Green

by Nick Earls

  I let the call go to voicemail. The message comes through when I get to the corner of West 66th.

  ‘Oh, hi Phil,’ a voice says when I pick it up. ‘Leo here, one of the team from Arcadius.’

  He’s speaking almost unbearably slowly. Or maybe that’s just how I’m hearing it. There’s no sign of the GTR Girls on a quick scan of West 66th, or Frank, or anything other than a regular New York street with standard marathon madness going on down at the far end. That’s the last sighting of them, so it’s where I’ve got to start. I feel like I’ve stumbled into a missing persons TV show but, instead of the victim being a cute four-year-old child, it’s a cramped multi-millionaire being carried by at least a dozen identically dressed women with polymer in their knees. Poppy Montgomery would have solved it in a minute, and she’d already be back at the precinct signing off on the paperwork.

  The message goes on. ‘We haven’t had a chance to look closely at the script yet ’ film code for we haven’t looked at it at all—‘but we’re interested in the concept. Just a couple of questions . . .’

  There’s a bakery on the corner. No GTR Girls. Then a hair salon, a real estate agent and the American Folk Art Museum.

  ‘We were wondering about moving it to Louisiana,’ Leo says, in his unmodulated rhinitic drone. ‘They’re giving great tax breaks at the moment.’ There’s muffled noise in the background. ‘Oh, yeah, two more questions. Does it have to be lunch?’ There’s a pause while he checks something and while my hopes develop a familiar nauseating sag. ‘And does it have to be Betty Grable?’

  I keep moving, telling myself the message is not the wall, not that sapping nineteenth mile that comes after the bridge climb. Every film ever made has this call and gets through it, and every film not made ends with it. The sickening thud of a non-comprehending response, and then silence.

  Ahead there’s a building under repair, a vein clinic, a children’s gym and a faade that looks like Hampton Court Palace.

  Then a yelping, whooping sound comes as someone opens the door to a bar called Paddy Malone’s.

  When I get there I can see, even through the smoky glass, that the place is overrun by GTR Girls.

  They’re shoulder to shoulder, toasting and cheering and yet, through it all, I can hear Otter at the bar saying loudly, ‘No, kale will not do—it needs to be choy sum’.

  Frank’s in a booth with an ice pack on his forehead and face. His head is swelling, he’s gravel rashed and his nose is probably broken. He’s grinning. He still has all of his chemically whitened teeth. Two of the GTR Girls are massaging his bare red feet. Another is holding a moist sugar cube on a teaspoon over the tealight candle on the table.

  ‘I’m sure this is barely legal,’ she’s saying to him.

  There’s a glass nearby with a green liquid in it that must be absinthe, and something crystalline crusted around its rim.

  Frank’s absent-mindedly turning a torn sweaty sachet of Eno over and over in his hand. ‘Someone cooked it up for me once at a conference in Freo,’ he says, as if it’s charming and will make any sense to her. His head clunks back against the wall. ‘It was a chem prac, maybe. Measured something in a sample of . . . something.’

  I call out, but he doesn’t hear me. I push my way through, grab the candle and check his pupils.

  ‘Fireflies,’ he says. ‘Look at ‘em.’

  I start a quick MSQ, but he falters early. He can tell me his name, but then he gets vague.

  I ask him who the Prime Minister is and he shouts, ‘I won, Philby, I won,’ and he punches the air, or in fact a reproduction 1930s whiskey poster mounted on the wall behind him.

  I hold my finger up to test his vision. He swats at it, but misses.

  ‘I’m year rep,’ he says, as if someone’s just contradicted him. ‘All year.’

  And that’s enough of the bar-room medicine.

  ‘Okay, ladies, I don’t mean to spoil the party, but I think we need to take some pictures of Frank’s brain.’ I might be playing Anthony LaPaglia as I say it, but it works. For a moment, the GTR Girls go quiet. ‘We need to rule out an intracranial haemorrhage.’

  The bar tender instantly appears beside us, wanting to take charge. A New York argument breaks out about the best way to the closest ER and CT scanner. Otter fusses nearby with a hopeless brew of pulverised greens until I send him back to the hotel for the travel insurance documents.

  Within a minute I’m in a cab with Frank. In five, we’re at the hospital. The resident in ER needs no convincing about the CT scan.

  As Frank’s head slides into the big white donut of the CT machine, he starts singing the Violent Femmes’ Blister in the Sun.

  The resident turns my way. ‘Is this abnormal behaviour?’ It’s a slow day and Frank’s a real concern, so he’s come along for the scan.

  ‘Only for the rest of us,’ I tell him. ‘From Frank I’d call it encouraging.’

