by Nick Earls
*
Was it too much, after our guests had left, to end the evening by screaming at her, ‘You’ve violated Mister Wilson forever,’ and demanding a written apology? It was one of those rare moments when you decide, I can either go formal now, or maybe cry. And crying sucks, if you ask me. I think I also screamed, ‘You were the one who introduced hand puppets to bath time,’ even as my mother was already realising this whole disastrous evening was down to her.
Once I’d implored, she was broken. She knew she’d done wrong. But the evening was far too many allegations past saving.
I spend most of the next day in my room with the door shut, trying to study Beischer and Mackay, but mainly just sitting there being angry about still living at home. And everything else. Frank and Zel and Sophie, and my whole collapsed pathetically nonsexual life.
Surely there’s a rule that one thing you don’t tell people about your adult offspring is the imaginary friends they might have had when they were four. My mother knows that now, but she knew it a little too late last night. She went with the fictional George Glass and his imaginary friend Marcia without even knowing where I’d got them from. She knew she’d done wrong.
My mother started doing puppet shows at bathtime when I was two or three. I hated how the shampoo stung when it got in my eyes, so she had to do something. And I got involved in the puppet shows, so it was only natural that, eventually, my imaginary bathing buddy Mister Wilson would arrive. Mister Wilson was a fat jolly old man who would come through the wall at bath times and make the whole unwelcome experience a little closer to bearable. He was, in his own chubby, crusty, totally invented way, a hell of a guy. Like my life, he was not sexual. And nor was my wearing of a dress (and a little make-up) for the purposes of a revue sketch, nor my not entirely willing participation in the placement of a chocolate biscuit between Frank’s buttocks, nor my reluctant acceptance of a cash consultancy fee from Ron Todd.
However these things might seem to add up, some things are simply not to be added up. And there are far too many people in my life who are a long way short of learning that.
20
I never thought I’d welcome a twenty-four-hour shift in Labour Ward, but that’s what Monday brings me and I’m glad of it. I decide that if the evening’s quiet I’ll use it as a chance to study. Exams are a week and a half away, and another whipping at Scrabble looks like a very unproductive use of time at the moment. I wonder if I can claim special consideration for impaired exam performance due to family dysharmony caused by my mother thinking I was a prostitute.
The morning’s quiet, so I go to the usual sessions and afterwards I have lunch with Frank.
I tell him about Saturday night, but I give him the abridged version. The part about my mother thinking I had something going with Ron, and for cash. And how she lined up therapist back-up. The irony of me being the one suspected of coming home with hooker money in my pocket is apparent to both of us.
‘Your life,’ he says. ‘It’s even dumber than mine.’
‘Depending on what Zel tells Ron.’
‘Don’t remind me.’
‘Actually, mine still might be dumber. Remember the photos? The ones for O’Hare? They got developed.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. They came out on Saturday. My mother thinks I’m having a much more interesting life than I am, sometimes involving your arse.’
‘Hey, only once,’ he says, and then gives his hur-hur-hur-hur laugh. ‘Did she say what she thought of the arse?’
‘Shit, you and people’s mothers. Don’t even joke about it. There was a problem though, with the photos. You’ll like this. My technique did leave a bit to be desired that day. The photos were pretty blurry.’
‘Yeah? So she couldn’t tell it was me?’
‘No, she could tell it was you. That wasn’t the problem. Imagine this—a shot that shows your face clearly, your arse kind of clearly and the Tim Tam is blurry.’
‘Blurry? Oh . . .’ He laughs, laughs till he practically blows his nose. ‘Jesus. Really, did it . . .’
‘Oh, convincingly. If there was any doubt that the dollar-for-dollar deal had run me off the rails, it was the alleged turd shot that was the clincher. I think they’d had a pretty bad time leading up to Saturday night, wondering what else they might find out when the moment of confrontation arrived.’
‘Shit, I wish I’d been there.’
