by Nick Earls
I’ll have a full three-quarters of an hour of hot, passionate Heart fuck song, and surely that’s a timeframe that’s considerate to all concerned. I can see it like a movie sequence, time slipping into something more comfortable, the song playing and playing, the physical attraction inevitable, all-powerful. Fans circling above, curtains billowing, majestic halls. Probably not doves—that’d be overkill.
Actually, it’d be the Bonnie Tyler ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ film clip. I’m going to have to be careful about that.
I’m taping the song for the fourth time when my father comes in.
‘Oh, Philby, you’re in here. I thought something must have become stuck.’
‘I thought you were working.’
‘Well, yes, but I’m not deaf. I thought there was a problem.’
‘I’m just doing a tape.’
‘Really?’
‘It’s a film soundtrack thing. An experiment. For a film idea I had.’
‘Oh. And you have that song going over and over?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘It’s just a song. It’s got the right sound.’
‘No, what’s the film about?’
‘What’s the film about?’ He’s expecting an answer. He’s expecting it to be about something. Doves, fans, curtains, irresistible physical impulses involving me and a person yet to be located? What am I supposed to say? ‘Well, the music’s a big part of it. The film’s more a montage. There’s not really much narrative, so it’s hard to put into words what it’s about. It’s a montage of images, with the meaning inferred by their, um, artful juxtaposition.’
‘Quite passionate, though,’ he says, ignoring my ugly over-faking and noticing more Heart than I’d like him to. ‘You know, in that lock-up-your-daughters kind of way. He sounds like he’s that kind of fellow.’
‘What?’
‘The magic man. “Sorry, mother, but he’s got magic in his hands and that’s all there is to it. I was powerless to resist,” and so on. Listen.’ He stops us talking, for the length of an entire chorus and some of a verse. Yep, there’s passion. Just like there was supposed to be. ‘When I was your age there was a particular Glenn Miller number that I . . . um . . . doesn’t matter. It’s to do with girls. It would have been handy to be able to make a tape like that though. The song only went for about three minutes. Anyway, now I know what you’re doing I’ll leave you to it.’
He goes back to his study, whistling ‘In the Mood’. There are some things about your parents that you don’t need to know. Did he take his shoes off before starting his Glenn Miller record, I wonder? No, I don’t wonder. I don’t wonder at all. Did he take his tie off?
*
What I decide to wonder about, once I shake that thought, is the prospect of meeting a girl on the Paradise. And I don’t mean a dull regular girl pretending to be Spanish. I mean one who might be worthy of my now very extended mix of Heart’s ‘Magic Man’.
I can see her when it plays for the first time—her acknowledgment of the good taste it shows, and perhaps a hint of arousal. It’s an unseasonably warm afternoon for May—but they happen, it’s not impossible—and she takes the initiative. She’s amazed I’m single, pleased but not completely surprised that of all the women on the Paradise I ended up with her. She calls me ‘irresistible’ when the song plays a second time, and she laughs at herself for saying it. For saying something so corny, and/or so self-evident. When it plays a third time, she kicks her shoes onto the floor and makes her move. During the first chorus of the fourth she stands, takes my hand and says, ‘Maybe we’d be more comfortable in another room’. By about the twelfth time through it turns out that, as well as being irresistible, I’m the best she’s ever had.
Okay, there are a few outstanding technical issues to deal with before that’s reality. I could start by getting some new sheets, and taking down the ‘Catweazle’ poster and a couple of the planes.
What am I thinking? This room is comprehensively bad, and I’ve never made a move to change that. It’s like I’ve decided that, however many poker holes the Messerschmitts near the ceiling have suffered, the Battle of the Bedroom is already lost. Life will be conducted outside these walls, this place is beyond saving. And the bullfighter poster featuring the matador in his ‘suit of lights’, with my name the middle one of the three below and the only one that’s faded? Should I keep that, to help us recall the few early tender moments we shared cruising under Victoria Bridge on the memorable night of Viva Espa–a?
