Thought Crimes

by Tim Richards

  The Gingerbread Housing Initiative ‘

  ‘Maybe I should make another appointment. This stuff is too good. It’s cocaine, heroin and Viagra in one punch. I’m floaty and priapic, and I’ve never written so much.’

  ‘You sound happier.’

  ‘Not sure. I’m taking stats to evaluate that.’

  ‘There’s no need to fear bad stuff when you’re only experiencing good things.’

  ‘Doctor Long … Emma … What you just said sounds like the turning point in every German folk tale.’

  Anxieties of Influence

  You’ve read the instruction leaflet fifty times. It mentions the compulsions, the horniness, and the inability to draw breath between sentences. In bold letters, it warns against combining Mellovex with alcohol – as if liquor could make you feel better than this Swiss pharmaceutical dynamite – but nowhere on that leaflet, above the text or below, does its author allude to the possibility of delusional thinking.

  So when the spectacularly well-curved Liz Barclay leans against the balcony, looks into your eyes, and reacts as if your every word was scripted by the Bard himself, it’s feasible that it really is happening the way you see it.

  ‘I met that big friend of yours the other day.’

  ‘Collie?’

  ‘He said you write for television.’

  ‘Used to. I’m reinventing myself as a novelist.’

  ‘You wrote All Björk and No Play …’

  ‘I was on the writing staff.’

  ‘Wow,’ she says, in a tone reserved for Tarzan hot off the vine.

  ‘That’s incredible.’

  When a woman like Liz sets her eyes on you in that way, it’s no use saying that you hope those TV years won’t be seen as the high point of your professional life. She doesn’t want to hear it.

  ‘You should come in and hear Sian sing.’

  You tell her you’ve heard Sian sing, and that her daughter has a pretty voice, though that’s only partly true. When Sian goes through her scales you put the headphones on, and you haven’t heard her sing anything that could be called a song.

  ‘She has an amazing voice. But she needs to be on television. That’s the only way singers get the attention of record producers.’

  ‘I don’t know anyone that does variety.’

  ‘You must know heaps of people … Your friend said you wrote with Doug Stebbings.’

  ‘Occasionally. We weren’t close. Doug’s a hard man to get close to.’

  ‘Singers would do anything to get on his show.’

  You want to tell her no way, you hate Doug, the man goosed you every way but south. He could’ve offered you a gig on his show if he had the wit to know real comedy from the shit he gets away with. Nothing, but nothing, will persuade you to ask Doug for a favour. This is what you intend to say, but Liz’s lips are bulging, and her eyes are licking you from head to toe, and you remember Sian’s giggle, and in those circumstances – those exact circumstances – you know that you have no right to deny the world access to Sian’s giggle. Besides, what are the odds on someone having exactly the same number of lashes on her left eye as on her right, the way Liz does?

  ‘It would mean so much to us. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to see Sian get the break she deserves.’

  Blame Is the Name of the Game

  People don’t want to hear the father-shit you cart around, but they’re going to hear it anyway because you’re at the zeitgeist’s command.

  Dad was no poor woodcutter. As a big-time lawyer, he prosecuted famous criminals. Dad was a hard-hearted optimist – the world was going to get better, but to do that, it needed to become more efficient. Since the life we knew attracted too many of ‘the wrong sort of people’, it would have to be replaced with something more exclusive. This meant culling the unfit, and Dad’s notion of fitness focused on those unfit to make money.

  Mum never contradicted him. He was the oracle so far as she and your sister Barb were concerned. If Dad told them he was draining the family fortune to establish the Tyrants With Gout Party, they would have been first to sign up. A day never went by when you weren’t told how physically and mentally superior you were, and it’s easy to believe that shit when you want to believe it, especially when the world’s most confident man tells you to with a smile that would sway a cynical jury.

  Fleas seldom cut down big, sonnet-quoting bastards, but a flea got in Dad’s ear. When a friend of Mum’s told him she’d seen a man who looked exactly like him riding the number 8 tram down Toorak Road the previous day, a band snapped. Dad gave up everything to look for that man, as if he’d always known he had an identical twin, and that there was a warmer, more inclusive Dad who had to be slain if his dreams weren’t to be thwarted.

  So the man who’d always disparaged ‘the losers who ride trams’ became the most touched of all those losers, and though Mum immediately saw reality, and treated him with compassion whenever he ambled home, the transformation totally arseholed your sister Barb, who began fucking junkies like there was a bounty payable to junkie-fuckers. You and Barb were reasonably close, but she’d take no counsel. It was like watching someone be eaten alive from the inside.

  All of us have experiences that we assume to be unique, but starting out in television, you found yourself part of a team of writers where no fewer than six had scagged-up sisters, while four had dads who might have been the doppelganger your old man was seeking on the number 8 tram.

  On her twenty-first birthday, Sally Quinn’s dad confessed that he’d met her mum when she ‘acted’ in the pornographic film he was directing for her maternal grandparents. So it was Sally who mentioned Doctor Long when told that you were looking for a shrink who put pharmacy before prattle. Chemical optimism couldn’t be worse than the quasi-optimistic crap Dad inflicted on you when he was still someone to be reckoned with.

