by Nick Earls
‘Her, um . . . their, um, American circumstance . . . So naturally TV came up, since it’d pretty much have to. I didn’t read the whole thing. It’s not really my area. Not that I’m not interested. It’s just that I’ve got exams coming up.’
‘Can I just ask—and don’t take this the wrong way—how did it end with Phoebe? Did she really hurt you?’
When the now relentless bass line of ‘Magic Man’ kicks in for the fourth time—and, guess what, there’s not one suffocating garment loosened, even though it’s definitely warm for the time of year—she starts looking twitchily around and saying, ‘What’s going on? Is something stuck?’ Her forehead turns puzzled. ‘What were you saying about TV?’ She clutches her glass, looks down into her drink.
‘I just really like the song,’ I tell her.
And the comment was supposed to be low-key but, bugger it, I’ve somehow picked psycho instead and made ‘I just really like the song’ sound about as thoughtful and normal and non-threatening as ‘Have you checked the children?’
‘I think there’s something in my wine,’ she says. ‘Something . . . coming off the ice cubes.’
‘Probably just turbulence. There’s a temperature difference . . .’ Turbulence? I’m about to go for Bernoulli again. Have I learned nothing? ‘The riesling’s warmer than the ice cubes, so . . .’
‘No, no I think it’s the ice cubes themselves. I might go and get a couple of fresh ones.’
No, not the sink. But she’s already standing, as though getting a couple of fresh ones is mainly a chance to put some distance between us, step away from this fractured conversation and its mesmerising ‘Magic Man’ soundtrack.
‘I’ll help you,’ I tell her, as she walks around the far side of the coffee table. ‘I might check on the pies, too.’
‘No, no it’s fine,’ she says a little sternly. ‘Stay where you are.’
‘I’d really rather . . . you’re the guest.’
I stand, but she’s already up to the breakfast bar. The song’s up to the chorus. Jacinta’s up to the sink.
‘I’d really . . . There’s some things I should explain.’
She stops, just as she’s about to reach down for ice. ‘Phoebe things, would that be? You haven’t been entirely honest with me about Phoebe, have you? And you’ve been creeping me out a bit with this music, I have to say that. I don’t know what you were thinking with this tape.’
‘I’m not sure where to begin.’
‘Blood,’ she says in a voice that’s oddly deadpan. ‘There’s blood in the sink.’ She looks up at me, as though not a thing makes sense any more. ‘That’s what’s in my wine, isn’t it?’
‘Phoebe’s my mother,’ I tell her, and straight away I know it’s not how I should have put it.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ she says, same voice as before. ‘Your mother.’
‘I can explain.’
‘You just have. Um, I have to go now.’
‘No, no it’s not like that.’
‘I’m really sorry, okay? Really sorry. But I’ve got to go. I don’t think I can . . . I just have to go. You should get help. You, and especially your mother. But you too.’
‘No, it’s complicated.’
The song moves from languid guitar solo to sensual synthesizer, plus wailing.
‘These things are never simple. The blood, for example. I can’t guess . . . Could you step away from the basket? I have to go right now, and I’d be much more comfortable if you’d step away from the basket.’
‘No, you have to let me . . .’
‘Okay, let me put it another way,’ she says, every syllable louder than anything before. ‘I’m likely to scream if you don’t step away from the basket.’
I step away, three slow backward steps towards the French doors. A gust of air blows in from the garden, the curtains billow.
She moves forward, watching me all the time, even when she’s picked up the basket and she’s feeling around in it for car keys, backing away past the coffee table.
‘We’ll talk later, though,’ I say to her, in a way that sounds somewhere between a question and completely stupid.
‘No, no we won’t. I’m sorry. I can’t be the person to get you through this.’ And then, in the ultra-firm voice again, ‘I don’t even know what the blood’s about.’
She gets to the pantry and the kitchen door, checks the hall, and runs. She’s at the front door in seconds and it slams behind her and her feet clatter down the wooden steps outside.
