by Tim Rogers
The struck batsman is now walking back and forth to the side of the pitch; his head’s flung back and he’s breathing deeply, willing the blood in his chest to resume normal circulation and soothe the stabbing pain. It’s rare that blood is ever drawn from being hit; bruises that bloom like heliotropes are more common, fading slowly to jaundiced reminders of defensive failings. There is a camera shot from behind the other batsman at the non-facing end of the pitch. There are two flies on the back of his shirt, stationary in defiance of the awkward movements of the young man, who’s quite obviously wondering whether or not to go to the aid of his fallen team-mate. Finally he does, but in no great hurry lest he show any fear. The flies cling to him still.
The kids in the crowd react on impulse only, twisting their arms in front of their bodies, their faces open-mouthed in concentration or grimly clenched in confusion. ‘I would have smacked that delivery away for four. Why didn’t he hook it away?’ Pot-bellied men stare vacantly but with a slight curl of a smile. Ladies in large hats with long inky-black hair remain untouched by the perspiration that shines all the other faces.
The next bowler is thin and wiry, his action exaggerated like he is preparing for a cartwheel. The ball is released from the apex of his torturously stretched body. Swinging slightly to the left – off swing – the batsman jabs at it and misses, and I follow the ball straight into the wicketkeeper’s glove. It’s as close to a sensual thrill as I’ve had all day. The suspended atmosphere in those brief flickers of time when the ball is released from the hand of the bowler following a mysterious trajectory either to be treated with malice or approbation has me spellbound. If a delivery gets past the batsman and rattles the stumps, I reckon I couldn’t stop myself from doing a lap of the lounge room in ecstasy. Christ, I’m becoming the ball.
I am in accord with the swing and bounce. Mouth slightly open, my tongue tut-tuts on my top palate as the bowler strides back to his mark, mapping out the next scene. ‘Left arm high. Dig in short. Aim for his ribs. I am the one to undo this guy. I have worked hard to be here. Turn, and let’s go.’
What theatre! What fantasy. It’s another five overs before I notice my heart rate. Like my thoughts, it’s back where I can hold it. Not sinking or gesticulating wildly in panic. The bird is back out the window where it belongs.
When the game ends, with South Africa winning comfortably, I grab an assortment of cricket films and documentaries to watch, together with my collection of baseball docos as backup. I can’t trust that this calm is going to continue through the long night. To the left of the television is the little red desk, the pink beta-blocker pills and some paper, unmarked and white, I don’t even remember what it was there for. But now I know the night is going to pass. I’ll write my way out of it. Songs, shopping lists, try a goddamn haiku. Something theatrical. All those terrifying sensations under my skin are now whispering encouragement. Joy only comes through sorrow, day follows night, there’s no greater smile than the one after you cry. Little affirmations. Let’s not go over the top. There are still some unwelcome acquaintances lurking around the streets, around the neighbourhood. I’ll let them go wandering for a while and I’ll turn off the porchlight. The pills go onto the shelf in the pantry that houses a cornucopia of tablets and tinctures. The pages get moved front and centre on the sloping red desk, designed for a kid but just tall enough that I can look out the window. I turn off the TV and I begin.
The Man at the Door
You don’t want your anger to define
Any possible good you’ve got inside
It’s given you a ride, a rough ol’ climb
Can’t tell when and it won’t say why
Don’t want your anger to define
Any possible good you’ve got inside
It’s given you cheekbones and you get along
But you just ain’t landed just where you planned
So you back it on up and start again.
He is the man at the door.
I am the man at the door.
Any relief I got from confessing this, though, was small – like suppurating a ripe pimple or applying calamine lotion to sunburn. And then I realised that what I’d meant to write was: I was the man at the door.
The mistake went unnoticed until the end of the flight.
