Detours

by Tim Rogers

  Helen Garner writes of the ‘forlornness’ at the sensation of invisibility as being a passing phase, that you can ‘pass through loneliness and out into the balmy freedom from the heavy labour of self-presentation’. This is cruelly met with condescension from most people, seeing an older woman as bereft of opinion and ‘standards of behaviour’, but as our senses are daily assaulted if we allow ourselves even to dip a toe into the mucky pool of media, what a relief it would be to ask someone who takes time with their response, and who has really been out there, looking and listening.

  What do you think?

  Port Hedland

  You didn’t pay yer goddamn cash to hear us

  Yer girlfriend don’t wanna come near us

  Six warm beers and a room to clear

  We came somewhere left of venus

  In my dreams about travel, the one perennial presence is Sir Ian McKellen. His voice, which in work mode is like treacle being poured over a bowl of stones, is, in these episodes, released from its rich baritone into a less foreboding tenor and his behaviour is frivolous and gently mocking, like an ageing Puck shouting with gaiety as he skips into the enchanted forest: ‘Why so tense and glum, dear boy? This shit is supposed to be FUN!’

  And because he’s Sir Ian and I’m whoever the hell I’m pretending to be, I leap with him and his swarthy, laughing cohorts into the midst of whichever bacchanalian encounter he’s lined up for us, but always a few steps behind, joining in on the laughter but only from my throat not my belly. His hunky shirtless companions dance wildly to a Scissor Sisters tune, then disappear in a flash behind a rainbow of multi-coloured cocktails.

  The dreams also have a desultory aspect – either all the seating on the winged unicorn is taken, or I fall deliriously off the edge of a cliff made of marshmallow as Sir Ian shouts: ‘You only live once, dear boy! Remember the adage!’ He knows I’m an ungrateful tourist, with a litany of superstitions and habits and fears that bubble in my blood. I hope he doesn’t tell The Hurricane.

  The rattle of the cart being pushed by the room cleaners is a soft alarm. Checka-checka-checka-checka-checka. It’s like a kid gently saying ‘Dad . . . Dad . . . Dad . . . Dad’ on a Saturday morning when you’re late to take them to netball practice. Checka-checka-checka-check. Silence. A snatch of conversation between the ladies (so rarely men – why?), then the procession again. As if it’s recorded onto a seven-inch single and it needs to be turned over before the next dance.

  Big city hotels with their carpeted floors don’t give you this morning routine; their morning cleaning drill is executed with the stealth and silence of a covert military mission.

  Today, the trolleys are being pushed over a paved area, I presume by the rhythm of bricks and mortar, well maintained. The soft drawl between the ladies is not entirely displeasing, but I’m dreading the knock on the door like it’s a colonoscopy. Not so much that I don’t want to be disturbed, I just have nothing particularly funny to say. I used to clean out dressing rooms and theatres at university in Canberra twenty-eight years ago; I still feel these ladies are my brethren.

  Despite all our hackneyed tropes as a band, the one we can’t abide by is the whole ‘trashing the hotel room’ malarkey. Giving these women extra grubby work to do because you’ve mistakenly thought you were ‘stickin’ it to the man’ is plain stinking bullshit. Russell Hopkinson was the first person I met who left tips for the cleaning staff if there was stuff spilt or cigarette butts lying around, and I found his attention to detail endearing in some old-world-charm way. Blinking through the curtains at early morning after a night’s hootenanny is deliciously indulgent, but creating an extra hour of work for a cleaner doesn’t cover you in rock’n’roll glory – it just makes you an arsehole.

  Many years back we were staying at a hotel way outta Kansas City, midway through a US tour that involved a hell of a lotta sitting and staring out the tour bus window. Passing through the guts of America could be thrilling and wildly poetic, with its crooked and severe landscapes, or grindingly dull, as the crawl through outer suburbs to clubs in the cities rendered each afternoon monochromatic. The thing was that nothing was passing through my guts that tour – the road food and our sedentary lifestyle had banished my digestive tract to a growing list of dormant bodily functions (along with systematic thought patterns and smiling).