  The CT scanner takes one thin slice after another. The technician asks for quiet, and Frank says, ‘Only if you sing’. Which the technician does, in a strong bass voice, starting with Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.

  The resident is flicking through screens on his phone. ‘Do much trephining in your practice?’ he says. He’s checking websites to see where he might drill the holes in Frank’s skull.

  The pictures come through. From a cranial point of view, they are conspicuously normal. The resident puts his phone away. There will be no skull holes today.

  ‘He’s going to need a new nose,’ he says, pointing to that part of the scan.

  ‘It was never a good nose.’ I can see the fracture, and it’ll take some fixing. ‘He’s a chronic mouth-breather. Lives on breath mints.’

  ‘So, concussion,’ the resident says. ‘That’s a good outcome. We’ll keep him in and watch him till he’s reoriented. You’re next of kin?’

  He thinks we’re a couple. ‘I’m the closest he’s got. In this country anyway.’ I almost mention Otter, but then realise he makes no sense anywhere outside Frank’s head.

  By the time I meet Frank in the ward, he’s wearing a found beanie that he can’t account for and reading a pamphlet from a gospel church in Harlem. He has an IV line in and the white sheets are so starched they make a scraping noise when he moves.

  ‘We should have a barbecue,’ he says. ‘These people could sing at it. An official faculty barbecue but unofficially go around campus giving out flyers to all the hot chicks. Some of those girls in Arts are pretty game . . .’

  I realise I should call my mother, and probably Frank’s family, to let them know that he’s going to be okay.

  When I take out my phone there’s a text message from Leo. ‘Into the script. Digging it. Getting lunch, getting Betty. Charlize Theron as Betty? We’ll see more Macarthur in acts 2/3? If so, George Clooney? Could see it in Biloxi? MS also good for tax breaks right now. What would Aust govt offer? What’s your pound like to the dollar? Call when you can.’

  There is no Macarthur in the film, no Macarthur at all, and there’s a long and crazy road ahead before this thing gets made but, for this second at least, they’re on the hook.

  Charlize Theron, yes. Biloxi, well, will it get it made? I’ve told Noel to be ready for moves like that and he says he is, though I don’t know if you ever can be. We’ll work on Brisbane. I’ll work on Brisbane. I’ll keep it a live idea for as long as possible and beg anyone I can find for incentives. Macarthur, I’ll tell Leo, sounds really interesting and then I’ll quietly allow the idea to fade away.

  ‘And then I’m going to space,’ Frank says. ‘I’ve got a pamphlet somewhere.’ He reaches for a pocket that isn’t there. ‘It’s with Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic.’

  And so, the next adventure begins.

  Nick Earls is the author of many award-winning and best-selling novels and short stories. He is the winner of a Betty Trask Award (UK) and Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award. Perfect Skin was the only novel to be a finalist in the Australian Comedy Aw
ards in 2003, and was adapted into a feature film in Italy (Solo un Padre, Warner Brothers/Cattleya). 48 Shades of Brown was a Kirkus Reviews (US) book of the year selection, and was adapted into a feature film in Australia (Buena Vista/Prima). Four of his novels have been successfully adapted into stage plays, while The True Story of Butterfish was written as both a novel and an original stage play. A multi-media adaptation of his earlier play, The Drowning Point, was staged at the Edinburgh Festival in 2005 and in London in 2006. Nick Earls has also written for newspapers, including the New York Times, the Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald. He was born in Northern Ireland, but has spent most of his life in Australia, where many of his books have been bestsellers.

  “Earls’s prolific oeuvre of 12 novels and two short-story collections has steadily built him an international reputation as a contemporary writer who makes comic yardage—from subtle irony to groan-out-loud gags—out of the emotional entanglements of decent men during episodes of self-evaluation and transformation.”

  Sydney Morning Herald

  “Contemporary, cliché-free Australian fiction that is sure to have a very wide appeal.”

  The Australian

  “Earls’ appeal is his skill for developing lovable, self-deprecating Aussie males in the 18-40 year-old range.”

  Stage Whispers

  “Earls paints the battle of the sexes as a friendly duel with plenty of promising common ground, and readers should enjoy this amiable, well-crafted and genuinely romantic book.”

  Publishers Weekly on Perfect Skin

  “Nick Earls is on a literary trail trodden by J.D. Salinger . . . Where this at times very funny and insistently poignant novel achieves its momentum is in the careful pacing of character and slow release of emotions.”

  The Age on Monica Bloom

  “Wise, graceful, but above and beyond all that very, very funny, Zigzag Street is a distinct pleasure.”

  Review Independent Monthly

  Find more from Nick Earls and other Exciting authors at Exciting Press.