The morning had not started well. A taxi from the heart of Madrid to the airport navigated by a driver whose movements and decisions were surely determined by methamphetamine was made all the more delirious because the hour was 6 am. If the driver was in the throes of a meth mania at this hour, what had the preceding hours seen? A dash through the labyrinthine streets of el Rastro at midnight with a speed-addled cab driver made sense, but it was 6 am and I was hurtling to Barajas airport, communicating in broken Spanish with a bug-eyed young man with a severely cropped skull and a grip on the wheel that made the veins on the tops of his hands bulge like bacon frying in a pan. It did not calm my already flapping nerves. A late-night phone call questioning the itinerary of my impending visit to New York had irritated old wounds. And that’s when he comes. ‘Psychic reflux’ was how I have described it once the storms of anger and hurt pass. A mad dog could have been more apt.
Here he comes.
Don’t pick up. Give it two hours. Don’t pick up the phone after a drink.
This was a rule I had made for myself. But I had spent the afternoon bar-hopping through the La Latina district and had walked and drunk myself into thinking that I was again charming and patient. For a couple of hours. An Australian couple dressed in matching Osborne bull T-shirts (ubiquitous, ominous and priapic figures) and cargo shorts with more pockets than a room full of billiard tables had insisted on regaling me with their impression of the ‘vibrant’ nature of ‘the Spanish’. It had tested my patience and yet I was sure as I excused myself after the second glass that they would turn to each other shaking their heads and say, ‘What a fuckin lovely fella.’
I was on a winner for sure. The next day of travelling to New York via Berlin would be tolerable, even enjoyable. I’d arrive buoyant and bright-eyed. And so picking up the phone to answer a call from the ex at 10 pm was sure to iron out any historical wrinkles between us. I answered the call with the festivity of the ‘gay best friend’ in every second romantic comedy. ‘Hellllooooo!’ The bonhomie was short-lived. One criticism on the choice of hotel in Manhattan and the conversation soon collapsed to a spiteful melange of accusations and furious liturgies recounting each other’s personal failings. He had arrived.
It was hard to resist destroying the furniture in the room. Her voice when critical dug such deep trenches in his mind that he could only fill them with disorder and chaos. Landfill.
After he’d screamed, ‘Jesus, fuck, you can’t kill a man twice!’ he hung up, but in a way that was farcical. Shutting down such a spiteful exchange with nothing but an aggressive stab of a thumb on a mobile phone is, and forever will look, fucking infantile. All the day’s activities and ‘charm’ were just a veil hiding what he really was: resentful, fuming and only a phone call away from exploding. All she’d done was suggest he’d made the wrong choice of accommodation. Bloody hell.
Through cool tears on a reddened face, three exasperated chortles escaped. Then I reached into my shoulder bag, the one that is a blend of leather and wool like an English country gentleman’s coat, and fished out a small bottle of Jameson’s that I’d reserved for the morning flight – if security allowed it through. If not, it was to be breakfast. As the drink soothed the anger, there was temptation to call back. What chance of a different outcome, though? Another call could be fatal. Instead, the voice in my head told me to concentrate on strangers. Imagine conversations. Take a notebook and scribble endless impressions. Cool yer heels. And besides: he didn’t want to fucking apologise.
I’m sorry. I was too immature, though not young. You were an attractive woman. There was so much I didn’t understand, but you asked me to kiss you in the classroom of a primary school, remember? That makeshift dress
ing room? I can still remember the posters in florid cursive. I mumbled the pronunciations to calm my nerves while the room cleared. Pommes. Framboise. Pamplemousse. A suburban Australian kid in the south of France, what chance did I have? I kissed you as an ugly boy. I kissed you because I represented a legion of us ugly boys who pretty girls wanted to kiss because we had no front, and you must have been tired of machismo and front.
I’m sorry. I’m nervous about the flights tomorrow. I’m sorry.
