by Nick Earls
‘Shit,’ he says. ‘We’ll have to eat this one if I lose any more chocolate.’
‘Hurry up.’
‘Okay, cut. Take two.’ He pulls a new biscuit from the pack. ‘How’s it looking?’
‘Messy, to be honest. But that might even be adding to the effect.’
‘Ooh, cold,’ he says, having plunged the new biscuit right in. It drops out and he picks it up again. ‘I’m assuming this floor gets cleaned regularly.’
A car turns in from the street, revs up the driveway and slides in under the house.
‘Your mother?’
‘Yes. So clench, will you? I want to get this over with as quickly as possible.’
I take a photo as soon as his hand’s away from the Tim Tam and he says, ‘Jesus, that was all face. Don’t you get this? No identification. Just arse and biscuit, remember. And closer. Close enough to recognise that it’s arse and biscuit. I’ve got a point to make here.’
A car door shuts beneath us. I fire off a few in quick succession and it seems to satisfy him. By the time my mother’s coming up the back stairs, I’m in the kitchen and he’s in the toilet attending to the skids of chocolate across his buttocks.
She opens the screen door and says, ‘Hello,’ and I come back at her with, ‘Hi, you’re early. Frank dropped me home today. He’s in the toilet,’ before realising that’s a lot more information than usual. ‘We had some notes to swap.’
‘Good,’ she says carefully, like someone who plans to get the whole story later. The toilet flushes. ‘Good for you.’
‘Hi,’ Frank says, coming out of the bathroom. ‘I had to visit my grandmother and she lives over this way. Thought I might as well drop Philby home.’
‘Good. Two reasons to do it then. Your grandmother and the notes,’ my mother says. ‘It’s quite a way to come, so it’s handy to have two reasons.’ There’s a pause. At least a couple of us have decided to say nothing more. ‘Cup of tea?’
‘Thanks,’ Frank says, ‘but I’d better go. Nan, you know. She’ll have had tea already and she’ll be off to bed soon. I’d better just get the notes.’ He turns to me. ‘The ones in your room.’
‘Yeah, come on.’
We go into my room and he whispers, ‘Photos . . .’
‘What? It’s not instant.’
‘What?’
‘It’s not an instant camera. They’ve got to be developed.’
‘I thought it was instant.’
‘That’s so like you.’
‘Shit. Okay, let’s go to the car. We can work out a new plan.’
The kettle’s boiling as we go via the kitchen, choosing the back door so that he can say goodbye to my mother and make a show of carrying a bag, a bag that might have notes in it.
‘Well, I suppose we’ll have to wait until the end of the roll to develop them,’ I tell him when we’re outside. ‘That could be a while.’
‘I’ll pay. I’ll pay to do them now.’
‘I don’t think they’ll develop them. They’ll probably think they’re porn. And with some justification.’
‘Well, give them to me. I’ll get them done. Let’s go back into the house and I’ll take the film. We can call it more notes.’
‘No, it’s better if I do it.’
‘And you’ll do it now? I was sure it was instant. Isn’t that what people do on modelling shoots to check it’s all okay before doing the real things? That’s what I thought you had. I thought you’d be going to do the same thing when you got the video camera.’
‘Remember the revue photos? When we were shooting things for the med revue and you never got to see the pictures? They’re still in there.’
‘Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. It must be getting on to the end of the roll by now then.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’ll pay. For all of it.’
‘Okay. But just for the blank ones and the biscuit ones. I’ll pay for mine. But they’ll take a week to come back. We’ve got no chance of getting them through a one-hour lab, since they’re really tough on porn, so I’ll send them to a place at Tweed Heads. I think they sometimes develop those kinds of photos in New South Wales.’
‘Now you’re thinking,’ he says, but what I’m thinking is that I’ve at least bought myself a week to talk him out of it. He opens his car door, tosses his bag onto the passenger seat and gets in. ‘How’s that call going?’ he says, back on the topic of the week. ‘Had a word with the Paradise girl yet? Got to keep those man bits working or they atrophy, mate.’