‘Like I said, it was a big event. There was a therapist in attendance. They were ready for the worst. What they weren’t ready for, bugger them, was a series of really simple banal explanations. And a son with a few quiet ambitions, who otherwise happens to be a loser who helps people.’
‘Yep, it’s so wrong. It’s so wrong, isn’t it? They should be so glad they’ve got you.’ Hur hur hur hur. ‘The loser who helps people. And the people don’t make it easy for you, do they?’
‘Life was a lot easier when I was just a loser who minded his own business.’
‘The Sophie bit would have come your way anyway—that scene on Friday. If she was thinking what she was thinking. That all happened because of me and Zel.’
‘Yeah? I don’t know. It’s too tangled up for me to guess what might have happened and might not.’
‘So what’s happening with her now?’
‘What do you mean? Sophie? I don’t think we’re getting on very well at all.’
‘Come on, think like a movie maker and tell me what’s happening with her now. And this time cut the crap. You know how the story goes. You’ve got your game-playing, and there was plenty of that. That was always cute. You’ve got arguments, and that’s where you are now. Then you fall for each other. You have to get shitty with each other in the middle before things get hot and heavy at the end. It’s The Taming of the Shrew formula.’
‘What? How many times do I have to have this discussion with people about my life not being a movie? Lives don’t work that way. With stories you can have that sort of formula with the game-playing and then the arguments and then people falling for each other, and everyone knows it’s a formula but they’re happy to go along for the ride. Make the ride good enough and they all want the happy ending, anyway. It’s all about the journey. Life doesn’t come with those endings. With life you get ragged messy endings instead of resolution. You get exactly the kind of bullshit I’m getting now. You get bits of different stories happening at the same time. You get things that just drift off into nothing, even if it might have crossed your mind occasionally a while back that they might have amounted to something. And, anyway, maybe I didn’t pay enough attention at school, but where’s the bit in The Taming of the Shrew where she thinks he’s sleeping with her mother?’
‘You’ve got to update it a bit. But fine. Don’t if you don’t want to. I might have a crack at her if you’re not going to. Presumably you’re okay with that.’
‘You’re so wrong for her.’
‘Might leave that to her, hey?’
‘Whatever. Fine. She can do what she likes, obviously.’
‘Obviously,’ he says, and laughs.
*
A few hours later, I’m sitting making small talk with a patient and her husband. She’s in the early stages of labour, he’s dabbing at her brow with a wet washer and giving her two fingers to squeeze during contractions. He breathes with her, and I do too because it’s harder not to.
After a while, the contractions don’t seem to be amounting to much.
She’s Jeanne, a receptionist at a big caravan park on the southside. He’s Col, he fits seats in cinemas. This’ll be their first. And so it goes. Does their story fit a formula? I don’t think so.
Frank’s wrong with his Taming of the Shrew theory. If the last month or two conformed to any genre, it’d be one that’d see our story finishing on a high-point for World of Chickens. It’d be more sorted out than it is now, I’d be played by some boyish Mickey Rooney type and last Friday would have been the eighties suburban equivalent of stirring the k
ids up to put on a show. Michael J. Fox could play me, but not the Alex P. Keaton ‘Family Ties’ version. I’m casting myself as good-hearted, with a strong right part to my hair and a sense of purpose that real life (or my own slackness) is perhaps too erratic to allow.
I take a break for dinner, and I don’t hurry. On my way back, I walk up the hill towards Mater Mothers’ and some of the evening’s visitors are coming out to go home—a third-time father (I’m guessing) with two small children, a couple in their fifties. It’s close to eight o’clock, closing time. When I get there I decide I’ll take the stairs instead of the lift and I go all the way to the top, the floor with the Special Care Nursery. I go in and take a look at the board just inside the door. Baby Neil Armstrong has gone, but the RN looking after his humidicrib tonight is just back from leave and doesn’t know if he’s gone home or to a regular ward or not.