Trying to miminise panic from the manic taxi driver, I closed my eyes and tried to remember the previous night’s dream. Normally an early alarm and an hour or two of rest wouldn’t produce a sleep deep enough to conjure dreaming, but there was one. It involved Nick Cave. The two of us were pacing around an apartment in London that had the decor and light of Fagin’s lair in Oliver Twist. Feints of honey-coloured light fell on the faecal browns of the interior, not a symmetrical line in sight. The wood of the benchtops was gnarled and two threadbare wicker chairs had the reliability of a teenager’s facial hair. Nick needed a place to kip for a few hours before heading home to Brighton. I prepared tea but offered him a gin with the line: ‘Given my druthers, I’d throw the tea and stick to the juniper juice.’ Even in dreams I’m an aureate twat. Nick declined the drink but smiled generously and even laughed a little in his way, where sepulchral expression gives way to boyish glee, then curled up on a heap of straw swept into a corner and slept.
On waking to the alarm in my Madrid hotel room, in a caramelised haze I listened to ‘Jubilee Street’ four times as I showered and packed my dowdy fawn suitcase that was one resentful baggage handler away from losing all of its protective purpose. I thought again of that opening scene from the film 20,000 Days on Earth when the therapist asks Nick about his earliest memory of his father. The question had been rattling around in my head for the past week. Not about my earliest memories of my own father, but what my daughter’s would be of me? Waking in her cot and peering through the little wooden bars to see me lying on the floor next to her, asleep after a difficult night, or softly singing ‘Elvis Presley Blues’ as I cradled her and walked around the kitchen in circles. Or staring out a window crying silently as she ladled mashed banana into her rosebud lips, or shouting down a hallway while lunging for the front door. The dream wasn’t about my temporary Dickensian living situation or Nick; it was about parenthood.
My hyperactive cab driver had not fully stopped before his door was open and he was getting my suitcase from the boot and then speeding off, leaving me in his acrid gasoline spoor. A moth of anxiety had settled into a flight pattern, hovering in figure eights around my neck and ears. Uneasily I nudged through check-in. As the sweat began to form under my arms and spread through my pale shirt, I began to recite a mantra of boarding time, gate and destination in a rhythm I hoped would revive my spirits, but it began to beat louder and louder in my head until I feared I was reciting it at volume. And so it was given over to a clenched jaw doggerel: no detours to newsagent or pharmacy; breathe into your gut now please, Timothy. The phrase ‘in the grip of panic’ made perfect sense, as I felt like a small tube of toothpaste being squeezed by a very large, petulant child.
Timothy, just get on the plane.
The gentleman sitting on my left was young, very tall and blond, and had the posture of a sphinx reimagined by Albert Speer. And he was wearing very white, perfectly pressed shorts. I became transfixed at how hairless he was. Very tanned, very hairless. His legs were as smooth as two very large, very tanned test tubes. This was all noticed in peripheral vision as I was becoming paranoid about my own behaviour – excessive sweating and spasmodic hand movements in an air-conditioned aeroplane will do that.
Our legs were cocked geometrically pressed against the back of the seats in front of us. The angle wasn’t dramatic, though enough to give each other the ‘travellers shrug’. To try and distract the moths that were now flapping like seagulls, I began constructing questions I could ask in German, which I presumed he spoke, if he was the talkative type, which I presumed he wasn’t. In the way that anxiety attacks are often maniacal pranksters, I panicked and could only think of ‘Are your balls similarly hairless?’ And this I clumsily translated as ‘Sind Ihre Geschenk ähnlich haarlose?’
But in my gutter-level German, I was replacing balls (Hoden) with gifts (Geschenk). Do you shave your gifts? Are your gifts similarly hairless? I was so panicked that this would manifest itself in a Tourette’s-like questionnaire, I began rocking back and forth gently to urge the thoughts free.
I needed to calm the fuck down.
We were still climbing to cruising altitude and the drinks cart hadn’t yet made its way to the front of the aisle. Like an incantation, like a kōan, I began singing ‘Jubilee Street’, manipulating my lips but with no volume. This panic wasn’t to do with air travel or turbulence. I was willing my heart to stop, or explode. The excitement of seeing my daughter after six months was being wrestled and strangled by fear. But if I concentrated hard enough on ‘Jubilee Street’ and its tale of prostitution, Russians and blackmail, I could reach down to my shoulder bag and get paper and pen.