What would my mother think if I put ‘new sheets, non-steam engine, etc.’ top of my next birthday-present list? She’d know, wouldn’t she? I need to pick a girl who has already moved out of home, then find some way of making it seem normal when I pull the tape out of my pocket at her place.
Pick a girl. I’ve been hanging around Frank too long—Frank, who doesn’t see that I live in a world that exists in a crack somewhere between his chick auditions and the lazy twenty bucks in Nev’s back pocket. A contemplative, bullworking world with a 1:72 scale war on the ceiling and a 1:1 scale real-life diorama of nothing in most of the rest of the room.
How can I go to America when I can’t even change my sheets?
I told Sophie about the UCLA offer, and she said, ‘So that’s where you’re going, then?’
I wanted to stop her right there and go, ‘Soph, in life, nothing’s that straightforward.’ I did tell her the positions were for people with an interest in emergency medicine, and I wasn’t sure that was me.
It didn’t stop her.
‘But the medicine’s not really what it’s about,’ she said. ‘You want to go, don’t you? It’s LA. You want to go to America. I know New York might be your first choice, but LA’s even better from the movie point of view, isn’t it? Even if that’s not what you’d be doing in work time. That’s the reason you’re going, isn’t it? And you wouldn’t be working all the time.’
‘But . . . but emergency medicine in LA,’ I wanted to say to her. ‘Don’t you watch TV? It won’t be like the Mater. It won’t even be like the Royal.’
But I didn’t say that. I agreed with her, because there seemed to be no alternative. But I told her there were a few things to straighten out first. It wasn’t just a matter of sending a cheque to the Regents of the University of California and turning up at the airport at the end of November. There was the visa application, the price of the ticket, a lot of things I didn’t have time to think about right now. I didn’t mention that the ticket would probably be seen as an educational expense, and that parental support was therefore likely to be substantial.
The whole US thing was easier earlier in the year, when it was just talk. I assumed they’d reject me, or not reply. And five times out of six I was right, but the scariest one of all said they’d take me for a thirty-five US-dollar processing fee.
I want to go, don’t I? I want to go to America. Why can’t I even think that in a confident voice?
8
Some Wednesdays we finish early, but this Wednesday is Frank’s first twenty-four-hour shift in Labour Ward, so he stays on at the Mater when I go home and try to convince myself to study. By four-thirty, I’m reading the newspaper on the back patio.
My mother is working in the garden, being maddened by her roses in the way that some people are maddened by their misbehaving hair. Her roses make their own decisions, and wind and grow whichever way they like. My grandmother, who still lives in England, once said she would quite like to come to Australia, but she didn’t want to leave her roses. And my mother called it ‘not much of a reason’, but she’s been working on her rose bed ever since. Today she’s weeding with her tape recorder beside her, and singing one song from Pirates of Penzance over and over. I’m glad I made my ‘Magic Man’ tape before this afternoon.
She stands up, still singing, and looks over the work she’s done.
‘Better,’ she says. ‘Better.’ She hits her gloves together to loosen any dirt, and t
akes them off. ‘Enough,’ she tells the tape recorder, and stops the music. She walks over to the patio and sits down facing me, folding her gloves over the arm of her chair. ‘I so prefer Chekhov. Chekhov never needed songs. But sometimes you’ve got to play to the popular tastes. You never lose money on G&S.’
‘I’ve never quite understood that.’
‘You and me both, Philby. It’s a funny old world. A funny old world that loves a good tune. Look at all that Andrew Lloyd Webber nonsense. Give me Pinter any day, or Beckett or Tennessee Williams or David Williamson. The big moments in life don’t come with a soundtrack, or people bursting forth into song. They creep up behind you and then, whack. That’s what theatre should be.’
‘The bit that goes whack?’
‘Well, yes. It should draw you in and then surprise you, show you something you haven’t seen before. Don’t you think? Film too. I know why you want to do it, you know. It’s just a question of getting the chance to, isn’t it? And not being distracted from things like obstetrics in the meantime.’