Well into the night, Jeanne’s labour accelerates. The contractions become closer and stronger. We start to see the top of the baby’s head, moist matted black hair. I call the midwife more than I’m supposed to, but I keep thinking the baby might come out any time.
We see head, we don’t see head. We see head, we don’t see head. Everything slips back between contractions, but Col and I start to convince ourselves we’re seeing more with each one.
The midwife stays. She tells me to scrub and put on a gown and some new gloves. She tells me—tells us—it’s all going according to plan. And so it does.
‘Swab, and get your drapes up and get into position,’ she says. ‘Quickly.’
Jeanne grips her thighs with the next contraction, turns her fingers white with a surge of effort and the head is out, properly out and never going back. All that waiting, and it’s happening before I’d expected it to. The contraction seemed just like the others, but for some reason this was the one.
‘Now check for cord. Finger past the occiput and check for cord.’
No cord. Good. No cord, but the head of a baby, slick and mucousy, and then the rest, the shoulders and everything else, sliding out into my hands. The baby cries and writhes, but in a healthy way, and turns itself red.
‘What now?’ the midwife says. ‘What now?’
And I remember. I’ve made a list (chapters forty-one and forty-two) and I remember most of it, or at least enough. Col cuts the cord, the baby is examined and I concentrate on the placenta.
When it’s over, I’m the fourth wheel on the tricycle. Just like that. I’m at the end of my list of things to do and check, and Jeanne and Col are grateful but I suddenly feel superfluous, intrusive. Which is okay—I’m both those things. The midwife is already in another room. It’s business as usual for her. And in here it’s brand new for three of us, but the other two have suddenly got themselves a baby. It’s 3 a.m.
When I leave the room, I walk out of Labour Ward through the big plastic doors and I put money in the vending machine for a Kit Kat, but it doesn’t come out. What is it with vending machines in this place? When I hit it—and I don’t hit it hard—Kit Kats tumble out like a jackpot from a poker machine. So I scoop them up in my arms and carry them back in, and hand them out to everyone I know who’s over the age of nothing.
‘Beats cigars,’ Col says, pretending to smoke one.
*
The garbage truck wakes me when it empties the bins outside the on-call rooms. Jesus and Mary loom from my walls. The digital clock beside the bed says six-eleven. I’ve slept for two hours.
Even when the truck’s gone there are sounds. A slamming door, a rattling trolley, two male voices talking as they pass on their way up the hill, cars in the distance on the other side of the hospital buildings.
The air in the room is cold on my face, but the water in the showers is always hot. I can’t believe I’m getting up now. I feel like I’ve only just gone to bed, as though I’ve started a messy dream and left it not half done.
It’s a perfect winter dawn outside on the way to breakfast in the dining room. On my cheeks it’s cool as a slap but it’s bright, and soon that’ll translate into warmth. Finally, I can cross delivery off the list of things I’m supposed to do this term. I’m supposed to have done two, but it’s not compulsory and I did want to do at least one. I’m surprised how routine it was—how it followed the script—but each bit happened just as I was dealing with the last so, after all those hours of waiting, it was over quickly in the end.
I’m still not happy with my mother, springing her therapist friend on me on Saturday. Is being close to a birth supposed to fill me with some kind of positive, generous feelings and make that shit me less? Bad luck. Right at the moment I’m better off away from home and in the on-call rooms, even with all the statues. You’ll never be alone in there, but you’re alone enough. You’ve got Jesus and family in plaster and wood and, sure, they don’t say a word and their eyes are just chipped paint, but they won’t call their therapist friends over, bring out the butt shots.
In the dining room I get myself a bowl of Nutri-grain and a big plastic mug of tea. The coffee here is worse than the kiosk, just a vat of dark sour stain. I could sleep. I could sleep right now. I don’t even like Nutri-grain, the plastic mugs annoy me and I’m not big on tea. This is a flagellant’s breakfast, a breakfast chosen to turn a bad mood worse.
