by Nick Earls
‘I think there were students on the bus that I caught to get here.’
‘Well, if they were students they were probably going to lectures. Nothing to do with the demonstration. Joh’s done a lot for Queensland. My father was in the Liberal Party, and then he moved to the Nationals after the last election. But I’m still in the Young Liberals. It’s a tough choice, now we’re not in coalition any more. We’d be in the same electorate, wouldn’t we? How did your family handle the election?’
‘We’re not very political.’ Actually, some of us find the very mention of politics depressing.
‘Really? I think everyone should be political. That’s what democracy’s about. It’s not about all that protest rubbish. They’re just getting in the way. Getting in the way of people who are actually doing things. It’s like unions.’
‘Don’t get me started on unions.’ By which I mean, please don’t get started on unions.
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Yeah.’ More animated than she’s been all afternoon. ‘Don’t get me started, either. And what is it with hippies? What’s wrong with progress? What about all that rainforest in north Queensland? It’s completely underutilised, and there’s so much of it. Think of the tourism potential if you just cleared some of the coastal bits and put in marinas and theme parks and things.’
‘Hey, Phil.’
The voice doesn’t stop Jacinta, but it catches my attention. I turn around, and it’s Sophie.
‘I thought it was you,’ she says, as Jacinta talks up the virtues of Japanese tourists landing big marlin off the reef. ‘I wondered if I’d see you out here. Oh, sorry, am I interrupting?’
‘No, not at all.’
A minute or so earlier would have been perfect, but I can’t complain. Jacinta stops telling me where this state’s future lies, and she turns her head towards Sophie with the expression of someone who feels quite interrupted. Sophie looks from me to her, then back to me again. Jacinta appraises Sophie vertically, from head to foot—her lack of make-up, her sleeveless top, her khaki shorts, her boots—and she does it openly, as though it’s what happens to intruders.
‘Phoebe?’ Sophie says tentatively. ‘Would I be right in thinking you’re the Phoebe I’ve heard so much about?’
‘Um, no, this is Jacinta, actually.’ I manage to say it in a way that makes it sound as if I’m hiding something from both of them. ‘Jacinta, this is Sophie. She’s one of the people I work with at the takeaway place. A friend I met at the takeaway place.’
‘Oh, right.’ The context helps, and Jacinta smiles. ‘Hi. It sounds like quite a place. How about that awful guy Ron with the bad rug and the bad . . .’
‘Sophie’s father. Ron is Sophie’s father. You’re thinking of, um, of that guy from the Mater. The obstetrician. Ron the obstetrician. Ron Bellamy.’
‘Oh.’ Jacinta still has the smile, though it’s stiffened up a little. ‘Oh, yes. Sorry, I’ve heard about so many people this afternoon. Anyway, I wouldn’t worry. Your teeth are really very nice, Sophie. And dental care’s come a long way.’ She laughs, but it gets us nowhere. ‘On the other hand, your hair could do with a bit of work.’ She grins, Sophie gives her nothing back. ‘I’m kidding.’ She puts her hand on my forearm, as if to reassure me that we’re all just playing. ‘Your hair is . . . I’m kidding.’
‘I thought it was Theo Bellamy, the obstetrician at the Mater,’ Sophie says to me, in a tone that could easily be described as terse.
‘Oh, sure, Theo’s there too. Ron’s the kind of less high-profile of the Bellamy brothers. The quiet achiever of the family. Not a bad guy, though. Doesn’t go out a lot, so he doesn’t go in for the same level of grooming. You should see . . . yeah, well.’
‘Yeah.’ She looks down at my arm, still with Jacinta’s hand on it. ‘So are you coming over to Mayne Hall then? For the demonstration.’
‘Um, yeah. I thought I’d get over there soon.’ Jacinta’s hand lets go of my arm and moves back to her drink. ‘Why don’t you go and I’ll see you there?’
‘Okay.’ Said in a way that means, okay, you’ve done nothing but lie this whole conversation, so I expect I’ll see you some time next week instead. ‘I’ll see you there. Just follow the noise.’ Then she turns to Jacinta and says, ‘I’m sorry about my hair, but it’s a bit of a lost cause.’
