Detours

by Tim Rogers

  Well, it went up to three hundred and fifty from my guy and that’s why I ditched it.

  Well, good! Good on your little guy. Bloody hell. All that money, for what? A high for the night?

  That’s what I’d ask myself every morning.

  [A significant shift in tone] And tell me . . . have you spoken to your sister?

  No. Well, not for two weeks. We had a phone call about the arrangement with the kids and Christmas and all that. She mentioned something about goin’ up there but I got shows and, look honestly, this is about taking sides, isn’t it? There’s no other way to season it [Makes game-show buzzer sound] and, really, this whole time of year reminds me I’m a deadbeat dad and I’d rather wash dishes up at the Mission with the deros.

  Needless to say I didn’t get an invitation.

  Why don’t you invite yourself?

  It’s just too hard. I miss those kids so much. I wrote them cards but no response yet. I don’t want to disrespect the parents’ wishes but a cuddle would be good. But I can’t risk another fight . . . I’ve got to protect myself, you know?

  Bloody hell, Mum. Why have you got to have a strategy or a protective shield up? It immediately makes the situation loaded when you go in with a rigid mouth and try to act solemn and all. Just get drunk and call her!

  That’s sage advice! A little less drinking in the family would help us all. God, that last birthday was just awful. What a way for your partner to be welcomed to some of the family. Good God.

  The Hurricane can handle it, she’s used to that kinda carry-on. But strategies and therapies . . . I know they’re your thing, but they just don’t work.

  Well, then, we will have to . . . agree to disagree. How is your lovely lady?

  Livin’ it up like Lady Muck as usual. Yeah, she’s real good. Just workin’ a lotta shifts and lightly offending the occasional customer. Nah, real good, Ma. I’ll give her a kiss from you.

  I can still picture when I first met her, when I came down and you were away. Did she tell you? We sat on that little balcony of yours – that you’ve really got to do something about – and had a bottle of wine and the first thing she said after popping the cork was ‘We won’t talk about him tonight, okay? That’s for another time.’ I just thought it was really . . . lovely. [A kookaburra laughs but ends mournfully]

  Because you hate talking about me?

  Ha! No, it just meant . . . well . . . you were the elephant in the room, of course.

  Is that another big nose reference?

  Oh, cut it out. No, it was very . . . considerate of her.

  Righto, well, I’ll keep her then. Hey, sorry to talk business but are you gonna be going to the Tax Office Christmas Party this year – when you look at my statements on a projection screen and all laugh it up?

  Look, boy, I’m here to keep you out of jail! Your set-up was such a mess and we’re almost in the clear, so don’t you get all shirty at me, okay? Don’t shoot the messenger is what I say. They make the rules and I’m keeping you out of jail, so don’t shoot the messenger!

  And ‘Don’t Pay the Ferryman’?

  What?

  Don’t pay the ferryman. It was a reference to your missus’s foot-long Chris De Burgh collection. And speaking of which, when I do come up next we’ve gotta do an inventory of your Old Lezzo Couple CD and DVD collections, okay?

  I don’t get you, sorry.

  Well, The Golden Girls box sets and the Janis Ian collections. Doncha reckon it’s a little . . . scripted?

  Seeing as we’re the only gays in the village, we may as well fly the flag! Now tell me, how’s your darling little girl? I need to know before we finish up.

  She’s tryin’, Ma. Real hard. We speak a little these days, she’s a sweetheart. I think she’s in love and I wanna be . . . respectful of that, y’know? She needs to do better at school but . . . she’s kinda dreamy and a romantic, I think.

  Oh, little sweetheart. I wonder where she got that from. You tell her that her grandma sends all her love, okay? I’ll send her some money for Christmas.

  Orright. Okay, look, I’m gonna go buy an organic bullshit tomato and smash the hell out of it on a piece of ancient grain toast and charge myself twenty bucks. Love you, Ma. Sorry for asking you to take yer teeth out at those parties forty years ago.

  And it was more than once, too. Horrible child. Take care, darling.

  Take care? Why?

  Ooh, yer awful. Stay away from the rivers, boy.

