by Nick Earls
‘How can you tell me that when I’m just about to have coffee with the guy?’
‘You’re not having coffee with his external genitalia. Or is there something you’re not telling me?’ He gives that hur-hur-hur-hur laugh another go and says, ‘If you get a pay rise because of it, remember to tell him it has to apply to both of us.’
‘You . . . I don’t believe you sometimes.’ That’s all I can say, and it sounds weak. Ron hits the horn again, in case I haven’t seen him. ‘We’ll talk later.’
My head’s spinning on the way to the car, and it keeps spinning all the way into town.
‘Mate, I’ve done it,’ Ron says. ‘I’ve booked myself in for the extractions tomorrow afternoon. So instead of coffee we’re going to a flash place in town for a bite on me. Lunch at Michael’s.’
‘Good. That’s good . . . I mean, that’ll be great. A big improvement on the hospital dining room.’
‘Well, it’s practically my last meal with my own choppers, you know? Fourth last, actually. So I’m trying to make the most of them.’
That’s how it begins, and we talk teeth most of the way into town, Ron working on a stoicism that I think he’s been practising, me offering one generic piece of reassurance after another. ‘You’ll probably be a lot better off when they’re gone.’ Etcetera.
But it’s still the Frank stuff that’s playing through in my head, though it now really has become Frank and Zel stuff. To think I was worried about the vigour of my pursuit. He didn’t even try to deny it. He actually tried to justify it. I wasn’t ready for that, not even from Frank. And Ron . . . I look straight ahead. If Ron has problems we’re to talk about over lunch, they’re to do with teeth and business. Not war wounds.
How did I get to be in this car, anyway? How am I in this Merc on a uni day, looping off the freeway and into Margaret Street, lunching in town at Michael’s with the husband of Frank’s older woman? Why did I chase Frank about it? Why did I choose ten minutes ago to remove all doubt? Why am I not in the hospital dining room right now with a plateful of subsidised ravioli in front of me, complaining about all the usual things?
I’ve never been to Michael’s. I’ve only heard about it or, actually, read about it. I don’t know anyone who’s been here, so there’s No one to hear things from. We go up a burgundy carpeted staircase, and there’s a man in a dinner suit waiting for us at the top, holding menus.
‘Mister Todd,’ he says when Ron identifies himself. ‘Of course. Please come this way.’
And maybe he’s just doing his job, pretending to remember Ron, but maybe he’s not. The lighting is low in here. It’s all dark wood and richly patterned upholstery and almost-noiseless carpeted footsteps, with a small candle set in the middle of each stiff white linen tablecloth.
‘Let’s eat,’ Ron says, folding back his menu and scouring the entree page.
When my family goes out to eat, it’s most often at a Bonanza steakhouse, but my father says that’s because it combines good service and good value. On rare special occasions, we’ve gone to a suburban restaurant of the ˆ-la-carte variety. We’ve never been anywhere quite like here. There’s too much French on this menu. Possibly even creatures that I don’t know.
‘What are you thinking?’ he says. ‘Remember, we’re here to eat up big.’
‘Um, I don’t know yet . . .’ What am I thinking? I’m thinking that if I could go for a couple of serves of garlic bread and take the balance in cash, I’d practically have my half of the video-camera money.
‘No. It’s a bugger of a choice at this place,’ he says, misreading what the menu’s doing to my head. ‘You could do worse than open with the lobster bisque. If you want to know what I’m thinking.’
‘Sounds good.’
Ron, somehow, is still able to be Ron in here, while I can’t stop wondering if I’m sitting up straight enough.
He closes his menu and says, ‘Done,’ and he asks about my day.
I find myself burbling about some fictitious woman with acute polyhydramnios. I go on and on, staring at the candle and then at the pattern woven into the table cloth, talking about how they’re thinking of getting a portable ultrasound for the clinics area, but they don’t have one yet, about the way people sometimes get acute and chronic polyhydramnios confused and that could really cost them in the exam. Burble, burble. All the time thinking Frank’s getting it on with Zel. This place spins me out. You might not have external genitalia. This was supposed to be coffee.