And all Jacinta can say is, ‘Right . . .’ as Sophie turns and walks to the door. She walks quickly and she doesn’t look back. ‘Sorry,’ Jacinta says, ‘I think I might have upset your friend. I really was only kidding.’
‘Of course. She’s a bit sensitive about her hair, but you couldn’t know that. It’s a long story. I wouldn’t worry.’
‘So, are you really going to the demonstration? What was that about?’
‘Oh, another long story. A misunderstanding. I think I mentioned at work that I was probably coming out here today. And I decided not to bore her with the detail of what I was going to do in the Biol Sciences Library. I didn’t know she’d got the wrong idea. And when she started talking about it just then . . . you know, politics. Sometimes it’s a lot easier not to get into it, and to just let it go.’
‘She’s not the best at taking a joke, is she? The two of you don’t have some kind of . . .’
‘No, we just work together.’
‘And Phoebe? Who’s Phoebe?’
‘An ex. That’s a situation that was over a while back. I don’t know why Sophie brought it up. I can’t have mentioned the name more than once or twice.’
*
It was a time for succinct answers then. I’d already been wondering if we should wrap it up before Sophie arrived and then, once she’d left, all I could think about was that I’ll have some explaining to do next week. Or, as far as the Ron part goes, probably no explaining at all. If I’m lucky, we’ll both pretend it never happened.
It feels like Sophie stood on the edge of the conversation, and Jacinta and I sat at our table and made her stand there. That’s what her face was saying, too. Perhaps in a few weeks I could have introduced them in more ready circumstances. These worlds weren’t meant to collide yet. It’s as simple as that.
No it’s not. I could have chosen some way other than dumping on Ron to try to impress Jacinta, if I’m going to be honest about it. If only it hadn’t worked so well. But then we got to politics, and things worked less well.
By early Saturday morning, I’ve decided to think of her simply as misinformed, and I’ve decided that it’s not fair to view her political position as an automatic turn-off. She’s giving me a second chance following my Paradise performance, after all.
The afternoon nearly ended so well. We’d talked just enough, we were finishing our second drinks, an arrangement had been made.
‘Always leave them wanting more. Never outstay your welcome.’ My mother’s advice again, and perhaps this time she could have offered it to Jacinta too, and said ‘particularly when it comes to politics’.
My mother means to help, but outstaying my welcome is now one of the main things in my mind when I’m talking to a girl. Along with ‘be anything you like, but don’t be dull’ and the various other pieces of misinformation that have lodged in the advice part of my brain over the years.
All this gives me no credit for the progress since my early days at uni, when I lost myself in biochem and bad clothes and ponderous uneventful silences. It’s a long way back from there, but I made it, linking by chance with Frank when he was the big man on campus, and finding myself with a long-term spot at the fringes of the in-crowd.
Since settling into that—definitely as good an outcome as I could hope for—and since getting rid of both my pairs of brown board shorts, things have been better. Learning to order beer with confidence, bullshit till all hours on cheap port and play at least mediocre pool was a big help, too. I’m a much, much slicker package than I used to be.
So, I left Jacinta wanting more. Or, at least, agreeing to more. And I mightn’t quite have had mystique, but she was wondering about Sophie a
nd asking about Phoebe, so I look like a contender.
We parted at the door of the Rec Club. It was starting to get busy with the late Friday afternoon crowd, and the first-year law students putting money in the jukebox had a thing for the Violent Femmes’ ‘Blister in the Sun’. It wasn’t an atmosphere for hanging around.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ll see you next week then.’
And she said, ‘Yeah, see you,’ and walked off into the evening swinging her basket of books as the protest, not far away from us, turned louder still.
And that was Friday.
*
It’s about 7 a.m. when the front door opens, and I’m never ready for Saturday this early.
There are feet on the steps, down and then up, and the door shuts again. My mother’s feet, and they walk this way and stop outside my room. She knocks.
‘I’ve got the paper,’ she says. ‘Come and we’ll see if we can find you.’
‘I’ll be out in a few minutes.’ What else can I say? I can’t go telling her I’ll only be in there if they included Rec Club photos, and I’ll be the guy sitting next to the Young Liberal.