  The Dread of the Boards

  You’ve suggested I have daemons

  But I just can’t agree

  They’re just some pushy friends

  They’re on my couch, they’re on my knee

  Compel me to go wandering, implore me to go forth

  Eventually South but first it’s North

  These things must take their course

  If I don’t let ’em in, some other fool will

  If I don’t let ’em in, maybe they won’t come back again.

  My position onstage was off-prompt side, sitting, after a languid entry only minutes after the lights had dimmed. I wore my preferred off-white seersucker suit, and my hair was oiled and combed as a quiet nod to the doyens of the stage whose footsteps I needed to imagine I was now following. At least I was dressed for the part. ‘Dress of it, don’t make a mess of it,’ I said to myself ritualistically in the accent of a luvvie as I smoothed the lapels of my jacket.

  The job was tailored to fit. A play woven around songs I had written a decade and a half before, with a script written for two actors neither of whom I would be. My task was to perform the songs with two other musicians, giving the actors an enigmatic smile or two, acknowledging neither the audience nor my own contribution to the narrative. The theatre was intimate, yet still seated three hundred and fifty.

  I had rehearsed well and been ‘present’ during development, so I held no great fears for the show other than reading a bad review while still hungover: that dreaded tug in your gut from the daemon deep within, the subsequent rage that melts away to a distrust of your own intentions and talent until it pools on the bed sheets, the juice wrung from a ripe ego. No, that familiar feeling might or might not come, but I had already had a solid six weeks of work with a company I enjoyed being part of, and with actors and musicians I respected.

  The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd. Give me all of it.

  Then two weeks into the season, on approaching the stage wings from my dressing room, I experienced a fluttering nervousness. An almost auditory sensation, like a moth’s wings near my ear. As I had promised myself to stay dry before performances I couldn’t reach for a bracer, but instead drew a little vial of Rescue Remedy from my pocket, a tincture designed, I believe, for such occasions. I’ve used it before for flying. After a hasty, delicate swig I stepped onto the stage, prepared to spend ninety percent of the next two hours sitting on my bum and soaking up the actors’ performances, the melancholy, the mirth, the romance and the rhyme.

  Ten minutes in, Johnny, our handsome leading man, gestured to me in a scripted move of complicity and my stomach sank. My jaw maybe fell open and I was gripped by an old, familiar foe.

  For twenty-eight years, anxiety – and its attendant nervousness and stage fright – has been my most consistent, irregular companion. It’s never too far away but I’m unsure when it will come knocking. I haven’t yet been able to explain why. Maintaining a modicum of physical health and laying off drugs helps shoo it away most days, but it’s in the neighbourhood, always.

  Twelve minutes into the night’s show, the homeopathic remedy quite litigiously not doing any rescuing or remedying, I was slipping off an edge. My heart thumping erratically, sweat irrigating my skin which had already been stretched far too taut; an audience whose breath was surging onto my legs then sucking itself back to the soundboard like the meanest of tides.

  As my muscle memory guided my accursed hands through the opening instrumental, I tried to communicate, silently, with our vi
olinist – ‘I have to go’ – while at the same time manufacturing a facial gesture of ‘Do you have a bottle of whiskey somewhere onstage? I can’t do this alone.’ I could sense the audience was congealing into a throbbing, amorphous blob, poised to thrust itself at me violently, eager to suffocate and devour. I could only find relief from my dread in stripping to the skin and confronting the beast, like some naked ancient hero, albeit one bereft of muscle tone and valour.

  I’m well aware that these hyperbolic explanations sound very much like an acid trip. But I was seeing none of this; I wasn’t hallucinating. Why I was certain it was all about to happen just as sure as I knew I had to tune my guitar very quietly between the entrance of our lead actress Sophie and her descent from the staircase, was a mystery folded into the maelstrom of panic I was experiencing. Fucking ‘Rescue’ Remedy, it was as useful as throwing a Paddle Pop at someone hurtling through rapids on a capsized raft.