  The Way of the World

  ‘Are you on something?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘You’re talking so fast, and you’ve just told me it was good to hear my voice three times in a minute.’

  There’s history here. You told Sally you’d stay in touch, and you haven’t. This largely because she took a job with that filthy shit Doug Stebbings – the moral equivalent of distributing How to Vote cards for Howard. Worse, the reason you liked Sal in the first place was her ability to cut through to the truth. So it’s with some unease that you tell her you’ve met this girl with a sensational voice and terrific looks who will be a real winner given the chance. Doug’s people could do worse than call her in for an audition.

  ‘I’m just a writer. Call the talent co-ordinator.’

  ‘They’d listen if it came from you.’

  ‘You must want to fuck this girl badly.’

  ‘Jesus, Sal.’

  ‘Richard, television’s fucked because it’s full of people who got here the way you’d like this girl Sian to get here.’

  Speaking the truth doesn’t give you the right to be offensive, so it’s at this point you tell Sal she only got that job because Doug likes the way she fills a sweater. It’s not as if you don’t already know what burnt bridges smell like. It was a small fucking favour to ask.

  Reflection

  Having spent your life thinking about Hansel and Gretel, you know that you’re meant to see Gretel’s heroism as an expression of her sublimated desire to vanquish her stepmother and win back her father, but you tend to fixate on the practicalities of constructing a gingerbread house in a forest.

  You figure that the H-G story is about loyalty and the forces that subvert loyalty, and about the various ways you can be led astray when you’ve gone hungry for a long time. If sister Barb had looked out for you the way Gretel looks out for Hansel, things wouldn’t have deteriorated to a point where Swiss chemistry was required. And there’s one other thing to be said about this fucked-up third-rate era. Once upon a time there was just the odd witch or wolf to side-step, now whole industries are devoted to separating the conf
used and helpless from the flock.

  Worry Merchants

  The machine’s never been so fascinating. You’ve always liked counting the red flashes more than answering and erasing messages, but now the red has a special lustre and the recorded voices are displaced, like speeches removed from an excavated time-capsule.

  ‘Richard, about those delusions. I’ve seen new research about Mellovex, and we need to consider alternatives. DB 2312 might be worth a try.’

  On the machine, Doctor Long’s ‘Richard’ is indistinguishable from ‘Wretched’, but after you’ve heard Emma say it forty, forty-five times, wretched sounds fine. You can live with being Wretched.

  An Environmentally Friendly Gingerbread House

  Of all bog-common sexual fantasies, mother-daughter is never one that’s excited you too much. Three’s a crowd, they say. But hear this: you haven’t known gratitude till you’ve known intergenerational gratitude. And it’s not as if you’re breaking new ground with this pair.

  ‘When did she say they’d call?’

  ‘Not soon. The show’s fully booked for singers this series, and then it depends what internationals come through. But when I told them Sian had a rare gift, they knew I wouldn’t say that about just anyone.’

  In this situation you ought to be paying attention to the way Liz’s hands explore Sian, but you’re obsessed with the freckles on the girl’s shoulders, and annoyed that Liz keeps talking while you’re trying to count.

  ‘You’ll have to think of some way we can repay you for what you’ve done,’ she says, without hint of irony.

  And now you know there are exactly one hundred and sixty-one brown flecks on the girl’s shoulders, and you’d seize this moment to speak of Sian’s perfection, and the pride you’ll feel when she’s a superstar, but the kid’s swigging from a glass of Chablis, and, when her fingers part your lips to empty wine from her mouth into yours, there’s no gainsaying this witchery.

  The First Red After Pillar-Box Red

  No sooner do you slot the last piece into the blue-on-blue Yves Klein puzzle than you find yourself in Toorak Road, boarding the number 8 tram just before it turns into Park Street. There, you are unsurprised to find your grubby father sitting across the way, scanning the compartment with wide eyes. You try to tell him how offering false hope to a needy mother and daughter has unlocked the door to optimism, and that from here on it will be happy days, but the old man doesn’t want to know. You must have him confused with the demented lawyer who has been chasing him for years. And now the barely clad Liz and Sian push past to tell this bum what a huge help you’ve been to Sian, how you’ve promised to make his girl a great star, and how, with his dark spell lifted, he can give the trams away.

  None of this stops you necking their bottle of wine, though your head’s splitting, and the throbbing red on the St Kilda Road stop-light is no common red, but answering-machine red, each flash signalling a call that must now go unanswered.

  THE PROTOTYPE

  Having just invented a new species, Tori wanted to be known for her great mind rather than her film-star looks. Forbidden to use the beast’s trade-name, she told Carl that ‘Dog Bear’ was a fusion of sheep-dog and Peruvian sun bear. Super-smart, domesticated, cuddly. A marketer’s dream.

  Before the Australian government made its offer, Tori’s American research team was based in Vienna. Struggling to find an export niche to fill the gap left by oil-stressed tourism, the Industry Minister promised Tori top dollar and a lab formerly devoted to cancer research not far from central Melbourne. The two partners signed a fifty-fifty deal.

