Portable Curiosities

by Julie Koh

  ‘Gnarly,’ said Razza, feeling that less was more in playing this beach scene.

  Having taken over operations at the rock shelf, Ralph was reeling in a jewfish.

  ‘I’ll deal with it,’ said Two II. He unhooked it, took it by the tail and bashed its brains out on the rocks.

  ‘Unorthodox,’ said Ralph, ‘but shows initiative.’

  Two II shrugged. ‘Life is brutal. Why fight it?’

  Ralph ruffled the hair of the duplicate child and decided that this was a boy he had the right skill set to raise. Two II smiled up at him.

  ‘Your father must be proud of you,’ said Ralph.

  ‘My real dad’s a drug lord,’ said Two II. ‘He’d give me up for a bag of crack.’

  ‘People should have licences to have children,’ Ralph said and cast his line back into the sea.

  The sun was setting. Two was crouched in the sand with his camera, looking for a nice way to frame the view, when he noticed Razza and Two II within shot.

  They were far off in the distance, walking down the beach. Razza was ruffling Two II’s hair and resting his hand on the boy’s shoulder – a perfect moment between avatar father and avatar son.

  Two let the camera drop around his neck. He ruffled his own hair and wondered why it wasn’t innately lovable. After all, it was the same honey colour as Stefan’s and dropped over his eyes in the same way. Yet it wasn’t loved, thought Two, not even by a faux father who’d been hired to faux love him.

  Ralph was standing next to Two, seeing what he was seeing, both of them unable to look away from the pair.

  ‘I want to go home to Lola,’ said Two, after a while.

  ‘We’re going,’ said Ralph. ‘Don’t you worry about that.’

  Two was no fool. He knew in his gut that if Razza’s heart belonged to another, he would have to take swift and decisive action.

  That night, in the semi-darkness of Two II’s parents’ front lawn, with the verandah light illuminating the boys’ honey-coloured hair, Two made his smirking avatar redundant, citing budget cuts due to slowing growth in the marble economy.

  *

  As soon as Stefan’s very alive, very law-abiding parents had retracted all allegations of kidnapping against Ralph, and life had returned to normal, Ralph decided it would be a good time to take stock of all he had acquired.

  Why is everything so old? he thought as he inspected his favourite house. The carpet had worn thin and mould was creeping down the walls. He ran a finger along the sideboard, leaving a mahogany-coloured streak in the thick layer of dust.

  Then he noticed that, sometime in the last ten years of their marriage, Lola had turned into a table lamp. She wasn’t even an attractive one – brown with black numbers and frayed at the edges.

  Ralph realised things had progressed in a direction with which he was not entirely comfortable.

  ‘I can’t stay the husband of an item of furniture,’ he said to the lamp.

  The lamp flickered as if to say: ‘I’m flexible.’

  A tear rolled down its shade.

  ‘Be careful,’ Ralph said, as he put the lamp out on the street for the council’s next bulk waste collection. ‘No need to get all teary and electrocute yourself on account of me.’

  *

  In the spirit of renewal, Ralph bought another house for himself and his numbered offspring. The house was big and white, full of sharp edges and cold marble floors. Ralph hired men dressed in green jumpsuits and green caps to remove the grass and lay down artificial lawn, in order to produce, instantly and permanently, the effect of a well-tended garden.

  One night at the dinner table, Ralph rubbed his hands together.

  ‘Do I have a surprise for you.’ He produced a stack of pages that his PA had prepared. ‘The checklist says I have to see the world and you’re coming with me. Our whole holiday is set out in this spreadsheet.’

  When laid out end to end, the pages of the spreadsheet stretched from the front to the back door and back again.

  ‘We’re going to cover every single city in existence,’ said Ralph to his offspring, as he walked them through it, ‘at a minimum rate of one a day.’

  One’s eyes shone as if she had just seen a tower of chocolate sprout from the ground. She knelt next to the spreadsheet for a closer look.

  ‘As you can see,’ said Ralph, ‘our movements for each day have been broken down into five-minute blocks.’