  My GP is named David, and though he has urged me to use his first name always, when he enters the waiting room I call him ‘Doctor’, whether the waiting room is populated or not. Once we’re in his office we can slide back to familiarity but I want to show my respect for his profession and its demands, especially as he is effusive in complimenting me for my ‘profession’ and its ‘demands’. This comparison is just so, so unbalanced that I want to make every visit somehow entertaining for him, to square our ledger somewhat. He is ten or so years older than me – if our swapped stories of higher education are pasted beside each other – and over the past decade has transformed his rather astringent gaze to something gentler. He is a man of medicine and healing sitting opposite a man-child given to music and irresponsibility – all of this is made plainer when we peruse my medical history of mild depressions and skin deteriorations. Slight of build, he only revealed his own struggle with a particularly virulent cancer after my request for an ointment for a rosacea outbreak that was without doubt attributable to booze.

  During this visit we spend ten minutes talking about my theatre project and his continuing remission and his plans to get back out there again into the social and romantic spheres after many years given over to his recuperation. I’m here to talk to him about a return to medication. With another three weeks of the season, I’m desperate to hide under a heavy blanket of whatever benzodiazepine is the flavour du jour. Lorazepam, Diazepam, even Valium, whatever is available. He gives me his opinion, which is that my desperation for doping up my senses is only going to cause further anxiety, but he can see I’m scared. And desperate. He’s a wise, kind man. The appointment terminates with a prescription, plans to meet for drinks, and my resolution to re-examine what the fuck I’m doing playing music as an occupation.

  ‘Take care!’ David says with a beatific smile. Respecting him too much to give my usual reply of ‘Why?’ I instead offer, ‘I shall try.’

  The little pink pills are beta-blockers called Inderal. David has told me they are often used by classical musicians before auditions, shaving off the unnecessary nerves but not dulling concentration. They sound perfect, though at this stage he could have prescribed horse tranquillisers and ethanol and I would have kissed every one of his four cheeks.

  The following three weeks of shows are not easy ones; each night feels like a performance on an ice rink, perched upon a very tall hill, sans appropriate footwear. I keep a little hip flask in my right pocket and pat it reassuringly three times as I stride onstage, but only take a swig at the final moments of the show, if at all. Just the knowledge it is there is enough most nights. The season finishes, I’m remorseful that it is a relief rather than a celebration, and I make a decision to stop taking my little beta-blockers the night after closing. Which I’ve been warned against, but fuck it.

  The attack hits me at dusk – that time of the day that most reminds me of childhood. Mornings and daylight I can only see a kid walking nowhere in particular throwing a ball to himself, against a wall, up in the air off an imaginary hitter. But dusk was when the fear always rolled in like a fog. Caught between light and dark, in purgatory.

  I wade through the soupy air of my apartment in slow motion, trying to drag my palpitating heart rate down. It’s like trying to throw a sheet over a bird as it panics in unfamiliar interiors. For lunch, I’ve demolished most of a roast chicken I’d bought myself as a little gift for getting through the month. Its carcass lies on a large white baking dish while the meat lies in my stomach. I’m feeling queasy not sated. The little clear plastic tube of pills sits on the red school desk in front of a window. Within arm’s reach. But to swallow one now is too late, a band-aid on a shark bite. With a large whiskey and desperate for a distraction, I turn the television on without much hope. It’s Seinfeld, and according to the guide it’s a marathon, episode after episode. The music is actually worse than I remember. I always hated it but it’s mocking now. Suiting the action. The show’s nastiness and pettiness rankles me. Depresses me. It’s not a show about ‘nothing’ any more. It’s about absence. Emptiness that’s filled with one-upmanship and parsimony. A smug adolescent existence. And I start to think it must have enabled the bullshit insouciance in folks I speak to at gigs sometimes. So desperate not to show enthusiasm for anything lest they be shown a fool. Gimme a fool any day, those honest, open-hearted idiots. Today. And please bring a knockout drink.

