’t say anything more. Soon after, Deb appears at my door.

  She’s looking really tired, she says. She was up all night with Daniel. She said she thought he was unsettled with her having been away the night before.

  She goes back to her desk. I call Hillary.

  Hi.

  Rick.

  How are you?

  Fine.

  Fine?

  Well, what do you think? And thanks for the drugs too, by the way.

  I didn’t tell you to take three tablets.

  Yeah.

  So what’s happening?

  Nothing’s happening. I feel like shit with this hangover, or whatever it is, and Daniel kept waking up during the night. She pauses, and allows it to become clear to me that some issues are, for the moment, slipping away. And we’ve got a lot of work to do for Monday.