  Two mooched back to the dining room, sat in his allocated spot and stared into his chicken soup. His only comfort in the world at that moment was the warmth his palms felt against the sides of his bowl.

  ‘Be careful,’ Ralph said. ‘No need to get all teary, even if it is with joy.’

  There were documented holiday policies and procedures to ensure that One and Two kept up the appropriate pace.

  They were on a minibus leaving the Leaning Tower of Pisa when Ralph said: ‘This calls for Protocol Number Three.’

  He handed Two a video camera.

  ‘Sorry, Ralph, what’s Number Three?’

  ‘I quizzed you at Heathrow.’

  ‘I know,’ said Two. ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Just point this out the window and stop recording when I say so.’

  Two pushed the lens up against the glass and pressed the red button. His arm ached all the way through the blur of Florence and Rome, and a red circle formed around his right eye from the pressure of the suction-cupped viewfinder. When the minibus drew up to St Peter’s Basilica, its last stop for the day, Ralph looked up from his BlackBerry and asked why the hell Two was still recording.

  While the trio caught an orchestral performance in Vienna, Ralph made the children watch a Highlights of Italy package on his BlackBerry. The video had been edited from Two’s Protocol Three footage by Ralph’s PA back at company headquarters.

  ‘Goes pretty well with this music,’ said Ralph, rather surprised. The patrons behind them stared in fury at the back of his head.

  As Ralph and the twins sipped mocktails in Vanuatu, they began writing postcards home. These particular postcards had been picked up in Cambodia, so Ralph insisted they all be backdated to the day the family sped through that country on the back of a ute.

  Hello from Siem Reap, wrote Ralph to the CEO of a company he had just bought. He wrote so quickly that none of his loops joined up. His As and Os all looked like Us, while his Es looked like Ls and his Ls looked like Es. In Two’s eyes, the message appeared to say Hleeu frum Silm Rlup as if the letters were floating around a bubbling pot of turtle soup.

  That night, One whispered to Two that she thought Ralph’s handwriting looked like a pigeon had had a case of bad worms, shat all over the page and then hopped through its own poopsie lala. They giggled and snorted together, both sandwiched flat on their backs between the hotel’s starched white sheets.

  But Ralph couldn’t care less about his handwriting. He called this Efficient Personal Time Management, or EPTM, which he saw as a cornerstone of the company that bought and sold other companies. Ralph’s rationale was that the less time he spent writing these holiday greetings, the more time the recipients would be forced to spend attempting to read them. He felt this distribution of intellectual labour to be appropriate.

  The photo featured on the postcard from Silm Rlup showed an ancient tree spreading its roots over an ancient building. Ralph didn’t like how old the whole scene looked. He made a mental note to email the concierge who had given him the postcards and have him rethink the hotel’s postcard acquisition strategy, on the basis that a country should always promote itself as being on the bleeding edge.

  While finishing his postcard, Ralph texted an employee to acquire another company he wanted.

  Have it done by yesterday. Thx. R, said the text.

  In the middle of both writing and texting, Ralph elbowed Two. ‘The Four-In-One Experience,’ he said. ‘Having mocktails in Vanuatu while sending postcards from Siem Reap while acquiring MetCo from StetCo while spending quality time
with the kids. This is the beauty of multitasking.’

  ‘I don’t like multitasking,’ said Two and burst into tears.

  ‘You read and walk at the same time. That’s multitasking.’

  ‘Can we stop?’ asked Two. ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘We can’t have anyone holding up this holiday,’ said Ralph. ‘There’s no room for delay.’

  ‘I cannot proceed,’ said Two. ‘There is a high risk I will begin to exhibit symptoms of a panic attack if I am forced to continue with this ill-advised mode of action.’

  Ralph shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’

  He stuffed a return plane ticket into Two’s shirt pocket and sent him and his psychological baggage straight back to their great island nation.

  ‘How about you?’ Ralph asked One, once he had dispatched his recalcitrant second child.

  ‘I can keep up,’ One said with a brave face. She wiped her clammy hands on her dress, the fabric of which was printed with maps of major European cities.