He listens intently, like someone with a deep but unsatisfied urge to unravel a parable. And I want to say to him, don’t be absurd, it’s not a parable, it means nothing but I have to keep going because if I talk about polyhydramnios I won’t tell you Frank’s having an affair with Zel. An affair—it’s such a stupidly deceitful grown-up ‘Days of Our Lives’ kind of idea.
I like life so much better when Frank is sleeping with young single women I don’t much care for.
But what about you, Ron, I’m thinking. That’s what we’re here for. Open-ended question, open-ended question. So, how are you feeling about the teeth? It shouldn’t be as bad as getting your genitals blown off. Or Frank doing the wild thing with the missus.
‘How did you get your start in business?’
That’s the question I go for, and it’s a glorious choice. It compels Ron to bore me and bore me, and I couldn’t be happier. I knew he had it in him, and it’s just like the back room at the World again, pre-affair, pre-all this.
He orders lobster bisque for two with pepper steak to follow, and a bottle of Queen Adelaide riesling. And he tells me about his life. The self-making of the man who is Ron Todd, from passing the public-service exam at fifteen, to his mission of progressive betterment. He tells me how he really thought self-help books would have helped him more. How some days he thinks he’s ended up winning only a couple of friends and influencing practically No one. And is that enough? Is that enough to have done in the world?
‘I’ve only mastered two of the seven habits of highly effective people,’ he says. ‘Imagine what I could do with, say, four of them . . .’ And on he goes, roaming from one topic to another, grazing at each before moving on, talking and talking but proving very hard to listen to. ‘You’d be surprised at the prospects I had before ’Nam . . . Mowers? Mate, I could tell you a thing or two about mowers . . . I wanted that Merc and I wanted it bad. There have been a few ups and downs, but I’ve got no regrets. You can’t afford to live with regrets in this life.’
The bisque bowls go, the mains come, he pours me a second glass of riesling.
‘Mate, World of Chickens,’ he says, and shakes his head. ‘Some days I don’t know if I’ve got the guts for this. I don’t know if I’ve got the balls. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know if throwing money at it’ll get us out of the hole or not. We really need to freshen the place up, but I can’t even afford new signs.’
Signs, I tell myself. Think signs. Don’t think balls. ‘New signs could be good. Maybe we could do a few things without it costing a lot. I don’t know. Maybe there’s a bit we can do ourselves. It should work, the place should work. I keep thinking it should. It’s just got to build from a much lower base than you thought.’
‘Yeah, that’s it, isn’t it? I’ve got to keep telling myself that. The problem’s not with the World. Max’s Snax wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. We’ve got prime position, we’ve got a good product, we’ve got no direct competitors, we’ve got a top-notch hygiene record, we’ve got a big bloody chicken out front. Yeah. We’re doing a lot right. We’re doing a lot right, aren’t we?’
‘Yes, we are. We’re doing all those things right. They’re not the problem, so changing them’s not the answer. We’ve got the chicken side covered. We just need to be selling more. It’s about vision. That’s what Sophie said to me a while back. And you had the vision to put a chicken on the street, and we’ve now got to tap back into that vision and get creative again.’
‘To us,’ h
e says, and raises his riesling glass. ‘To the World. To chickens on the streets.’ We clink our glasses together, and he takes a mouthful. ‘To the finer things. How’s that pepper steak going?’
‘Couldn’t be better.’
‘Mine too. Steak.’ He shakes his head. ‘It’s the last time these teeth’ll get to deal with a steak.’
‘Yeah, but if you kept the teeth they wouldn’t be able to deal with steak for a lot longer, anyway. You’ll get things fixed up. You’ll be surprised how much better it gets.’
‘Yeah. Another thing I’ve got to keep telling myself, hey? We’ll push through, I guess. Solid stuff’ll be off the agenda for a while till the mouth settles down, I suppose, but we’ll push through.’
‘There are plenty of things to do that don’t involve eating. Like, movies.’
‘Yeah, good idea. Great idea.’ From nowhere, enthusiasm. That wasn’t . . .‘We should take in a movie some time.’