  I’d never bought an enema kit before, but thankfully American pharmacies are expansive and pedantic. My kit could have almost been custom-made for me, such was the wide range in personal excavation devices – generally available in discreet packaging. The young shop attendant’s distasteful expression as I made my way through her check-out was unnecessary, I thought, but perhaps I was just over-smiling in my tourist way and she found my over-eagerness purchasing an enema kit deeply odd. I wondered if I should have chucked in a carton of prophylactics, just for my kicks and her added disgust.

  I had some interviews to do by phone for the Australian press, as we had an LP that had just gone to number one, but back in the hotel with the first interview underway my discomfort was such that the procedure couldn’t be delayed a minute longer. As I squeezed the bottle to force the warm liquid up my chute, the journalist asked me how I planned to celebrate the chart success. I answered churlishly, ‘Oh, just some “Boy’s Own” shenanigans,’ the slightly queasy tickle up my tract giving my words an extra musicality.

  Andy, Russell and Greg were hunched over a video game while I hoped for a successful evacuation. But I was new to the experience and my timing was all shot.

  After a night of drinking, confined to our one room as the surrounds of the hotel were less than enticing, I woke before the sun had risen to see the shadowy forms of my bandmates and to feel a wet sensation beneath my entire lower half. And something stank. Real bad.

  Disposing of the manchester wasn’t enough to fulfil our edict of leaving hotel rooms more or less intact. Irreparable damage had been inflicted on the mattress, and I engaged in a silent yet frantic pre-dawn investigation, that could have been funny if it hadn’t been so difficult, to find somewhere to dump a soiled mattress and linen from a hotel I hadn’t even mapped out yet. On the outskirts of Kansas City.

  But dispose of it I did, placing the mattress beside a large industrial bin in the car park. I hadn’t run into anybody on the way out, but on my way back through the hotel’s back door, I encountered a lady in a light-blue uniform, with raven black hair pinned neatly back in a bun, wearing the unenthusiastic expression of someone starting a long shift before her first coffee. I held the door open for her, barely aware of my hurriedly assembled outfit of Sturt football shorts and a ‘Joe Walsh for President’ T-shirt. I ducked my head and, with due humility, softly whispered, ‘Lo siento, Señora. Muchísimo.’

  It’s Saturday in Port Hedland. And although the bed is clean, I’m creaking a little after last night’s show, and thinking of the thousands of mornings, all so deeply similar, over almost three decades. The time alone before the rest of the room or most of the hotel has woken up is precious. While it can often be a time of dread – another hangover, another flight – it can also be the last little snatch of solitary time on tour when you don’t have to negotiate for stag time while still being one o’ the gang, when you will have to bury your head in a book or clamp on headphones for a little restorative time before hooking back up with the mob.

  ‘Going on tour’ can sound like a clarion call heralding weeks of misbehaviour. It can also be whispered like a friend telling you he knows where there’s a good place to hide away to avoid copping a beating. It’s both for me. If last night was a good show, I’m back at the teenage slumber party. A bad show and I’m in the lock-up.

  Spending consecutive days in one town is rare on tour, but Davey and I have an acoustic show booked at a sailing club tonight; it’ll be our second night in town. For a while I think of what I can do to send my other bandmates off with a laugh before they tumble into the van and head off to the airport – some nudity or another visual atrocit
y. But before I’m even conscious of the motion I’m already outside, offering a desperately hearty good morning to the cleaning ladies that is met with slim but welcome smiles, then through the car park that served as the pitch to a hastily constructed game of cricket last night (before threats of police intervention from hotel management), then onto a sliver of paved track that runs for miles, parallel with the ocean.