But there’s no point in imagining that New York lives are immune to nights like Saturday, even though that was my first thought. Parents everywhere, I suppose, indoctrinate their children with the standard set of values, and then assume they’ve turned to pornography and prostitution when flimsy coincidences arise. I’m surprised drugs rated only a passing mention. Soon enough, my mother will forget she lectures about media, and will blame the media for putting all this in her head.
It’s less of a Brisbane story, actually. I don’t know if it’s just Woody Allen and his characters, or if there really are millions of people on Manhattan entrenched in analysis, but the Attack of the Killer Therapist over fondue seems, if anything, more New York than Brisbane. I can see Woody Allen doing it: ‘And there I was, concentrating on the process of fonduing—they had me cooking my own meal as a distraction, I’m sure of it—and, out of nowhere, this therapist . . .’
Or maybe in second person, in a different voice:
You’re out of there now, and you know it’s for the best. You remember the moment the first photograph came out, the instant you realised they weren’t thinking Tim Tam. You wonder if Baby Neil Armstrong has flown from this place, and you hope he has. Out to the suburbs, to an unnoticed childhood that belies its beginnings.
Concise, but not bad.
When Frank turns up for our eight-thirty lecture, I tell him I finally delivered one last night and I give him a Kit Kat.
‘They were handing these out.’ It’s easier to put it that way, and I’m sick of explanations that have to go beyond about ten words. ‘It was their first and the dad got pretty excited.’
I stay Tuesday night at the Mater. I can’t concentrate at home. Or anywhere, in fact, so I might as well book myself more time in a cell with Jesus on the wall. Jesus demonstrating the worst of his misericordiae. Or should it be Mary’s misericordiae, since these are the Mater Misericordiae hospitals? She looks much more as though she’s come to terms with it.
I’m too annoyed with my mother to talk sensibly with her, so I call and tell her I’m staying here to do more work. Study work, not money-for-sex work, in case she’s wondering.
I scam free dinner in the dining room by claiming to be rostered on, then it’s back to my cell.
I figure screening will come up in either the written exam or the clinical so I flowchart how to proceed from the heelprick blood test, making sure not to rush to big investigations or unlikely diagnoses too early.
I wash my Monday clothes in the shower, I wring as much water out as I can and I hang them in the room, on the back of the chair and from Mary’s thoughtful hand. They’ll do for Wednesday.
*
I’m still annoyed with Sophie sometim
es. I’d rather not be, but I’m not used to this. I’m used to a life that just ticks over, without this recent burst of wild allegations. I’m used to being irritated by Frank, in all kinds of inconsequential ways, and otherwise just taking things as they come. How could she think I would do something like that?
I also want to fix things with her. Weeks ago, we had something going that I’d like to retrieve.
But she’s not at World of Chickens on Wednesday. She’s studying. Did I know that? I don’t think so. I knew she had exams, but I thought she’d be here. Smelling of toothpaste and fear perhaps, but here.
Instead, Barb is back as the fill-in chicken, standing kerbside doing a stiff, fearful kind of pointing when we walk up from the car park. Someone needs to tell her that strobes work even better if you don’t stand as still as possible.
Ron’s behind the counter, trying to make a burger but putting more effort into an excitable version of his boss-with-the-common-touch act. ‘Ron,’ I want to say to him, ‘you’re as common at they come, you don’t have to do that.’ But I don’t.
‘Business is up,’ he tells us, while Frank sorts out the burger. ‘I know it’s early days, but business is up and three people have come in in the last hour talking about famous hotplate chicken. You were onto something there, Phil. They’re starting to want us.’
‘Good. That’s good news.’
‘So I’m bringing the mid-year party forward.’
‘There’s a mid-year party?’
‘Yep, always. And this year it’ll be bigger than ever. World of Chickens meets World of Mowers, this Saturday afternoon at my place.’
‘And the feathers’ll fly.’
‘What? No, it shouldn’t get to that.’
‘It was a joke. Chickens meeting mowers. Don’t worry about it.’