  To date, Tori’s team had been able to generate just one viable prototype, DB1, or Graham, a boisterous male who embodied a technology that would soon redefine cuteness. To judge from images Carl had seen, Graham was a cuddle-magnet. Everything you’d want in a companion. While the lab’s dogs and bears didn’t always see eye to eye, DB1 got on well with both sides of his family tree.

  Earlier cross-breeds had been born without eyes or kidneys, but Graham exhibited just two drawbacks. First, he would eat only the most expensive salmon, and consumed thirty kilos a day. The second, related, drawback was more distasteful, and while Tori was happy to speak about it, Carl’s friends struggled with ‘the pong issue’. Graham was anally retentive. Formidably so. Defecating just once every four days, the Dog Bear released three black logs, each the weight of a house brick. Not even a million-dollar air-conditioning system could neutralise a stench so pungent that only four of the original research team chose to stay on, while their replacements turned over at fortnightly intervals.

  Call it mother-love, but Tori was untroubled by the stink. She expected an answer would be found in something so simple as charcoal tablets or castor oil. Once that issue was resolved, and her team succeeded in generating a mate, the pay-off would be tens of billions. What mega-rich Sultan wouldn’t want a Dog Bear?

  Living with a genius like Tori was intimidating. Her previous lovers had all been high-fliers: UN delegates and state governors. Carl often felt an urge to ask, what could a woman with her gifts – someone Time had dubbed ‘the Bardot of Biodiversity’ – want with a balding accountant like him?

  When the federal government announced its investment in ‘A Major Scientific Project’, Tori’s image was front page of every newspaper. Not surprisingly, she received a mountain of letters from hard-lusting admirers. But pictures never tell the whole story. Working intimately with DB1 had ruined Tori’s allure for those who knew her well, people who had never considered the role scent played in their erotic lives.

  Born with no sense of smell, Carl had a huge advantage over his high-status competitors. Whether it was lamb roasting in an oven, or a sickly waft from an open sewer, nothing registered.

  Because science meant everything to her, Tori could joke that associates rated her as skunk to the power of ten. And Carl couldn’t help but notice a shift in mood when he and Tori entered a room. Nor could he miss the crude remarks. One neighbour called the fire brigade. When told they could do nothing, the woman staged regular perfume accidents on the landing outside Carl’s door. Water off a duck’s back when you were into someone as deeply as Carl was Tori.

  You might think that such a strongly seasoned couple would have no trouble with privacy, but Carl had to accept that he and Tori could never be truly alone. When not at the lab, she was accompanied by two federal agents. The stench kept the officers outside, but Tori warned Carl that his apartment, telephone and business premises would be bugged. The surveillance was supposedly to protect the pair from the animal-rights activists who kept a vigil outside Tori’s lab. In truth, these agents were there to ensure that enemies didn’t attempt to kidnap or kill one of the nation’s major commercial assets.

  When Tori first asked if Carl would be prepared to live under threat, and to have friends condemn his personal hygiene, he didn’t hesitate. No true friend would refuse him this one great shot at love. What Carl hadn’t foreseen was his yearning to meet Graham.

  Daily reports of Dog Bear’s endearing traits sent Carl’s imagination swirling. Some jealousy was to be expected. Spending eighty hours a week at the lab, Tori rarely had more than an hour or two for her lover, and Carl needed to remind himself that without Graham and his odd ways he wouldn’t have found a woman who could value a modestly successful accountant with no sense of smell.

  Carl’s aches weren’t jealousy so much as an insistent empathetic need. He mentioned this to Tori only because he saw it as his scientific duty.

  His sexual preferences had always been quite orthodox:woman on top, man and woman lying side by side, and man standing at rear. But after learning that Tori’s main task was to obtain DNA material by ‘fluffing’ the enthusiastically compliant DB1, Carl developed a fixation with being ‘fluffed’ by her, something that he previously would have considered a sex act of the last resort.

  Happy to comply, Tori was so skilled with lubricants and variations of pressure that, in her absence, Carl cou
ld think of little else. It wasn’t that he imagined Tori stimulating Graham while she pleasured him. Rather, he saw himself as the Dog Bear, every stroke adding lustre to his cross-bred strength and cunning.

  When asked if she used a glove while making collections, Tori anticipated Carl’s thoughts by bringing home the same gloves she’d used to fluff the prototype. At long last, Carl had a woman who could read his mind. Which wasn’t the same as saying she understood him. Nor was Carl ready to tell Tori how much stronger he felt since he’d taken to defecating every third day.

  Fate being what it is, three crucial events more or less coincided. After a tough day in Senate Estimates, the Secretary of the Department of Science insisted that Tori provide firm dates for the generation of more Dog Bears. Further, she had six months to indicate when the species would begin to generate in commercially viable quantities. The odour problem also had to be dealt with.

  That same day, Tori’s trusted assistant, Trudy, didn’t turn up at work, and ASIS soon reported that she’d left the country, probably not of her own volition. With the Chinese said to be well-advanced with their own ‘cuddly export’ program, Trudy’s knowledge of DB1 could tilt the balance against Australia’s two-billion-dollar gamble.