  Within a hundred metres of taking off, I can tell I’ve made the right choice. The Indian Ocean to my left is so vast and silent that if I stare at it too long I fear it will hypnotise me into catatonia and the Dreamtime legend of the huge blind water snake that patrolled these waters might be conjured up. Any ripple in the surface causes a little tickle in my ribs. He moves slowly, circuitously, with a heartbeat that gives a tense energy to the whole harbour. To the right of me is the ubiquitous red earth, surrounding proud, elegant, old wooden houses – it is as if I were looking across the top of a pot of simmering curry. The lunar eeriness of the vision is broken up by brilliantly psychedelic splashes of bougainvillea in the yards of a few houses, sketched into the scene by Doctor Seuss.

  I’ve been invited out on a trek today with an old friend to explore the Pilbara, but once again I’ve left my phone in the room and in any case will plead a heavy writing session as an excuse for my lack of communication. If I put in the same amount of energy to be with people as I do in avoiding contact with them, I would be a wonderful friend.

  Out on the ocean are huge ships, probably laden with ore or salt, their distance from shore making them appear like snoozing uncles in the park after an afternoon barbecue. Careful not to rouse any giant blind sea snakes, I take a little time to converse with them; it’s a little like telling secrets to a sleeping person while hoping for atonement. I give my apologies for not being a better friend and for not being a better tourist. I say I’ll work on replying to messages asking if I want to go for a drink or have a bite, and I’ll make the effort to explore regions of the country, like the Pilbara, that offer thousands of years of history and culture. The boats appear to nod in gentle recognition and acceptance, like priests to my penitent confessions.

  I give thanks for my daughter’s continuing health and wisdom, then recount the ridiculous litany of work engagements for the past year: from giving sex advice on a panel to performances of Roald Dahl stories, grimly trying to write fictions and gigs with a dozen different combinations, all attempted with gusto, but often failing in execution.

  Is it the West that brings this out in me? I remember having a similar penitence and thanksgiving session staring down at the adumbral landscape of Kalgoorlie as I approached it by plane at night a year ago.

  The ships look either ecclesiastical or villainous, although at times it’s hard to distinguish between the two. The casual visitor can never be guaranteed the virtues of his invigilator. I keep walking onward, a little unnerved by my cogitative mood on this sun-slashed day.

  Later tonight, in between sound check and show, I will repeat the walk, to encourage myself to be buoyant and kind – even if the audience will be talking all the way through the songs until we hit the discernible lines from ‘Heavy Heart’. The ships will remain where they were this morning, watching me, and perhaps a giant blind sea snake will be watching them. A shooting star will flash across the sky and as it disappears from view I might feel a small loss. With the bougainvillea still brilliant even in the dark of night, and the water still pulsing with the occasional sash of silver, I’ll smile at the thought that the star is actually Sir Ian McKellen and his league of sprites, on their way to another celestial cocktail party: ‘You’ve got to live, dear boy! This shit’s supposed to be FUN!’

  The Dripping Tap

  Your dinosaurs I’ll keep ’em in my top drawer

  You and I know what they’re there for

  Cold old Sunday nights

  When no-one understands all your ramblings

  The Triceratops she understands things

  Most humans can’t abide.

  It is the kind of morning where the sound of a dripping showerhead doesn’t sound like water on porcelain any more, but the sound of failure itself. Despite the best efforts of Blossom Dearie, and her soft pleas to a love unrequited, coming from the record player perched on stacks of half-read magazines just to the right of his mattress, the metallic thrum of the neglected shower repair job cuts through and refuses to be ignored.

  Already he has replayed his favourite warm memories to will at least another half-hour of unconsciousness, but he is trying too hard – and anyway the snapshots of the times when he still had his daughter in the bedroom next door, and could steal a few hours watching her sleep before coaxing her into her pre-school rituals, were becoming so faded he has begun to think such history may not even be his own after all.

  At least the night before he had the foresight to assemble the large Semi-circle of Soft Landings around his pillow. The Brocade of Benevolence. This little tradition involves choosing four or five magazine articles, photos or handwritten quotes to act as a salve for his remorse for the previous night’s drinking.