‘Magic Man’ starts for the fifth time. The enticing aroma of party pies fills the air. Outside, a car engine roars into life and rubber scorches into bitumen as Jacinta leaves the scene.
I hit the stop button on the stereo, walk into the kitchen and turn off the oven. My appetite’s gone. Won’t be back for some time.
There was a better way of saying that. Sure, there was also an ice-cube management issue, but there was a better way of explaining Phoebe. There were probably many better ways, but I would have settled for any that didn’t imply I was fucked-up because my last relationship was with my mother. Someone once told me that when you try to explain things you should get right to the point. Now I know that’s not always the best approach.
I go into the spare room and I pull the sheets off the bed, fold them and put them back in the cupboard.
*
The only lucky break that comes my way is that the lab didn’t develop Frank’s photos. The packet couldn’t be more innocuous—straggly roses, people at a party doing nothing special, compositional exercises showing that I still have a thing or two to learn about perspective and framing. These photos—that’s where my life is. My life is made up of dull backyard things, and I shouldn’t try to be so bold with party pies, and shaving at the last minute and some song about a man with a kind of chick magnetism that can’t be explained by science and has to be put down to magic.
I should have masturbated. At least it would have put a couple of minutes pleasure in my day.
A while later, Frank calls. ‘If it’s a bad time . . .’
‘No, we’ve done the bad time.’
‘I just thought I’d see how it was going.’
‘Thanks. It’s sort of gone. She’s gone. It’s a long story.’
‘It’s never a short one.’
‘Oh, look, it’s nothing major. Just a misunderstanding. She got some funny ideas in her head about my relationship with my mother, and I kind of cut myself shaving and some of the blood got in her drink.’
‘What?’ He’s laughing. ‘You bled in her drink?’
‘In her wine, yeah. But not directly . . .’ A pager goes off in the background. There’s a muffled voice somewhere but it’s drowned out by Frank, still laughing. ‘Where are you?’
‘Um, still at the Mater.’
‘Yeah, the pager was a hint, but we’re not rostered on this afternoon are we? I thought it was only the morning I was missing. Has anyone noticed I’m not there?’
‘No. I was working for Dad last Friday, remember? So I missed Antenatal Clinic and I thought I’d do double today. After what happened in surgery I’m taking no chances. So I’ve stayed on for the afternoon one. But forget that. You served a girl a drink with your blood in it. Have you hooked up with a vampire and not told me?’
‘If she was a vampire she’d still be here. You should have seen her. She didn’t so much leave as flee.’
‘You’ve got to call her and straighten it out, before she gets any strange ideas.’
‘She’s got them. Trust me.’
‘No, call her. I know you don’t want to but it’ll only be worse if you don’t. Call her and explain. What have you got to lose? You don’t want her going round saying you put blood in drinks.’
‘Yeah, I . . .’
‘I’ve got to go. I’ve got to call the next patient in. You have to call her, right? Don’t stress. She’ll never go out with you again. It’s fine. It’s just damage control, and you’re very good at damage control. Yea
h? Pretend I’ve got myself in some situation and you’re bailing me out. It gets down to explaining. You’re good at explaining.’
‘Yeah.’
He’s gone before I get to mention that his photos weren’t developed. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I should call her. I don’t want the wrong version of the story getting round. I’ll probably call later.
I should tell him about the photos. I’m sure he’d want to know. I give him twenty minutes to see the next patient, then I call the Mater back. The switchboard puts me through to Antenatal Clinic, but there’s only a clerk there. He tells me the morning clinic finished well over an hour ago, and there isn’t an afternoon clinic on Fridays. Frank must be somewhere else at the Mater, even though it was an Antenatal Clinic he missed. But I don’t know where to try next. I’ll talk to him later.
I plan my Jacinta conversation most of the afternoon, sitting at the table making notes about the directions it might take and what I might say. This time I’m leaving nothing to chance.