I’d only sort of met Nick Cave once. I was performing in a play that he and his musical partner Warren Ellis had done the music for. There’d been a day set aside for Warren and me to do some press and I took my daughter along as she was still at home back then. Warren is enormously good company, smart and drolly funny, and he was as generous as he’d always been the handful of times we’ve spoken over the past twenty or so years. On this occasion he was particularly kind to my daughter, so I was pleased to get a call from him the next day. He was at the Collingwood Children’s Farm with Nick and their families. He asked me if a song in the play still contained the line ‘wild English cunt’, then Nick piped up in the background to say that a Danish version of the play had cut the line. I assured them both it was definitely a feature of the song and of the play, and that the shock on the faces of the front rows when the line was spat out brought great joy, nightly. A brief, unusual exchange.
I watched my hand lean into the bag under strict instruction not to touch the long bald legs next to me, and pull out a notebook I had bought before leaving home. Embossed on the cover was a statement in bold print: ‘Facts Are the Enemy of the Truth.’ In my own hand was scribbled: ‘Really?’
I smiled for the first time that day. I recognised myself in that little rejoinder. The drinks tray had started its service, still a dozen rows away but moving. The flight attendant’s hips, three metres away and retreating towards us, appeared to sway in rhythm with the song in my head. I mentally thanked the clipped efficiency of the German airline service. Soon, if I could act with a modicum of calm, I would order a wine and be transported, existing as a liquid sample handed over to Western Europe then the Atlantic before taking my rightful place beside my girl. But first I needed to coax my nerves back under my skin, so I began to write.
The Things I Can No Longer Tolerate, Now My Daughter Is Turning Sixteen:
•
The television series Entourage. Once a mindless pleasure to switch off to after work: the fortunes of four oiks rooting themselves through Hollywood was restorative even if I’d regularly wince at their ugly misogyny and objectification. It will be forever intolerable from now on.
•
Any teenage boy with chutzpah.
•
Much of the lyrics of M. Jagger, J. Osterberg Jr, J. Morrison, S. Tyler and many others I have previously adored.
•
Photographer Terry Richardson, whom I’ve never liked, but now hate.
•
Those tiny shorts that young ladies wear as if they’re denim undies.
•
Urban Outfitters advertising.
The sweat on my hands left a dark crescent stain to the right of my growing litany. To redress the imbalance, I began again on the opposing page.
The Things That Remain Loved, Now My Daughter Is Turning Sixteen:
&nb
sp; •
Any teenager reading a book, printed on paper.
•
Boys and girls discussing video games or science fiction excitedly, gesturing and grabbing each other’s hands to emphasise a new idea.
•
Wes Anderson films.
•
Mathematics and the nerds that chew their pencils while solving geometry.
•
Nerds.
•
Libraries.
•
Netball.
The drinks trolley arrived and I was allowed two white wines. My bare-legged buddy was by this time either asleep or simply blanking out the sweaty scrivener beside him, and the small crack of a mini of wine – like switching off a house light – brought with it a promise of calm. I turned the page of the notebook and started again.
Hello my love,
Deadbeat Dad here at 35,000 feet over the north of Spain, heading towards Berlin, before I jump on the next big ol’ bird and get my arse to NYC. Why write to you now when I’m gonna see you in ten hours or so? Not entirely sure, but I can tell you, if you’re feeling upset, or sad, or nervous, writing stuff down sure can help. Similar to how I blag on to you about reading novels or short stories when yer down. It’s the only thing I know that works. And writing songs. And not looking at telephones. That shit’s always gonna make you feel worse.
It’s an Insta-bloody-gram world out there, baby, where everyone looks like they’re having a good time except you. And it ain’t true. Folks are desperate to put up photos of themselves having super fun on social media because their conscience knows those times don’t last. I dunno, baby. I can feel you’re having a tough time. I hope we can talk a lot, or as little as you like, when I’m there. Just as you’re learning stuff for the first time, I am too. If you gimme a little patience, I’ll try to be more patient too.