  It is a Monday, and even though weekends make little difference to him from any other two days of the week, they still gave him a wider sense of freedom; he feels the sense of relief at the end of the working week that others enjoy. On the flipside, the sense of re-incarceration that Monday morning brings to others also falls heavily on him too, and the sounds of his apartment block waking resentfully and throwing together the working week’s necessities rings above and below like tin cups raked along prison bars.

  Well, hooray-fuck then for the collection thoughtfully placed around his still-prone body, positioned like a giant’s smile as wide as his outstretched arms. In a way these items are postcards sent to and from himself: from a distant location where his head was full of ideas for trips to the country, or language courses that he would dive into, or romances he would pursue. Little tender mercies. Sent from far away, the night before, after a skinful. As if a lover who left early complimented him on his technique, or that ‘we’ll try it another night’, the promise sealed with a kiss. A lousy glass of water and Panadol would be like wrapping a tourniquet below a decollated throat.

  To his immediate left is a photo cut from a book about the Heide art gallery, showing John and Sunday Reed, Sidney Nolan and Joy Hester posing in sand dunes. This period of Australian art history has begun to intrigue him (although he has as yet no great love for the visual arts), and he remembers choosing the photo as a nod of encouragement to pursue a life somewhere near the fringes, if not the edges, of art and love. But why the hell did he include a photo that shows a man (Sidney) holding a baby (Sweeney, son of Joy and Albert Tucker)? Maybe he just loved the way the haunted, delicate face of Joy Hester fixed her gaze unsmilingly at the photographer as she tugged on a cigarette.

  He throws the image aside just as the crying begins from the newborn in the apartment below. Soft mewlings rather than anguish, but still at a pitch that finds its way in between the drip and Blossom, existing for one bar as a counter melody, then creating dissonant chords the next. Had his own daughter cried much as a baby? His prevailing memory is that she barely did at all, that she was even contemplative back then. The way she would slingshot her mush across the kitchen from her high chair seemed exploratory rather than a crude infant protest.

  The next memento, by his left hip, is a recipe for roast chicken, crudely ripped from a newspaper supplement. It involves inserting a half-empty can of beer up the chook’s cavity as a support and then standing it in a barbecue. The recipe surely tickled some hours ago; the prospect of seeing an uncooked chicken leaning forlornly like an old drunk against a wall as heat ravages its posture, a beer can up its arse for support, seems pathetically poetic.

  He doesn’t really cook any more, although he is prone to frying three eggs in a pan and dousing them with Tabasco sauce on mornings when he knows some restorative nutrition is needed. (Hot sauce excoriates the phlegmy residue in hi
s throat, doubling as a mild punishment.)

  His daughter had tolerated, at times even enthusiastically enjoyed, some of his past cooking attempts – a tuna pasta recipe, in particular, that almost hid the presence of garlic and onion – but the strongest memory this morning is of the time he made empanadas to take to one of the only two times they went to a football game together. The night before the match he made the dough and filling, accompanied by a Django Reinhardt box set and two six packs. It took over three hours. So proud was he of their preparation – their courageous resistance to breakages during his first attempt at deep frying, and their eventual resemblance to the pictures in the book – that the next day at the game he couldn’t wait until half-time to share them with her. On finding their seats twenty minutes before the opening bounce, he took them out of his shoulder bag, wrapped lovingly in tinfoil like they were precious geological finds. Her wonder at his prowess didn’t match his own, of course, and after the first bite the empanada stayed in her hand for several minutes. Scoffing down his own, quietly dismayed that the pastry was as thick and dull as a work boot, he asked if hers was in any way okay. Her kind response was as sweet as a macaroon but just as unconvincing. Why the hell would any parent think their kid would want homemade deep-fried rubbery treats when the entire stadium was redolent with the smells of craftily manufactured mass-produced deep-fried products pulsing with the promise of immediate satisfaction? She had her game face on, but he remembers her grateful glow when he gently relieved her of the half-eaten savoury semi-circle and suggested they dash up the forty steps to the first tier for a chocolate milk and some hot chips with tomato sauce.