Thought Crimes

by Tim Richards

  Grotesquely pregnant at twenty-six weeks, Simone enjoyed the attention from shoppers in her new suburb.

  No, so far as she knew, there was only one child, although it felt like two football teams scrambling for a loose ball. Yes, she did know the child’s sex. Oh, but why spoil the surprise? Not her idea. A paranoid husband refused to let her keep secrets.

  Simone answered these same friendly questions when they were put to her by the woman who owned Kidna’s Bookshop. Then she asked if Kidna’s had the latest novel by a South American author, Manuel Primm.

  ‘Yes, Worthless Lives,’ Barbara answered, pointing to an expensive hardback on the shelf immediately behind Simone.

  When Simone suggested that Worthless Lives couldn’t be the writer’s latest work, she was assured that Primm’s most recent prize was for first-time novelists under the age of thirty.

  Unable to make sense of this, Simone gave Barbara Ken’s list of hot tips. Most of these names meant nothing to her. Not long ago, she’d had multiple copies of Collusion by Miranda Murray, but she’d sold out. Despite being an avid reader of Helen Bain, Barbara had never heard of The Abattoir at the Far End of the Futures Market.

  The name that most intrigued the book woman was Michael Fouks. Fouks was a Hampton local who frequented the shop. The previous year he’d won a competition with his story ‘Illusory Density’.

  When Simone asked if Barbara had a copy of Marginal Behaviour, she looked perplexed. So far as Barbara knew, Fouks hadn’t published a book. Just now, Fouks was writer-in-residence at Melbourne University, and she understood him to be using this time to finish a collection of short stories. She’d ask about Marginal Behaviour when he next came in.

  Simone handed over thirty-five dollars for the hardback copy of Worthless Lives by Manuel Primm, but she never gave the book to Mick, or read it herself.

  Previous impulses and epiphanies had taken Simone a long way. They’d once taken her to a bed and breakfast in North Wales. There she’d determined that life was too short to get stuck in a groove halfway through ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’.

  Simone now felt certain that one of the worthless lives Manuel Primm wrote so brilliantly about would belong to Ken, a charming, obese radio producer whose days were shadowed by a half-baked genetic transfer. Another of those lives was very likely her own. Or a version of her life as she’d come to see it fifteen years hence. Primm’s magical control of tense would bounce sentences off the wall marking the end of time.

  As a postgraduate student at the same university where Michael Fouks was in residence, Simone could have approached the writer to ask about his work in progress. But she was ‘a woman with child’, a woman who remembered the curse that had already befallen the unnaturally farsighted Ken and his twins. To praise Fouks for the quality of his unfinished book, Marginal Behaviour, would be like kicking sand in the face of a sleeping dragon. Or discovering too late your duties with regard to a crucial switch.

  SUSPENDED ANIMATION

  Charles Brown, still boyish in appearance, enters the set to loud applause. He is wearing glasses, a black T-shirt with a red Snoop Doggy Dogg insignia, black trackpants, and trainers. He shakes hands with Ypres, celebrated Afro-American talkshow host. Being short and two-dimensional makes it difficult for Charles to find a comfortable position on his seat.

  Ypres: Wow, that’s a warm welcome, Charles. We feel as if we know you. We grew up with you.

  Charles: You grew up, and I didn’t!

  Laughter.

  Ypres: And that’s what this return to public life is about, isn’t it?

  Charles: Yes … Folks feel like they know me, and that’s nice most of the time … But that makes you a slave to preconceptions. People act like they own you. You’re expected to be that little boy …

  Ypres: They want you to say ‘Rats!’?

  Charles: Good grief!

  Laughter.

  Charles: … But I’m not an artwork. I’m entitled to be my own man now.

  Ypres: You’re growing …

  Charles: I’m wearing long pants.

  Applause.

  Ypres: And you’re talking about it …

  Charles: I have to. Everything that happened to me is still happening to other kids.

  Ypres: Yet you were telling me before we came on that you still think you had a wonderful childhood.

  Charles: Absolutely … But being a kid was all I knew. You think, Hey, what could be better than being six or seven forever?

  Ypres: It never felt like you were being … abused?

  Charles: Never. Not while it was going on. To outsiders, it might look like we were abused or brainwashed. To me, those terms aren’t useful … I was playing games with my friends, playing with my dog, discussing the big religious and philosophical questions … ‘But Charlie, you were always losing. Nearly every day you were humiliated.’ … What was I going to do? Complain to the union? … I never saw it as exploitation. Kids don’t think that way.

  Ypres: Not when they’re kids.

  Charles: No.

  Ypres: But now?