We didn’t see me on the late news last night, but I did say that I hadn’t seen TV cameras where I was, so I wasn’t expecting to appear. There were two thousand people. A degree was burned, and a swastika. When the invited guests arrived, the crowd surged and broke three panes of glass and drowned out the speakers. Joh Bjelke-Petersen wasn’t even there. He was ill and didn’t make it. Apparently there had been announcements on Thursday, but word didn’t seem to travel too far. Either that or the organisers hadn’t believed it.
In the dining room, my mother has spread the Courier-Mail out over most of the table. She’s scrutinising the coverage like a general studying the map of a battlefield. Eventually, after close inspection of the biggest photo, I convince her that the haircut somewhere in the third ragged row of protesters squished against the window is mine, with the scuffle making a mess of it. I push my hair around, tilt my head.
‘See?’
‘Yes. Yes, it does look like you,’ she says, suddenly proud and wanting to believe. ‘You wouldn’t want to go out with that hair, though.’
‘No. Combed hair, clean underpants. That’s how I always start off at a protest.’
‘I’m never sure that it’s a good thing to flout the law, of course . . .’
‘The law of hair? Or do you mean the law of combining combed hair and clean underpants?’
‘The law of the land, Philby. But I am proud of you for standing up for what you believe in. I’d bail you out. You know I would . . . Oh Philby, you’re just too thin to get arrested. It’d be very cruel television.’
*
It’s not till later, when I’m sitting reading the article, that I realise that the head next to the one I claimed is probably Sophie’s. Most of her is blocked out by the person in front, but it looks like her hair and, near it, her shoulder and the top she was wearing yesterday.
I should have been there. Standing up, being counted. Standing next to Sophie instead of giving tacit approval to turning the northern coastal rainforest into marinas, and all of that.
But in this state you can be political just about any time. A drink with a willing girl doesn’t come along so readily. The rainforests understand that. Don’t they?
Frank calls mid-afternoon and says there’s a group of people going to the Underground later, so by midnight we’re sitting in the side room again and I’ve had a few drinks and invented a better version of yesterday. The version in which I caught up with Jacinta (pre-arrangement implied but not stated) and it’s all going just as I’d like it to. But I’m trying to pace it, and we’re getting together again next week.
Sophie gets a mention, as someone we happened to bump into because she was on campus at the time. I describe their meeting as uneventful, and brief. And how was Sophie with Jacinta? Fine. Why would she not be fine? But I have to admit that, okay, it probably felt a little odd for both of us—worlds colliding when, but for one visit to this room, my life and Sophie’s have overlapped only to the extent of a chicken suit three nights a week.
‘Yes, there are firm plans. No, you can’t have the detail. With detail comes hassle.’
‘I thought I did the hassle, anyway,’ Frank says. ‘I thought I was supposed to do the hassle regardless.’
‘Yes, and you will. But I get a much better kind of hassle this way. You’ll hassle me for information about the plans. That’s way better than all that hassling about making the call, or psyching me up for the day. You know that doesn’t work for me.’
Tonight, I don’t have to impress. I can dance like someone trying not to dance at the same time, and it doesn’t matter. Tonight, my arrangement with Jacinta is a good thing. An unqualified good thing and I’ll think it all through later, some time between now and Friday.
‘She might hold certain views,’ I tell Frank, ‘but I wouldn’t want to be more specific just yet. There’s a lot I don’t know. She does Law, Arts/Law. That much I know. She’s got a car. I sensed an ambivalence about subtitled films. She’s not bad in daylight, I’ll say that for her.’
Frank nods and clinks his stubbie against mine in a toast. ‘Daylight doesn’t do anyone any favours,’ he says. ‘And you’re about due one with a car.’
I go back to the dance floor when they play the Psychedelic Furs’ ‘Love My Way’, and I dance for a full two minutes with a girl with tight leather pants, big hair and eyes made up as blue and vivid as fireworks. She mouths the words of the chorus at me when it comes round the second time, and then her boyfriend starts looking territorial and taps her on the shoulder.
‘I’m already going out with someone,’ I want to tell him. ‘I’ve already lined up lunch with someone else next week. You don’t have to worry that your bad girl’s fooling around with me.’