‘Yeah, thanks. I think they’re still okay. I might call her tonight.’
‘Go on. Surprise me.’ He starts the car, gives a honk of the horn and pulls out from the kerb with a wave.
As if this afternoon needs one more surprise.
My mother hands me a mug of tea when I walk into the kitchen, and she says, ‘What are you boys cooking up?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘All that secrecy.’
‘Oh, that. I’m not sure . . . Okay, it’s for the protest at uni tomorrow.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yeah. I can’t tell you what it is though, obviously. I wouldn’t want to compromise you. Since you’re on staff . . .’
‘Of course. I’m intrigued. Biscuit with your tea? Tim Tam perhaps?’
‘Might just have a piece of fruit after. You can never have too much fruit.’
*
On the bus on the way to the Mater on Friday morning, I realise that Frank’s misunderstanding of what I’m doing is simple. He thinks I prefer Sophie to Jacinta. He thinks I’m pointlessly choosing the unavailable Sophie over the possibly available Jacinta, when I’ve actually got no choice either way.
I’m expecting questions about the phone call I still haven’t made, but he’s not at Antenatal Clinic. I keep assuming he’s in one of the other rooms, but he’s not there at all. I hope he’s not off doing something dumb involving Charlie O’Hare’s room at the Royal, but why would he be? That’s not scheduled till at least next week, and the film’s in my bag.
Whatever he’s doing, I live up to my part of the bargain. I leave the Mater at lunchtime, and I mail the film on the way to the bus stop.
I catch one bus into town, then another out to the campus at Saint Lucia. I don’t know what this’ll be like. I think I’m learning that I’m cut out to complain, but perhaps not to protest. They’re not the same thing. I wish my mother hadn’t used expressions like ‘front line’ and ‘barricades’. Did she say ‘barricades’? Maybe not.
But I have the right to protest, and there’s no need to do more than that—stand up, be counted, lie low, get home in time for dinner. Add my body to the crowd of complaint about this degree, this government. With the ideal performance involving making noise, not looking scared and avoiding arrest. I’m sure there’ll be lots of people doing just that this afternoon.
‘Fascist,’ one of the other passengers bellows venomously out of the bus and into the traffic. And then he says, ‘Oh, shit,’ in a completely different voice as he takes a second look. ‘It’s just a big black car. I thought that was him. Sorry mate,’ he calls out to the puzzled driver. ‘Love your work.’
His friends laugh, and so does he. ‘Save a bit for when we’re out there,’ one of them says, and they seem more like fans on the way to a game than protesters. They don’t seem like people taking a risk. They’re keyed-up, ready to go but, from the look of them, ready to surge at a concert rather than a barricade.
I have to get barricades out of my head. It’s most likely to be a few hundred people standing around shouting ‘fascist’ while a cordon of bored unarmed police marks the way in for the dignitaries.
The campus is busy when we get there, but it’s probably always busy. There are posters about the demonstration all over the bus shelters, more people getting off the buses than on and I don’t imagine that’s usual for Friday afternoon. In the distance, from somewhere beyond the sandstone buildings of the Great Court and over near Ma
yne Hall, I can hear an amplified voice but I can’t make out the words.
I stand near the bus stop, listening, trying to get a sense of what’s going on. I’m tapped on the arm and it’s only when I turn it sinks in that, far closer than any protest, someone almost beside me has been saying, ‘Hey, Speedy.’
Jacinta’s grinning, laughing at me again. She’s standing there holding a basket of books and looking totally different to Saturday night. But those eyes and that laugh are things I’d recognise anywhere. There are parts of Saturday night indelibly inked into my brain, and her laughing is involved.
‘I thought it was you,’ she says.