‘Yes. Are you suggesting that chapter eighteen, ‘Bleeding in Early Pregnancy’, is waiting for me on the coffee table in the lounge room and wondering what I’m doing out here?’
‘Well, it’s hardly my place to do that, is it?’
When we’re back inside, she starts to chop vegetables for dinner and I make another move on chapter eighteen, this time in front of the TV news and then ‘Perfect Match’.
I do like it when she fights G&S every step of the way but takes it on despite that and bides her time, waiting for Beckett or Chekhov. She earns her Chekhov by doing that, by staying part of the team when they’re putting on things she doesn’t particularly like. But the mood at home varies distinctly. The roses got no attention at all during rehearsals for The Cherry Orchard.
About two minutes after I’ve succumbed fully to my motivational lapse, put the book down and decided it’s late enough in the day for me to devote my undivided attention to a ‘M*A*S*H’ repeat, my father arrives home and says, ‘It’s good to see you lounging around doing nothing for a change.’
‘He’s been working,’ my mother calls out from the kitchen, always in favour of credit being given where it’s due, and sometimes even where it isn’t. ‘He’s been reading something about bleeding.’
‘Let’s not get into that. Dinner’s not far off.’ My father’s not good with bleeding. ‘I meant that it’s good to see you having a bit of a break. You’ve been at World of Chickens quite a few evenings recently.’
‘Yes, but it’s not intellectually taxing work. And I’m saving up for that video camera, remember.’
‘Don’t worry, I remember.’ He sits down and looks under the papers for the TV remote. ‘There’s no hurry, is there? They’ll still be around after the mid-year break. This is a repeat, isn’t it? Isn’t this the one where Hawkeye and Hotlips get trapped behind enemy lines?’
My father is philosophically opposed to repeats, which is why I have the remote tucked down the side of my seat. He has some issue with them, and the closest he can get to articulating it is, ‘Well, they’ve shown them already.’
‘Dinner soon, I suppose,’ he says, giving up the search. ‘How’s obstetrics treating you then?’
‘Like everything else. I’ve got Labour Ward this Friday, and that’s a twenty-four hour shift starting at 8 a.m. Frank’s on tonight, so we’ve swapped at the World and we’re doing it tomorrow. And I’ve got a different job on Saturday night. Just a one-off thing, bar-tending on the Paradise. You know the Paradise? The barge with the palm trees that goes up and down the river at night with a lot of loud music and drinking?’
‘Not really my bag.’
‘Come and get it,’ my mother calls out, using a rough-hewn western accent I haven’t heard since Oklahoma!.
‘Musicals,’ my father says, but only to me. ‘She’s got that musicals bit of her brain going again. Suppose we should humour her.’
‘Mighty fine chow, Miss Phoebe,’ he says as he ambles into the kitchen, a round-shouldered green-cardiganed cowpoke after a tough day on the range doing balance sheets for cardboard box sales.
From there it gets worse, both the accent and the corn level, which is definitely elephant-eye height at the very least. My mother plays accents for maximum comedy, my father tags along. My mother steals scenes with accents, my father abducts accents and then roughs them up in a nearby alley. The one thing in his favour is that he has the decency to confine it to home. He’s completely aware of his own shortcomings—those relating to theatre, anyway—but his amazement at my mother’s modest gift for performance seems only to grow with time.
Once we’re at the table, the two of them get over it and start talking like displaced British people again. But displaced British people who, in the distant past, invented the ritual that says dinner is the TV-off time when we each have to report on our days. It’s rare that anyone has anything worthy of reporting but it’s still what we do, usually for two courses. Tonight: beef stroganoff followed by Sara Lee Chocolate Bavarian. My father’s summary: ‘a veritable feast’.
‘Did you see they’re going ahead with that honorary doctorate for Joh?’ my mother says to me during course two. ‘There are posters up about it on campus.’
‘Joh? As in, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the premier? Renowned hater of universities and all connected with them?’
‘Yes, that’s the one. Doctor Joh. Doctor Sir Ruddy Joh.’