‘Um, yeah . . .’
‘Oh, don’t worry, I’ll see you right. We could call it some kind of consultancy fee. Your time’s money.’
‘That’s very . . .’
‘Unnecessary? Not at all. It’s how it’s going to be. You’re a student. Students are always needing money. I’ve got one at home, remember. You, me and the movies—I’m looking forward to it already.’
‘Yeah. Me too.’
‘You’re going to be picking them, by the way. That’s part of the adventure for me. I’ve tended to give a lot of my attention to musicals and it’s about time I developed an interest in serious motion pictures. I mean, you’ve got to love Grease, which might have been the last movie I saw, but you can narrow your scope unnecessarily. Sophie tells me that film-making—you know, the actual making of films—is a big interest of yours, so it’ll be good to get your take on things when we watch them together.’
*
I’m late back to the Mater and I sneak in to the ultrasound tute, full of three gourmet courses and smelling of riesling. The lights are down so that we can see the swirly moonscape images on the monitor, and every so often over the next hour my chin bounces onto my chest and wakes me. As far as I know, I manage not to snore.
The others go off in the direction of the wards afterwards and I tell Frank it’d be a good time for that coffee he mentioned earlier.
We don’t get coffee. There are people in the kiosk and the coffee’s always awful there. We sit on a bench in a nearby small square of garden, and the loosened corner of a memorial plaque catches on my sleeve. I’ve eaten too much, had too much to drink. My head’s fuzzy. I’m not ready for this, but I already wasn’t ready.
‘So, go on,’ I tell him, wondering where the hell it’s supposed to take us.
‘Look, it’s just one of those things.’
‘I don’t know what those things are. And I thought neither did you.’
‘Zel has needs,’ he says. ‘It’s not like it could have happened otherwise. And Ron’s got problems, remember? That ’Nam stuff, or whatever. There’s also his attitude. She’s a great woman, and he’s totally neglecting her. That was obvious from the start.’
‘What do you mean? How much time have you spent with these people?’
‘You can tell. Particularly once you know.’
‘What made you think . . .’
‘I didn’t do all the thinking, remember. I might have picked her up on my radar, but she noticed me, too. And she made the move.’
‘And, like your Dad says, you’re such a beaut young climber, Frankie. It’s a bloody tragedy to waste a skill like that.’
‘Fuck . . . Look, what’s it to you, anyway? Just because you were off having lunch with your mate Mister No Nuts. Since when are you the moral guardian of the World? Or is that part of your new job description as a pay-off for all that brown-nosing? I might have to take you aside for a talking to, if you and Ron take things any further. Who knows what the two of you’ll be doing next? And is that wine I smell or are you going to tell me you’ve been grappling with a difficult case of acute polyhydramnios?’
‘He took me to Michael’s. The restaurant. The one up the back of the clinics, next to the portable ultrasound. He wanted to have three courses and something to drink. He’s having all his teeth out tomorrow. It was his fourth last meal with his own teeth, and he happens to want to make the most of them all.’
‘For his teeth you get lunch at Michael’s? And what? For a gall bladder you’d root him?’
‘I think it’s just that he doesn’t have a lot of friends. And we’d agreed last week to have coffee today anyway, to talk about a few things.’
‘Next he’s going to be . . .’
‘Don’t say taking me to the movies. Because there’s nothing wrong with going to a movie occasionally. But this is about you and Zel, so don’t try to drag it off somewhere else. It’s about you and Zel. And what I’m saying is: does she ever take you to Michael’s? Because watch out, it’s our turf.’
He laughs. ‘We tend to stay at her place more. We eat in. But don’t think she’s cheap. She does slip me a twenty now and then.’
‘She slips you a twenty?’ I’m now laughing at his joke, except . . . except a couple of things. First, it wasn’t so long ago that Ron told me he’d pay me to go to the movies with him. Second, it appears that it’s not a joke.
‘Yeah for, like, offering it up. Twenty bucks. And you should be able to open any bloody dictionary in the land and find that as the definition of a winwin situation.’