It’s the first time I’ve seen her properly, in day clothes, in real light. The Paradise wasn’t big on visibility. Somehow, in daylight, Saturday’s incident seems even more exposed, as though she’s going to start shouting out, ‘This is the guy, the one I told you all about,’ and then hundreds of people and a loud hailer will be clustered around me chanting ‘Speedy, Speedy,’ and I’ll never go out with a girl in this town again. Which is how it looks some nights, anyway.
‘I thought you were at the Mater,’ she’s saying. ‘Didn’t you tell me that?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So what are you doing out on campus? You’re not going to tell me you made up the fifth-year med-student story?
‘No. That much on Saturday night I got right.’
‘You’re not out here for that silly protest are you?’
‘What? What silly protest?’
‘The degree ceremony.’
‘No, no, I . . .’ I can take a hint. The word silly is usually a hint. ‘That kind of thing doesn’t have much bearing on us in the clinical years. Campus politics, I mean. I’m just out here to look up a few things in the Biol Sciences Library. For a case report I’m writing.’
‘Well, you’ll never get near it because of the silly protest.’
‘Oh, right . . .’
‘You’d be better off not even trying.’
‘What, just catching the bus and going home? That seems like a bit of a waste.’
‘You could always have a drink at the Rec Club, or something. Make it worth the trip. We could have a drink at the Rec Club.’
‘Yeah. If you’re not doing anything . . .’
The protest fails to re-enter my mind most of the way across campus. I can get to it later, when Jacinta has gone wherever she has to be next. I’m not looking very protesty anyway in my hospital clothes—even with the tie off—so I’d look out of place near the front. Middle, and towards the back—that’ll do me.
Jacinta doesn’t look like a protester, either. I don’t know what she’s studying, but it might be law. The book basket has become a sign of a certain kind of law student in the last year or so. I’m connected enough with the campus to know that, and to know that a check sleeveless top and a big denim skirt and court shoes doesn’t constitute protester uniform.
She swings the basket as we walk and it’s like walking with Gidget, but I don’t mind it at all. This could be a second chance I’m getting, in which case her list of automatic turn-offs is surely more generous than most. And tonight the phone call goes like this: ‘Hey Frank, I talked to her, like I said I would. We had a drink this afternoon. So will you stop hassling me now?’
It sounds good and, if I word it that way, it’s not even a lie.
On the stairs going down to the Rec Club, I tell her I’m buying and she says she’ll have any kind of cooler. We find a table out on the balcony and away from the pool games and the noise. And then she laughs at me again.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I just hadn’t expected to be here, you know? Drinking with you, Speedy.’
‘I know. Don’t worry, I know. Is there any chance we could . . .’ There’s nowhere to go from there, other than to pause and let her laugh again. ‘You’re enjoying this too much. You can’t begin to imagine how embarrassed I am.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘All right? It couldn’t be much further from all right. Last Saturday . . . I was kind of unprepared. I didn’t realise the turn events would take.’
‘Obviously.’
‘Obviously, or I’d go around wearing plastic pants. Yes, thank you. No, I mean, I didn’t know how things would . . . proceed. You know what I mean. So, enough about me. Enough about that. Tell me about you.’
She seems reluctant, as though we’re already skirting the edge of a better topic, but she relents and lets me off the hook for now.
She’s third-year Arts/Law, with the Arts major in French because she did it at school (though that stopped looking like a good reason at least a couple of semesters ago).
She doesn’t mind French films, but she still has to read the subtitles. She’d like more to happen in some of them, and less attitude. I mention Sartre and she tells me, ‘We don’t do him. It’s not that kind of French.’ She doesn’t have a part-time job. Her parents don’t like her to. Her father’s a solicitor. Her mother doesn’t come up in conversation. She has a brother, but they don’t really get on. ‘And Saturday wasn’t all bad,’ she says. ‘You mix a pretty good jug of cocktail, and what would Belle have done without you?’
She buys the next round of drinks, another cooler and another beer.
I’d like a photo to show Frank, just as proof. That’s what I’m thinking while she’s standing at the bar. What a waste sending the film off with three or four blanks at the end. But Frank will still hassle me, and a photo wouldn’t change that. I’ll tell him about this later, and he’ll still hassle me if I haven’t got follow-up organised.