‘But that’s ridiculous.’
‘Of course it’s ridiculous. It’s worse than ridiculous. I’m going to end up with a doctorate from the same institution. Apparently it’s a tradition, for the seventy-fifth anniversary. The premier of the day got an honorary doctorate at the twenty-fifth and fiftieth anniversaries, too. That’s where it comes from.’
‘But that’s no argument at all. Tradition’s no reason to keep doing anything. If it was, we’d all wear neck-to-knee bathers and you wouldn’t vote.’
‘I couldn’t agree more. So you’re going to be protesting then? That’s what the posters are about. They’re planning a big rally on campus to coincide with the degree ceremony on Friday week. It’s in the afternoon, starting at two.’
‘That could be a bit early for me.’ Me? Protest? Well, in principle, sure . . . ‘I think I’ve got a clinic on at the Mater, and they usually go until about four-thirty.’
‘That’s all right. The protest starts at two, but the ceremony isn’t till six. Plenty of time.’
‘I’ll check my timetable.’
Somehow I’ve railroaded myself into political activism. But, thinking about it, perhaps it’s where I should be. It’s a senseless tradition for a start. Maybe there were particular reasons to do it the other two times, but to hand an honorary doctorate to an anti-intellectual whose entire cabinet boasts one Ag Science degree doesn’t seem right.
My father starts clearing the plates.
‘Ah, a family dinner,’ my mother says as the uneaten third of the Chocolate Bavarian is carried away. ‘We haven’t had enough of those lately, what with you doing all that work and now me starting rehearsals.’
‘You only had your first rehearsal last night, didn’t you? You don’t need to get weird about family dinners just yet.’ Particularly when, most evenings, they’re just an obligation standing between me and television.
‘Philby, you have family dinners to make sure things don’t get weird. That’s why you have them.’
My father stops on his way back into the room, unsure of what he’s missed and where it’s now going. ‘I wouldn’t mind a Blackberry Nip. Anybody?’
‘I’d love one,’ I tell him. ‘Blackberry Nip’s always been good for stopping things getting weird.’
*
Our pay cheques are waiting for us the next night at World of Chickens. I’m closing in on the video camera.
Frank’s bored. I walk inside from the street to change and he’s there by himself, staring into the distance. ‘Mate,’ he says, �
�what is it that’s so close to perfect about college girls in their underwear having a pillow fight? Is it simply the combination of underwear and squealing?’
‘If it was just underwear and squealing, you could put pants on a pig.’
As the door swings shut behind me, I can sense I’m leaving the room while there’s serious thought going on, and I’m quite glad I’m not there to catch the detail.
Frank and I don’t think about films the same way, but I guess that’s no surprise. He once said National Lampoon’s Animal House was the kind of film that he knew was destined to be a permanent fixture in his all-time top ten. He told me that sometimes you just know that kind of thing. Citizen Kane was his reference point. He said that there are plenty of people a generation older than us who have had it at the top of their top tens for decades, so long that it’s now not negotiable. It will always be their favourite film, the best film they’ve ever seen.
I didn’t know where to begin in countering that. I put it to him that it might be more a matter of content than film making, as far as he was concerned, and that Citizen Kane wasn’t set up to deliver his kind of content. We had to reach a compromise. I had to concede that Animal House was at least the finest example of its genre yet made—better even than Porky’s—and Frank, in return, said he was prepared to go as far as admitting that his favourite of the cinematic techniques used in the film was the combination of college girls, underwear and violence featuring bedding. ‘That pretty much always works for me in a movie,’ he said, ‘but it reached a new zenith in Animal House, and I doubt it’ll be surpassed in my lifetime. Five stars.’
I put it to him that there was a little more to it than that, that the full combination is college girls, underwear, vigorous squeally pillow work and a student desperado up a ladder at the window. And he said, ‘Oh, sure, there’s always a desperado. Where would the frat-house comedy be without the desperado? That’s where you get the dramatic tension. It’s the perennial question of how much gear’ll come off before they notice him or the ladder topples backwards.’