  But One knew her own stride was only half her father’s. Inevitably, during a second dash around the globe to cover cities they had accidentally missed, Ralph outran One, leaving her waiting by Manneken Pis, that famous statue in Brussels of a small boy taking a public slash.

  *

  Back from holidays, Ralph put out a second advertisement.

  The consequent upgrade wife, who had no associated children, was called Silvia. At the interview, Ralph and Silvia ran their checklists by an algorithm designed to calculate their relationship potential. The algorithm, which took into account 216 dimensions of compatibility such as calf length and hair growth rate, determined that Ralph and Silvia were ninety-seven per cent compatible. Unsatisfied with this result yet unwilling to spend any more time searching for a suitable candidate, Ralph asked Silvia to be his bride and Silvia, experiencing a ninety-seven per cent compatible emotional meltdown, said yes.

  Silvia was not one bit like Lola. She was the sort who would never turn into a lamp. ‘Only the Best for Silvia’ was her motto. She liked floral rather than chess dresses, resembling more a supermarket bouquet than a board game. She invariably wore her hair in a lacquered French roll.

  Said Silvia to her eleven girlfriends between sips of Lady Grey in the tearoom of a swish hotel:

  ‘He’s quick to lose people. But I’ll change him.’

  The girlfriends arched their collective eyebrows and brought their porcelain cups to their pursed lips, in the manner of those who must stoically and silently look on as their loved ones make foolish life decisions.

  ‘Ninety-seven per cent made for each other,’ said one, snapping the lips of her purse together as they watched Silvia flounce off in the cloth bouquet of the day.

  At the wedding, as the guests toasted the lucky couple in a field of sunflowers, Ralph lifted Silvia’s veil for a kiss. Both veil and dress had been printed with photorealistic, life-sized sunflowers, a design that inadvertently caused Silvia to blend seamlessly with her surroundings. The guests had been unaware of her presence until the moment the celebrant asked that they stand for the bride.

  Upon lifting Silvia’s veil, all Ralph could see was a hovering head with painted red lips opening towards him in slow motion. He suffered. His mind screamed that he was in the middle of a mistake and he felt sick in his stomach, like the few times in his life when he had tripped and realised, mid-fall, that it was too late for him to avert a brutal landing.

  In the end, the only course of action Ralph could take to make those lips go away was to give them a peck.

  Overjoyed, Silvia beamed at her eleven bridesmaids of the pursed lips and lipped purses, who were also swathed in photorealistic, life-sized sunflower gowns. Ralph couldn’t bring himself to look at the dozen floating heads and their painted smiles. He stared at his trusty sneakers and bounced up and down on the balls of his feet, as if he were a lunchtime runner in the CBD, sporting a company T-shirt, short shorts and hairy legs, and waiting at a traffic light for the little man to go green.

  At the reception, Ralph watched Silvia giggle as her bridesmaids arranged her train, helping to prepare her for the throwing of the bouquet. He turned to his PA.

  ‘Put the divorce in my calendar for a year from now.’

  ‘Pardon?’ said the PA, who was hitching up her dress to jostle for a good bouquet-catching position on the dance floor.

  ‘Look at her fussing over those flowers,’ said Ralph. ‘This one’s too slow for my liking.’

  The PA wondered why Ralph had a problem with Silvia’s speed when really what he should have been concerned about were the myriad ways in which Silvia’s face looked like that of a powdered horse.

  As Ralph watched the sunflowers arc through the air, he resolved that one day he would find and marry a girl from a wealthy racing family, who understood the need for speed – someone unlike this woman with the slow red lips, who looked like a thoroughbred but was sure to usher him to a premature death-by-boredom in between sips of Lady Grey in the tearooms of endless swish hotels.

  *

  After Silvia, there was a procession of women. Ralph chose them as young as they legally came until it dawned on him that their youth was making him feel older, not younger.

  They would look at him out of the corners of their eyes, toss their hair to one side and smooth out the laps of their assorted dresses, asking:

  ‘Bill Gates? Is he a comedian?’ and, ‘Which Korea is evil, East or West?’