I revisit lunch from all kinds of bad angles. I blame my mother, I blame Frank, I blame Ann and Nancy Wilson and anyone else connected with Heart. Each for different things but, ultimately, I know where the buck stops. For a while, I wonder if it might have been better if I’d gone with the moderately sensual ‘Let’s Go’ by The Cars rather than the story of a man with an allure so compelling no girl’s mother could understand it. But, let’s face it, that’s not the issue. The way things panned out, I might as well have picked Warren Zevon’s ‘Excitable Boy’ and sung along to the bit where he killed her and filled the cave with her bones.
My mother arrives home, making a lot of noise as she gets to the door.
‘It’s okay,’ I call out to her. ‘She’s gone. I’m back doing obstetrics.’
‘Oh, right,’ she says as she comes along the hall. ‘I wasn’t going to ask.’ She stands in the doorway to the kitchen, holding shopping bags and looking around, as if hoping to catch some lingering interesting sign of the visit before it fades away forever.
‘You can ask. And the answer is I don’t think she’s for me. You know how, sometimes, you just know that? So, I’m moving on. There’ll be other possibilities.’
‘What? What other possibilities?’ she says with a speed that gets the words out before her usual tone of measured curiosity manages to catch up with them. ‘None of my business. Sorry.’
‘That’s fine. It was a general observation. Not specific.’
She looks at me, trying to work out how fine it really is. ‘If you want to talk about this, or anything we could. We could talk, couldn’t we?’
‘I’m sure we could. If there was anything to talk about. Are you after salacious details or do you just think I need therapy because lunch didn’t work out?’
‘Oh, nothing like that. It’s just . . . well, you bought party pies. You probably got your hopes up. Or maybe not.’
‘Well, it’s all irrelevant now, whether I did or I didn’t. She’s not for me. Back to obstetrics, I think.’
And she navigates herself so cautiously through her well-intentioned concern that I don’t even have the go at her that I was planning to about opening my photos. My photos. Does anyone open anyone else’s mail around here? Definitely not. That’s definitely a rule. Even if there might be photos of their roses in there.
So the photos stay in my room, and we don’t discuss them. She’s making dinner by the time I tell her I’m about to use the phone in the study. I explain that I’ve got to talk through a lot of uni things with Frank—lecture notes and case studies—and I need to do it with everything spread out in front of me. I take my conversation outline and a large irrelevant pile of paper in there, and I shut the door.
Just go with the plan, I tell myself. The necessary outcome’s simple, and it’s not like lunchtime. Damage control, that’s all.
It still takes a lot of pacing before I pick up the phone, and it gets put down again twice before I dial one digit. Do it. Just do it.
I call. It rings. Three times, four.
‘Hello.’ A female voice, and familiar.
‘Hi, Jacinta?’
‘Yes.’ The voice toughens up already.
‘It’s Phil.’
‘Yes.’
‘I just wanted to have a chance to explain a few things. About today.’
‘I’d really rather not do this.’
‘No, it wasn’t the way it seemed. Things got a bit jumbled. Some of them came out all wrong.’ New tactic: start peripheral, move towards the point. ‘I was fighting off a migraine. I get them sometimes, and they affect my speech and I can say odd things. About relationships. That aren’t true. They’re just a jumble. And they affect my vision—the migraines—so that made me shave very badly and made me quite clumsy with the ice and it might have made me seem a bit strange. Did I seem a bit strange?’
‘Have you still got the migraine?’
‘No, I’m fine . . . yes, I have, just a bit. And it was a new razor, and they’re sharp and they can slice through just about anything without you feeling it. When you’re shaving. And the tape, that strange tape that we played, I don’t know how it got into the machine. It’s my brother’s.’
‘Yeah? What’s his name?’
‘Name?’ It’s the pause that does me in. That and the tragically tentative way I invent my brother Peter.
She hangs up.
I call back.
‘Okay, this time I’ll tell you exactly what happened.’
