by Nick Earls
FRANK
Supposing I suggest you have an interest.
SOPHIE
Supposing I suggest you turn that thing off.
FRANK
And how long might you have been harbouring these feelings?
SOPHIE
I’m not a feeling harbour. I’m not a harbour of any kind.
FRANK
Anything to stop you making some kind of move?
SOPHIE
No way.
FRANK
No way?
SOPHIE
That’s right. I don’t know what he’s thinking. I don’t know what he wants. He’s got accepted into UCLA. Why doesn’t he send them the money and go? I don’t know what he wants. What would I say? What would I say to him? Okay, there’s this bit on page two of Bright Lights, Big City where the guy talks about the likelihood of where you aren’t being more fun than where you are. I might say that to him. And then I’d say, dickhead, have fun where you are. But that’s enough. Enough prose. Now I’m going to do a poem. Are you ready for the poem?
FRANK
Yep. Always.
(There’s a bad attempt at close-up, losing half of SOPHIE’s face, then a change of mind and reversion to previous framing.)
SOPHIE
‘Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, Lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day.’ He said that once. It’s from a poem, but the poem’s about time, so don’t get any big ideas, just because it’s also from a coy bastard. He said it a couple of times in the chicken suit. On the back steps of the World.
FRANK
And you can remember it all.
SOPHIE
Well, yeah.
FRANK
What do you think that means?
SOPHIE
I don’t know. What do you think it means?
FRANK
I didn’t say it. What do you think it means?
SOPHIE
(This time like de Niro) No my friend, what do you think it means?
FRANK
Are you talking to me?
SOPHIE
Are you talking to me? We watch a bit of Scorsese round here now. Are you bullshitting me about having no tape in there?
FRANK
Why would I do that? I’m against bullshitting. You know that. There’s not one tactic in me. That’s what they say. All I’ve got’s the direct approach. Ask Phil. So, trust me, I’m a three-quarters doctor. If I scrape through surgery.
SOPHIE
I know I’ve blown it. I accused him of sleeping with my mother. I’m guessing that’s one of those automatic strike-out things.
FRANK
He’s not the kind of guy who’d do that. It’s just not him.
SOPHIE
Thanks for your support.
FRANK
Hey, I’m just calling it how I see it. It doesn’t mean you don’t have my support. Some people are like that and some aren’t. And, I figure, as long as you’re up-front about things, there’s not much to complain about.
SOPHIE
Are you sure there’s no tape in that? The red light’s . . .
FRANK
That’s just because my finger’s on the button.
SOPHIE reaches out, the picture goes to crackles.
Frank’s buttocks don’t appear once. I rewind the tape, and I play it again. I take it out, I put it in my room, and I rinse my shirt. I let another ten minutes pass, and I call the Greens. It’s Frank who answers.
‘It’s Phil.’
‘Figured it might be. Good timing. I just walked in.’
‘I’ve watched the tape.’
‘Which bit did you like best? The bit where I had Ron’s spare wig coming out of my arse like a bear from a cave, or the bit where I clenched his spare dentures between my buttocks and made them talk?
‘Well, they were good, but I preferred some of the quieter bits, actually. The character-based stuff.’
‘Yeah, surprisingly subtle, wasn’t it? I like the way you don’t even see the argument scene but, if you’re going with The Taming of the Shrew formula, it’s pretty much understood to be inevitable now, so you can run it off camera.’
‘Very clever.’
‘Well, it’s all down to characterisation, and having that understanding of the inner workings of people. I think that’s the key to being a really good film-maker.’
‘So do you reckon I should call Sophie?’
‘I can’t believe you’re asking me for advice.’
‘Yeah, sorry. I think it was just a reflex. What I meant was, I might give her a call and see what she’s doing tomorrow. I will give her a call, now. And apologise for my share of all that. For my excellent work off camera. I hope Ron doesn’t answer. I know he’d be a pushover for a trip to the movies, but it’s just not the same.’
‘Even if your mother thinks it is.’
‘My mother . . . not a word of this to my mother.’
‘Never. You can trust me. Anyway, I owe you. I owe you something. Even when you were really shitty with me, you didn’t blow my cover. But, yeah, you should call Sophie. I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s been thinking all along that that looked obvious. Not that that’s a problem, is it? Not in terms of my movie. It’s all about the journey, isn’t it? Something like that. I think I can remember someone saying that.’
‘Yeah, me too. Some loser in one of his many angry moments.’
‘Hey, that’s “loser who helps people”, not just loser. There are plenty of losers around who are selfish pricks. Remember that. You should stop being shitty with us all for a second—however justifiable it is—and look at what you’ve done. Look at Ness, look at every single Todd, look at the World. Look at me. You could have done nothing, and you didn’t. And it made some kind of difference, right?’
‘Thanks. There’s still a fair bit to sort out, but thanks. I should go. I’ve got some paperwork to take a look at.’