  Ralph was strolling one day down his hallway of cover shots when he stopped suddenly. He stepped over to one of the more recent pictures and put his face so close to it that his real nose touched his magazine nose. Staring deep into his own eyes, Ralph realised that the photographs in these platinum frames had been recording not just his career successes from year to year but also his physical deterioration.

  He hurried back to the very first picture and walked again down the hallway, scrutinising each photograph. He saw for the first time how the two lines on his forehead were settling into position, how the groove between his eyebrows was deepening into a chasm and how the skin on his neck was growing more and more like that of a plucked chicken.

  After that day, he refused all cover shots. At least in the world of glossy print, Ralph was preserved at a trim, blue-eyed fifty.

  *

  Old age, when it truly arrived, made Ralph spill cups of tea and fall off ladders. It put glue in his eyes and made him smell like old coats. His knuckles swelled and his skin turned to creased leather, marked with inexplicable stains. He played unwilling host to stray white hairs that reached out in curls from his nose and ears. The hair on his head turned to straw. It sat at strange angles and couldn’t be brushed flat into an acceptable hairstyle. It rustled in the wind, like bamboo, and dropped off with the autumn breeze in accordance with a schedule to which Ralph had not agreed.

  Ralph began to wear a promotional cap from the Whistling Lakes Golf Club, where he was a member.

  ‘I’m getting a thousand a second to wear this,’ he declared to anyone who would listen, though the real purpose of the hat was to keep each hair on his head for at least a solid day longer than its use-by date.

  To accompany the line, he would mime a golf swing and squint out at the horizon.

  ‘A physical representation of my financial hole-in-one,’ he would add for those who stared at him without comprehension.

  They were justifiably confused about what the old man was trying to mime. His agility wasn’t what it used to be and the swing ended up looking more like a prolonged tai chi move that might be called Painting the Upside Down Boat Rainbow of the Emperor’s Blue Mooncake.

  Although Ralph’s finances were doing brilliantly on his metaphorical golf course, they were, in reality, heading for disaster.

  Ralph had once been considered a game-changing entrepreneurial wizard. The business model on which his company was founded had been copied so frantically across the globe that commentators declared there had not been a craze this cr
azily crazy since the Dutch tulip mania of the 1600s.

  Unfortunately, it also turned out that the crazily crazy craze in companies that bought and sold companies that bought and sold companies was unsustainable.

  The bubble burst with Ralph inside it, mid-swing.

  On the day Ralph’s fortune performed a vanishing act in the top stories of every major news outlet, Ralph’s latest wife – who had been raised in a greyhound-racing dynasty and had the glint of acquisition in her eye – became distracted by an attractive piece of man meat. In the instant it flashed by, she decided to seize the opportunity and leave this doddering fool behind because if time was fleeting, she would beat it.

  *

  When it came time for Ralph to move to a nursing home, only Two was left to guide him into the waiting taxi.

  Razza was long gone. He’d sat down and calculated, with a spreadsheet, the future growth of his corporate career, consequently jumping ship before the bursting of Ralph’s bubble, and taking up a new gig as an avatar, Bazza, for the mining magnate with the penchant for steamrollers.

  As for One, she had long since used the skills she had gained from the Ralph Method to escape across the ocean.

  At fifteen, she had practised her getaway by swimming Bass Strait. Ralph had hired a film crew to record the attempt. The waves on the day had been high and treacherous and it looked like One would have to give up.

  In a short window of calm across the water, Ralph had used a fishing rod to lower a bottle of liquid breakfast from the boat to his daughter. One trod water and drank from the bottle. She had been daubed in sunscreen and still had streaks of it on her cheeks and chin.

  ‘Drink it all,’ shouted Ralph.

  ‘Yes, Ralph,’ said One.

  When she was done with the breakfast, Ralph lowered a replacement pair of goggles.

  ‘Make sure you get the goggles on right,’ shouted Ralph.

  ‘Yes, Ralph,’ said One.

  ‘Just ninety-two kilometres to go,’ said a commentator who had come as part of the crew hire package. ‘Do you think you’ll make it?’

  ‘Do you think I’ll make it? One day I’m going to swim so far you can’t catch me,’ said One, and she looked dead straight into the camera.