‘There’s a name for that job, though. You’re aware of that? I can see it now, the next enterprise, Zel Todd’s World of Boys.’
‘It’s a gift. It’s appreciation. And there’s nothing wrong with being appreciated.’
‘It’s twenty dollars. It sounds like it’s a set fee. It’s hooker money. You know what you’re getting into now, don’t you? Don’t try to tell me this doesn’t have bad telemovie written all over it. You’ve gone from frat-party comedy and ended up somewhere next to the policewoman-centrefold genre.’
‘And what a conflicted genre it is,’ he says. ‘They always shoot them to go straight to TV, so you never get to see the hot stuff anyway. Just bubbles and meaningful looks and shit. Side-on nork occasionally.’
‘And you, you my friend, are the policewoman centrefold. You’re the schoolteacher stripper. You’re the med-student hooker.’
‘Come on, they’re just a user-pays kind of family. That’s all. It’s how she shows she’s happy. There’s no harm in it. And, anyway, they’re loaded. They’ve got heaps of cash, even if Ron is whingeing about the World.’
‘Right, so this is political now? A kind of redistribution of wealth? You’re some kind of sexual Robin Hood?’
‘That’s not how it works. She’s a very sophisticated woman. You don’t . . .’ He shakes his head, as though I’m annoying him. Me and my lack of sophistication. ‘I always knew I was the kind of guy who’d have an older woman phase.’
‘How do you get to know that?’
‘It’s been apparent for weeks. And she’s pretty stylish, you’ve got admit it. She might even be about to start a column on style for their suburban newspaper. Style File, she’s going to call it. Except she doesn’t know whether it should be Stile File with Is, or Style Fyle with Ys.’
‘Well, stile with an I is a means of getting over a fence. A couple of bits of wood.’
‘There you go then. Y it is.’
‘Isn’t rhyme enough? Don’t the two of you know when to stop?’
‘Hey, how’s this for cool—Style Fyle cool—sometimes, if she sees a white top she really likes, she’ll buy two of them, but she’ll change the buttons on one so that it works for a different set of occasions.’
15
Some days I think there’s a whole world in Frank’s head to which I don’t have a visa. And it’s a place med students could go to do psych on their electives, but they might never come back.
I give up running a morals argument, since it
doesn’t counter much of Frank’s reasoning, anyway. I tell him about the Todds—the important parts of how I see them—and at least he listens, but I don’t think it’ll change much. Not immediately. They’re a family, that’s the thing. He’s messing with a family now. It’s not one of those times when he inserts himself into someone else’s month-long relationship, figuring that if it breaks up that’s where it was heading anyway.
Maybe there are some problems between Ron and Zel. Maybe that’s how Ron ends up talking to me. Or maybe there aren’t any of the problems Frank thinks there are, and there’s a lot of Ron invested in his self-made-man status. He doesn’t want the World to let him down, he doesn’t want to be toothless. He wants to keep Zel in her endless wardrobe of white clothes and her gold jewellery and her tan so deep it looks like it took medical intervention rather than mere sun exposure. He wants to keep Sophie admiring him the way she does, and wanting to be a success in business because he is. He doesn’t say that, and he doesn’t need to.
I don’t quite know how I end up being a part of it, but someone has to be on his side right now. And the food’s not bad. I shouldn’t have mentioned Michael’s to Frank. It’s the best restaurant I’ve ever been to—the only restaurant like that I’ve ever been to, and maybe the best in town. I decide not to tell him about the brush that was brought over to sweep the table between courses, or the prices, or any of the other mad fanciness of the place. Frank’d love all that. I think it’s the lure of proximity to that kind of life that might be partly what draws him to Zel. Something must.
The other reason I don’t tell him too many details about lunch is because I watched Ron put his teeth into their last pepper steak, and it only made me realise that the problems won’t be fixed by a place like Michael’s. Not the teeth, not anything else. All the money spent today hardly bought him a diversion. And, since money’s one of the problems, I understand today’s spending of it even less. I felt guilty about eating, matching him course for course all the way to the profiteroles, but there’s no doubt that it’s what I was expected to do.