Back in my room and under a pile of other things—obstetrics notes, miscellaneous junk—I find my UCLA documentation. The offer is about to expire, and maybe I was going to let it. Maybe I was going to let it slip quietly away, rather than risking a few weeks somewhere very different. I’ve made a lot of noise about getting out of here, and I’ve probably never looked like doing it. But all that noise is probably not even about here. This place is just an easy thing to be dissatisfied with, a fall-guy for anything that isn’t working the way I’d like it to.
‘If you’ve got a problem with yourself, deal with it.’ Sophie shouted that at me like a football coach who’d done a weekend counselling course. There’s nothing lank about her when she’s angry.
So maybe I’ll go to LA for December and January. LA. As if I’m any closer to comfortable with the idea. LA and an emergency room—how can I be ready for that? How can I? Who knows? But the time and place to work that out is December in LA, not here and now. And if I go and I hide in my room there all my free time—if I get free time—No one’ll know but me. And in a couple of months, I’ll be home. And maybe I’ll go out of my room sometimes, and maybe it’ll be good. I might meet people, do things.
Two or three shifts a week at World of Chickens between now and then should get me there—the airfare and some spending money. Not a lot of spending money, but some.
My mother’s car glides in under the house and I hear her coming up the steps. I don’t know how you go about getting a bank cheque for thirty-five US dollars, but she will. It can’t be hard. I’m sure there are people braver than I am who do it all the time.
I’m going to do this. I’m going to fix the paperwork up now, I’m going to call Sophie and tell her and then, in six months, I’m going to see how things work in LA. After that, who knows? But it’s as good a place to start as any.
I’m going to do this. I might be a long, long way from a lot of the cities where the big decisions are made, but I’m going to travel wherever I have to tra
vel and do whatever I have to do. And if it doesn’t work out—if I never shoot a frame and end up as a GP or a medical specialist or selling cars—it won’t be because I haven’t given it my best shot. So, here goes.
BACK SOON WITH FISH—1999
I’m in the cab on the way into the city when Frank Green calls.
‘Phil,’ he says, ‘You’re back.’
‘Yeah, just now.’
‘I was thinking of taking the boat out tonight. Get a few of us together and get out on the bay. The bream are running.’
‘Yeah, sounds good, but I’m in Sydney.’
‘I thought you were back today.’
‘Yeah, in Australia. I don’t get to Brisbane till tomorrow. I’m doing a film thing down here, going to a film thing. The producer I’m going to be working with? It’s the premiere of her new thing. It’s on now. I’m going to the after party. See who’s around, you know?’
‘Bummer,’ he says, and uses the word like he means it. ‘I reckon you could’ve hooked a beauty tonight.’
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘So when are you back at work?’
‘Tonight’s work.’
‘Yeah, right. When are you back at the healing-the-sick work rather than the schmoozing-the-starlets work?’
‘Monday.’
And with that he goes to catch fish, and for me Monday seems too close and impossibly far away, like a nearby day in a different life.
Tonight’s my first after party. My first serious film event and my body feels so far from sensible. Four meals, three movies, a disrupted sitting-up sleep and however many time zones there are between Toronto and Sydney. That’s how far from sensible. And I wanted to be better prepared than that. Mainly, I wanted it not to look like my first after party. These film people, they know how to have fun. Do I? Sometimes I’m still not sure.
But jet lag brings out my melancholy side. I should get all this out of my head. And some time before the age of twenty I should have worked out that extensive self-analysis isn’t worth the trouble. I could, had I chosen to, have learned that from Frank Green long ago.
For Frank, all of life makes sense and Monday is probably just where it should be. Tonight he’ll fish. He’ll go out on the bay with a few uni friends, drink too much, use language he’s never allowed to in front of his baby, piss recklessly over the side the way he likes to (thunderously autographing his name into the quiet night sea), catch something or nothing, sleep a few hours, cruise back home, continue cruising through the rest of his mid-thirties and beyond. There’s something straightforward about his life that I quite admire.
And on Monday he’ll be an orthopaedic surgeon again, I’ll be a part-time GP again, with my film dreams eating away at me, yet to become as much as I’d like them to.
‘Now this is why I went to all that bloody trouble to pass those exams,’ he told me two months ago when he bought his boat and named it after the Medicare item number for an operative knee arthroscopy, since he’d figured that was what was going to pay for it.
And he dragged me round the Boat Show an entire weekend, as though I had nothing better to do with my time, and got himself so caught up in it all that he’d not only bought a four-berther by the time we left, he’d also gone up to Ron ‘Thommo’ Thomson, the host of ‘Stoked About Boats’, and got him to autograph an Evinrude engine catalogue.
And I can remember Ron ‘Thommo’ Thomson, demonstrating more sensitivity than I’d expected, giving us the once over and asking if he should make it out to both of us (as though we had some permanent catalogue-sharing thing going). And Frank saying, ‘Nah, just to me, he doesn’t know shit about boats.’
So Frank is living the life he’d always planned to, back in our poverty-stricken uni days in the early eighties. ‘I’m not afraid of debt, mate,’ he said even then, as he ticked off the boat and the car and the house on his fingers. ‘The second I’ve got any kind of earning capacity I’m going to live it to the max.’