  Charles: Now, I see we were held back. We were never allowed to think outside the frame … Lucy and Linus want to start a class action … A therapist told me I’ll be in denial until I accept that what was done to me was evil … I say it was wrong. And because folks didn’t see it as wrong at the time, it got out of hand.

  Ypres: Meaning that you remained the same age, wore the same clothes, were made to associate with the same friends for fifty years?

  Charles: Yes.

  Ypres: And you now believe it shouldn’t have happened?

  Charles: That’s why I’m talking about it. Bart, Lisa, Eric Cartman … Even though they’re in family environments, exactly the same thing is happening to them. I’d hate for Bart to get to fifty-nine and feel that crucial things have passed him by.

  Ypres: You were so cute, Charles …

  Charles: ‘Strangely wise beyond our years.’

  Laughter.

  Charles: That was the gag.

  Ypres: But it was never grubby …

  Charles: Just Pigpen. Pigpen was grubby … You’re right. It was middle-class, white-bread, fifties America, with all the racial and global fears drained out. ‘The bitter-sweetness of lost innocence that shadows everyone’… Everyone but us … Sure, we weren’t Soviet gymnasts force-fed growth-retarding drugs. We were protected. But we were protected from reality.

  Ypres: Hostages?

  Charles: Well … We never had the wherewithal to grow of our own accord. I liken our situation to a kind of anticipatory anorexia.

  Ypres: Anorexia nervosa?

  Charles: Similar. A terror of adult bodies, the carnal, and the apparatus of desire … A Charlie Brown with pubic hair isn’t Charlie Brown … I was a healthy American male for fifty years, but I never had an erection …

  Ypres: Wow, you should have spoken to Kinsey …

  Charles: I would have, but I didn’t know enough to know that I wasn’t having erections because people didn’t want me to. Our whole lives – all the baseball, and fantasies, and homilies – were about tacitly confirming the public’s right to fear sex, and to see sexual desire as something opposed to innocence and goodness.

  Ypres: But Sally loved Linus, and, Charles, you really loved that little red-haired girl …

  Charles: No, you can’t disrespect lust like that … I’m fifty- nine, and what’s left? Masturbating to Riverdance videos? … If I’d known that sex was what I wanted from the little red-headed girl, do you really think I wouldn’t have gone after it?

  Ypres: You were six years old.

  Charles: That’s right … No one thought it perverse to have six-year-olds quoting Scripture …

  Ypres: You have a right to feel bitter.

  Charles: I have no choice … Look at Schroeder. Who does he sue? Schroeder was forced to practise Beethoven on a toy f ****** piano for fifty years … Excuse my French … And Snoopy …

  Ypres: Snoopy’s
everyone’s favourite. The whole world adores Snoopy …

  Ypres leads a round of applause.

  Charles: Of course they do. I love Snoopy … Snoopy’s the debonair romantic adventurer none of us were allowed to be … But who really believes that Snoopy spent all his time dreaming about the Red Baron, writing a novel or being Joe Cool? … He’s a dog for f ***’s sake!

  Ypres: Charles—

  Charles: It’s true! They rigged Snoopy’s thought-bubbles! All Snoopy thought about was boning Belle and licking himself … That’s what dogs do.

  Ypres: It’s still hard for you to process this stuff.

  Charles: Sure … I feel sorry for people who say they never had a childhood … It’s a special time. But it shouldn’t be all I have. Memories of suspended animation. We were jokes, and though we tried like f ***, we never found the magic tag that would release us …

  Ypres: We’re talking to Charles Brown about his extraordinary life, and when we come back, I’m going to ask Charles for his thoughts on spirituality and his father’s death …

  As the audience applauds, Ypres leans in to stroke Charles’s thigh, the camera slowly zooming out until the vision-switcher throws to a commercial.

  FROM STUDIES IN EROTOPHOBIA

  1. Currency Fluctuations

  Through January and February, the mood in the office peaked and crashed with each major currency shift. Whenever the dollar was outmuscled by its American counterpart, management strutted through the corridors joking about the new super-complex they’d construct in the northern suburbs. If the Australian dollar became more robust, spirits sagged, and the talk was of lay-offs and relocation to Malaysia.

  Amid this uncertainty, anxious employees dressed more conservatively, forsook lunchbreaks, and refrained from singing in the lifts. It wasn’t until mid-March that anyone could confidently declare the crisis over. Returning from their Easter break, the more self-assured male graduates abandoned jackets and resumed their lunchtime games.

  Though not so outgoing, Eric enjoyed the laddish optimism of his colleagues. The boys were playful, and they liked to flirt with the young women of the office. Eric seldom had need for the novels he took to the cafeteria when the fun was on.