  A phrase buzzes in my thoughts: A profound depression. There are lessons to be learned from profundity. But from this plunging weight, nothing can be learned. It’s plunging into nothingness. Grasping frantically at the walls of a deep black hole and all that occurs is your mouth fills up with sod. The harder you try to pull yourself out, the more alluvium. If I could just stop trying. Stop. Get my thoughts back above ground level. Concentrate on these characters with their communication so prickly and reactive. I once liked this show very much but I’m struggling to remember why. Now it pokes and pinches around cold trivialities when all I want is a firm embrace. Like a straitjacket. Or someone to strangle my throat until every sentient breath is expelled.

  I stab at the buttons on the remote control with the petulance of someone who’s been stood up on a date, then angrily excavate the least offensive ingredients of a bowl of Indian spiced bar mix. Peanut. Yeah, alright, a sultana. Another peanut. What are these little friggin’ sticks?

  There is a cricket game on another channel. My eyes have a little trouble focusing. The whites of the uniforms are daubed with colours that at first appear indiscriminate. Little Joan Miró shapes on bone-white canvases. Advertiser slogans. The unrecognisable outfits give my heart a start. It’s a game that is as familiar to me as my reflection, but it looks foreign and unfamiliar. Sri Lanka and South Africa? I concentrate on the predominantly white uniforms. I have to give myself over, stop grasping and lunging, to lose my resistance. ‘I can sink now,’ I tell myself. ‘I’m not onstage, no-one’s watching. There’s no script. Give yourself over.’

  Before I started playing at a level where I had the traditional ‘whites’ to sleep in – the Under-12s – I would lie under the bedcovers in the pose of a bowler about to deliver. Right arm bent at the elbow and cocked behind my head, which was facing to the left. Left arm similarly cocked but in front of my eyes – the guiding upper limb of a bow, ready to release the deadly arrow. My body twisted as the right knee was brought up to prepare its thud into the back crease, providing a temporary, rock-solid support to the expressive release above it. I’d commentate my own bowling. A somniloquy to keep my frozen action as taut as possible, in case my dad would come in to check we were sleeping and notice my dedication to perfecting the art of fast bowling.

  The TV commentary has rhythm. Da-de-da, da-de-da. ‘Right arm over.’ ‘Prods to cover.’ ‘Dives to his right.’ ‘What a shot!’ This is language I understand. Language that my muscles react to, tensing up then relaxing. I remember reading an interview with tennis player Boris Becker at the height of his career, where he talked of the difficulty he had with fame, and the thousands of people who would che
er him on. It troubled him as he felt undeserving. Beleagured by imposter syndrome. He said a therapist told him, ‘Boris, they aren’t cheering for you exactly, they want to be you, to be in your place.’ It was an appraisal that brought him some relief.

  Watching the crowd on the TV – a mix of beaming, excitable kids and immovable, concentrating adults (as opposed to the immovably bored) – I can feel their bodies strain as they unwittingly experience the batsman’s churning waves of fear and expectation. Willing him on, their fists clamping and unclamping to push blood to steady nerves. And a clutch of others, whispering incantations for his demise.

  The bowler runs in. Head as steady as the bubble on a spirit level. The rampaging bustle of his body, a bull to the mocking red sheet, is a fury of hydraulics as his eyes zero in on the stumps, but I imagine (or notice?) his eyes quickly dart to the body of the batsman. The real target. The thud of a cricket ball on flesh is as onomatopoeic as the cartoonish captions in fight scenes on the original Batman TV series.

  ‘THUCK!’

  Crowd and commentators react with fabricated concern to hide a fetishistic thrill. The middle of the batsman’s body buckles. It is like a cherry being dropped into buttermilk. The rest of his body explodes in reaction, but at the point of impact, where the televisual attention is obsessively drawn, there is forensic calm. The commentator, in that wonderfully mellifluous sub-continental way, exhales. ‘Ohh, that has got to hurt!’ He sounds like a concerned physician when really he was a fast bowler for Pakistan. He played a hundred games with cool malevolence before his left shoulder was reduced to bone-on-bone from being called on to bowl long spells on dull pitches. A mortar and pestle grinding away. His words deepen in tone. Once a mortal enemy of batsmen, since retiring he regards all young players with an avuncular comradeship.