I always thought he was kidding, right up until he leased the BMW a year ago. ‘Five series,’ he said breathily, as though it was sexual. And I think he used the word plush. I’ve never had those kinds of plans. I wandered into part-time general practice, wandered into film-making, almost turned thirty before I’d done anything that I liked. And now I’ve made six shorts and had a couple of turns as assistant director on something bigger. Which is how I met Jacqui Lynnot at the time when she was looking for a new project, and how I come to have spent a week with her in LA before the short-film festival in Toronto.
And even though we didn’t achieve too much in LA and my film played in Toronto to a mostly empty room, Jacqui says this is too good a project not to get up, and that I’ll be directing my first feature by mid-next year. And though I’ve never been much given to optimism, she’s a good enough producer that I almost believe her.
So we decided I’d overnight in Sydney for the after party before going home. Check out the talent, get a feel for things. Even though I’d like nothing more than to be in my own bed right now.
Of course, that’s not my alternative. My alternative is a night on the bay, catching no fish, drinking too much and falling asleep to the noise of Frank driving his urine stream into the sea like a drill bit while singing the classic hits of the eighties.
I check in at the hotel, dump my bag in my room, shower and try to convince myself that changing into my bottle-green shirt—my last clean garment—will make me feel more up to this. I go to the rooftop. And I can hear the party from two floors down in the stairwell. Music, plenty of people well settled in to a good time. I wish I’d got here earlier. I wish we’d all started the good time at the same time. I wish, as I have had cause to wish more than once or twice, that my comfort zone wasn’t quite this slender. The thickness of the bottle-green shirt and not far beyond it.
I pick up a glass of wine from the bar and decide I’ll leave the getting a feel for things, and any schmoozing of starlets, for a little later. No hurry. I walk towards the edge and away from the crowd, tuck myself next to a dense, manicured shrub.
I gaze out at the skyline, in case I can look as though I’m genuinely interested in it and am, for a moment only, painlessly between conversations. I wonder if I could go to my room now, tell Jacqui in the morning that I had a great time, and where was she all night, and that I talked to plenty of people before the jet lag got the better of me.
I’d even rather be on Frank’s boat than this. Hating the predictable, reasonable things to hate about boating and fishing. Slumped on one of the four berths wishing I was somewhere else as Frank spouts rod ’n’ reel jargon and spins some bullshit about his bait preferences and tells joke number one thousand that begins, ‘The Pope, Bill Gates and Monica Lewinsky go fishing and . . .’ Frank is someone who should never have been given Internet access.
But my night’s not working out to be that good. For the next half hour the only conversation I have is with an actor who lurches up to me and says, ‘Eric. Eric. Hey, you’re not Eric,’ and then goes.
I’m floundering here. I’m aware I’m not Eric. I don’t need it pointed out to me. I’m pretty much nobody. I shouldn’t be here. Why didn’t I pick some socially less intense career, like lighthouse keeping? Damn them for automating lighthouses. I can’t face conversation tonight. I can’t even remember how any of those Pope/Bill Gates/Monica Lewinsky jokes end, and Frank never stops telling them. I concentrate on my next sip of wine, the horizon, and flounder with as much quiet dignity as I can manage.
My mother calls. So no quiet dignity now, either.
‘Did they like your film in Toronto then, Philby?’ she says.
‘Yeah, it seemed to go down all right.’
‘Nice people, Canadians. What’s all that noise?’
‘I’m at a party, remember? The film party in Sydney, the one I told you about.’
‘The one Christopher Reeve might be going to?’
‘Keanu Reeves, yes.’
‘So have you signed a
nyone up yet? For your film?’
‘It’s not quite like that.’
‘Oh come on, Philby. I know the way these things work. All the big deals are done in someone’s jacuzzi. Everything starts at parties. These people, film people, they swing, Philby.’
‘Yes. Um, I’ve got to go. And I suspect I’m interrupting you in the middle of something very Jackie Collins anyway.’
‘Now Philby, that’s not nice. I just wanted to make sure you’re being sensible.’
‘I’m always sensible. I’ve sent a sample of the jacuzzi water off for analysis and I won’t be getting in till they can confirm there’s no Legionella. Now, I’ve got to go. I’ve got Nicole Kidman here to talk through a couple of contract clauses with me. And she’ll catch her death of cold if she’s not back in the water soon.’
‘Nicole Kidman? Can I say hello to her?’
‘No, you can’t.’
‘Oh. Well, will you tell her I liked her in To Die For?’
‘I’ll tell her you liked her in everything since BMX Bandits. Now, I’ve got to go. She’s a very busy person.’
‘Yes, of course. Don’t spend the whole night bothering her, though. She might be very nice but make sure you work the room.’
I thank her and hang up, and it’s just me and the shrub again. A situation I’m beginning to quite like, and I’m wondering how long I can spin out this glass of wine. Before Nicole hassles me about a contract clause, or something.