And so he should, dammit. Jacinta, with her lively eyes and an Alice band holding back her wavy hair, telling me about herself and being interesting enough and not running away. Interesting enough and not taking flight: two major desirable girl features in my world. Somewhere in the distance, the shouting of silly protest is rising. I need to get over there, but I can’t yet.
There’s a drink coming my way, and perhaps a chance I couldn’t possibly have expected. She hands me the beer, takes her seat and gives a Friday afternoon kind of sigh, paying attention not to the shouting but to the lorikeets flying by, the people with bags on their shoulders crossing the playing field below us to head for home, and me. And she says it’s my turn—time for my life story, the part prior to last Saturday.
I tell her about my parents and their strange ways—material that could make anyone look like a raconteur. My mother’s flair for accents and my father’s for coloured drinks and old cardigans. How much better fifth-year medicine is than the other years, but I’m still not sure what I’ll do in the long run. How I’ve done Labour Ward once, but my time there hasn’t amounted to much so far. How I might travel at the end of the year, I suppose, since we have to do a term somewhere out of Brisbane. America looks good. Which leads me to World of Chickens and Ron Todd, his two-tone hair, his rank beige teeth and his seventies body shirts gone bad in the armpits.
And I’m not boring her, whatever my mother says. I’m on a roll, particularly with the Ron Todd stuff. So I keep going, making this big move on Jacinta mainly at Ron’s expense, long past the point where I feel guilty about it and forgive myself on his behalf, since chances like this don’t come along every day.
Then I realise I need to convert. I need to stop now while things are going really well and convert this opportunity into something, this talking into an arrangement.
‘Maybe we could do something some time.’ In my head the line sounds casual but, when it comes out and interrupts the conversation, it’s more like someone holding up play to take a kick at goal.
‘We’re doing something at the moment, aren’t we?’
‘Yes, but maybe we could go out, or something.’
‘You had my number, as far as I know.’
‘Yes, but . . . circumstances. What about the circumstances? As if I could have called. What would I have said? If your father had answered the phone, what would I have said? Tell her it’s th
e guy who . . .?’
She laughs. ‘Chicken.’
‘That’s hardly fair. But we’re past that now. Aren’t we?’
‘Maybe.’
‘So let’s do something.’
‘I’m busy over the weekend.’
‘Okay, next week. Or the following weekend.’
‘What kind of thing?’
‘A movie? Something to eat? Whatever. How about next Tuesday night?’ I’m plunging right into it now, fearlessly wading knee-deep into this asking out.
‘How about Wednesday? That’s probably my best night.’
‘I think I’m working at the World on Wednesday. Lunchtime Friday? A week from today?’
‘Hmmm. Okay.’
‘So that’s a yes?’ I’m playing it almost like Frank. Right at this second the Paradise is practically a plus because it means I’ve got nothing to lose. She’s seen the worst of me, and we’re still here talking.
‘Yes.’
‘Okay. Um, so, lunch . . . How about I make you lunch? You can come to my house. We don’t live far away from each other. And I’ll make lunch.’
‘That sounds nice,’ she says, and lunch it is.
I write my address and phone number on a beer coaster, and she puts it in her bag.
But I don’t cook. All that pride about wading, and now I’m stupidly out of my depth. Okay, I do burgers and other simple chicken products, but there’s nothing resembling a good lunch in my repertoire. I needed to anchor a timeslot, and I overshot.
I’ll deal with it, somehow.
There’s a roar of voices from the direction of Mayne Hall, like the roar of a crowd acclaiming my heroic comeback from a tragic last game.
Jacinta shakes her head, in a very tut-tutting way. ‘Why don’t they just grow up?’
‘Who?’
‘The demonstrators. They’re such a cliché. They’ll shout about anything. Rent-a-crowd. Most of them are just socialists who turn up everywhere. They’re not even students at all.’