‘I think you made a drink for me,’ she says when the song ends. ‘On the Paradise not so long ago, a foul green cocktail.’
The next song’s crap and we end up beside each other at the bar, her wary boyfriend still in attendance. She fiddles with the clasp on her nice-girl purse while the bar staff ignore us, and I tell her the Paradise is just a part-time job, but it’s hard to get started as a film maker.
‘That’s interesting,’ she says. ‘Interesting that you want to do that, because I want to get into publishing.’
And that’s when her boyfriend decides he’s had enough. He steps in again and tells her that if she goes and finds a table, he’ll buy the drinks, even though it isn’t his turn.
‘The beer’s on me,’ he says once she’s gone. ‘Assuming you’re going to give me a break and leave the little lady alone.’
12
I looked for Sophie on Friday, but I couldn’t find her.
That’s my story for Monday. And there were two thousand people there. I could have looked a long time and still not found her. And I’ve got more background on Ron Bellamy, too. By Monday night I know what car he drives and the name of at least one of his kids. Plus, there was that brief but amusing conversation while we stood in the queue in the hospital dining room at lunchtime.
All right, maybe that’s overkill. But it’ll only come up if it’s in context.
There’s no context. Not even a chance for context. We walk into World of Chickens and Sophie isn’t there. Instead, holding the costume and ready to go, we have the alternate Sophie—Barb. After a full day of obstetrics, I can do without Barb.
‘I just got a phone call,’ she says when I ask about the roster change. ‘I don’t know why Sophie couldn’t make it.’
I do my best to make things work the way they usually do, but am I expecting too much? If I start to talk about something non-work-related, she gives me a look that says, ‘Get real—we don’t do that on the A team,’ and she starts agitating for the costume. I can’t guess how she’d deal with it if I tossed in something Elizabethan or asked her to speculate on Jean-Paul Sartre’s all-time top-five Ame
rican daytime dramas.
Out at the lights, I try to fix the evening by doing the Village People’s ‘YMCA’ dance, but the wings won’t bend enough for M. This job, in the wrong company, sucks. I wish Friday had gone better with Sophie. Not that her absence tonight is anything to do with that—rosters do change sometimes—but I should have handled it differently. Some bits of Friday caught me off-guard, though.
I never clarified what I meant by ‘extreme right-wing political beliefs’ in my stated exclusion criterion and, the more I think about it, the more I realise I can’t recall anything definitely extreme in what Jacinta said. Okay, she was right of centre, and maybe strongly, but in a mainstream way. A way that’s mainstream for Queensland, at least.
Ron’s visiting when I go back inside.
‘You,’ he says. ‘You are bloody good out there.’
‘Thanks. I don’t feel like I’m in top form tonight, so it’s good to hear that.’
He follows the two of us out the back for our mute and very businesslike changing process.
‘Right,’ Barb says, her eyes blinking deep inside the beak when we’re done. ‘Right.’
And I want to say, ‘Wrong, dammit, wrong. Take some more responsibility for the quality of my day, will you?’ She turns to walk back in and waddles ahead of us with what looks like the friendly gait of a theme-park character. But it’s just how she walks, costume or not.
‘You get on out there, Barb,’ Ron says. ‘We’ve got a couple of things to check back here.’ The chicken head wobbles, which I know is a nod, and Ron shuts the door behind her. He looks at me, raises his eyebrows. ‘Morale. I look at some of the folk here and the word that comes to mind is morale. You’re an example to these people, you know that? You didn’t get to be a chicken just because you fit the costume.’
‘That’s good to hear.’
‘I hoped you’d give Barb a bit of a boost tonight, but—’ He shakes his head. ‘Just do your best. You’ve got Sophie thinking the right way, and that’s good. Or, at least, she was thinking the right way before this assignment deadline came along. I gave her my stress-management tapes, but does she let them go to work? We’re not the best with stress, the Todds. But she’ll be okay. Now, listen, I can trust you. I know I can trust you. And I know you see things the way I do, and I think you’ve got a pretty good head for business.’ What’s he going to do? Promote me? Where do I go from being best chicken? ‘Just between you and me, back when this was Max’s Snax, did you ever come here?’