Having gone with Plan A, the migraine, and less successfully with Plan B, my brother’s tape, I move to another sheet of paper and Plan C, the jokey explanation of the photos, to explain how my mood was completely thrown exactly when I got to the door.
‘So there they were,’ I tell her, ‘and my mother had opened them. And they weren’t just any photos. My friend Frank—you met Frank, I think—has a problem with a surgery tutor, so he’d got me to take some photos in my room of him with a Tim Tam between his buttocks, and I was worried that my mother . . .’
‘Naked buttocks?’
‘Hard to get the Tim Tam in there otherwise.’
‘Don’t call me again.’
She hangs up.
I call back. She’s kidding, surely. Anyone can recognise a prank. At least I have to finish Plan C before giving up.
The phone rings and rings. This time a man answers. It’s her father. His tone isn’t friendly.
‘Are you the guy who stuck the biscuit up that other guy’s arse?’
‘Me? No. He did it himself. I just took the photos.’
‘Listen, that’s exactly the kind of thing I’ve heard about you. I know you’ve got a very disturbed personal life, and I’m sorry about your family background, but let me be clear. I don’t know why you’re calling my daughter but, put it this way, I’ve got your name, Phil Harris, I’ve got your number and I’ve got friends in Special Branch. So there’s plenty of stuff a lot bigger and uglier than a biscuit that could find its way up your arse quick smart if I made one phone call. You won’t be calling here again, will you?’
‘I think there’s been a misunderstanding.’
‘You won’t be calling here again, will you?’
‘But there was this cruel surgery tutor . . .’
‘Listen, mate, get help.’
‘I never had sex with my mother.’
There’s a click, a loud click. He’s hung up on me.
*
It’s enough that someone in the family claims to have had their photo taken by Special Branch. My mother’s political cred will not be enhanced if Special Branch is persuaded to insert plenty of stuff in my arse quick smart because I made a dick of myself with some guy’s daughter.
My parents, spared the details, know me well enough to work out that it hasn’t been one of my better days. During dinner, my father tries his hardest to stimulate a conversation about current events or obstetrics or the mysterious eternal appeal of Gilbert and Sullivan.
Afterwards
he pours two glasses of one of his better brandies and says, ‘Fancy a film? The Bridge on the River Kwai, perhaps?’
He lopes off to the study, to the shelves of taped-from-TV videos he euphemistically refers to as a library. Soon the two of us are in the darkened lounge room in our recliner seats, sipping our brandies and watching Alec Guinness do his best work, my father murmuring ‘watch out, sir’ and ‘chin up’ as the mood takes him. This is not the evening I had planned.
The phone rings and my mother answers it. From her tone, I know it’s Frank. My father hits the pause button, but I tell him to keep watching while I’m out of the room. I should be able to fill in any gaps by now.
‘So,’ Frank says. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Drinking the good brandy and watching The Bridge on the River Kwai again.’
‘You fucked up the phone call as well then, hey?
‘Correct. You know the score. You don’t get the good brandy and The Bridge on the River Kwai around here if you’ve had one of your better days.’
‘We should go out. We should have a drink now.’
‘I don’t want to go out. And I am having a drink now.’
‘I’ll pick you up at nine-thirty. The video should be finished then.’
‘Okay.’
*
‘Usual plan,’ he says in the car. ‘The Underground. Cruise in at five-to-ten, beat the cover charge. Vince and Greg are meeting us there. There might be a few others, too.’
He’s playing Springsteen tonight on the car stereo, early Springsteen, Born to Run. We went to the concert a few months ago, us and fifty thousand others in pounding rain at the end of a hot day. I’ve never been to anything quite like it—spectacle and steam and mud, with the Clarence Clemons sax solos soaring all the way to the low clouds. Until that night, I thought the best thing about Springsteen was the girl in the ‘Dancing in the Dark’ film clip.
I can’t believe the mess I made of this afternoon.