  Socially backward, he might have been too inclined to take brash utterances at face value, to confuse boasts and fantasies with a reality beyond his experience. Occasionally, young women joined the men at their long table, but mostly the sexes teased each other from a distance that permitted the free circulation of gossip about drunken abandon in stairwells and laneways.

  Eric knew enough to know that he was being ragged when these men described him as a dark horse or quiet achiever. Asked what he thought about this or that woman – if he’d like to put a smile on her face – Eric said nothing, and his silence provided a vacuum for their lascivious speculations. He saw no harm in this play, since the women were sharp-witted and gave much better than they got. They played the same games of confession and lustful fantasy among themselves.

  Of the recent graduate appointments, only Emma Ray absented herself from this banter. In all the time Eric had been at Sencorp – nearly three years now – she’d kept entirely to herself.

  ‘She’s the one that’d really go off,’ Maggot told Johnno. ‘Never underestimate the quiet ones.’

  ‘Nah, too far up herself,’ Johnno argued. ‘She’d have a hyphenated stockbroker tucked away somewhere … What do you reckon, Eric?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Dunno? … Your desk’s next to the hottest vixen in the office, and you’ve never once thought about where she’s getting it?’

  ‘Well … Emma’s not the easiest person to approach,’ Eric said.

  For two years and three months, the young legal officers Eric Davis and Emma Ray had occupied desks separated only by a flimsy partition, but their duties seldom gave them reason to communicate. While Emma worked the legals for Media Liaison and Publications, Eric dealt with industrial accident claims.

  Every morning, public transport permitting, Eric clocked in at 7.54. Emma’s habits were less regular. Sometimes, a sweet scent indicated that her arrival had preceded his. On the mornings she rode her bicycle to work, Emma would pass his desk between 8.22 and 8.27 and offer a brief smile. Eric lived for these quiet, unforced smiles, but found it impossible to reciprocate.

  Emma must have overheard his blustering phone calls, his nervousness in the face of abuse from union officials, just as he eavesdropped on her superbly measured handling of complex matters. Her voice – in manner and intonation more English than Australian – was pure honey. Never a word out of place.

  Eric’s feelings for his neighbour were at their most intense when she attended weekly debriefs with the divisional head, Declan O’Riordan. In a company not known for rapid promotions, O’Riordan – two months Eric’s junior – had made cometlike progress through the ranks to take control of the legal department, and an income reckoned to be $300,000 per annum. Infinitely charming, with a voice like Irish cream, the unattached Declan was going places. His conspicuous avoidance of the spectacular Ms Ray made it a monty that the two were romantically involved.

  Yet these Thursday afternoon interludes brought Eric his greatest opportunity. Emma’s absence gave him cause to leave his desk, cross the partition, and answer her telephone.

  This had become a kind of unspoken arrangement, Emma doing the same for him during his Tuesday morning briefings. Eric would hurry back to his desk to find a note written in Emma’s deliciously elegant hand:

  10.47. Altona production-line threatening to shut down if you don’t ‘get off your fat arse’ and settle the widow Beltov’s claim for funeral expenses. Call Tess urgently. Cheers, Emma.

  Eric kept these notes in a special folder. Although he seldom re-read them, the thought of words written by Emma sent a flush through his chest, while more primal thoughts of her, in a brief skirt and sheer black stockings, stretching over his desk to write these notes, roused him a way that might have embarrassed him had there been need to leave his desk. Irrespective of the stuff-up he’d been charged to address, the notes always ended with the same ‘Cheers, Emma’, and he was never less than cheered.

  Nearly all the messages Eric took for Emma were words of praise for her ability to solve a tricky problem with understated diplomacy, and Eric tried to phrase these messages as if this praise was his own. On one occasion, he answered the phone to a beautifully spoken woman, and knew instantly that it was Emma’s mother.

  This message induced a rare, direct communication.

  ‘So, you had a chat to Mum?’

  ‘Yes, she seemed nice.’

  ‘Yes, she is nice.’

  Then, without warning, Emma offered him a piece of her lemon slice, and he reacted as if he’d been knighted.

  ‘This is good,’ Eric called across the partition. ‘It’s excellent!’ And in truth, it did seem superior to any lemon slice he’d ever savoured.

  There was another phone intercept he would have preferred to forget. A male asked to speak to Emma Ray. When invited to leave a message, the caller declined, describing it as a personal matter.

  So much darkness clouded the memory of this ‘personal-call incident’ that he couldn’t say whether the message had been received during Emma’s weekly meeting with the slimy Declan, or on some other occasion when she was away from her desk. And, at this distance, he couldn’t be sure whether the ‘personal acquaintance’ had spoken with a mildly foreign – possibly Irish – accent. Eric knew that if he gave these considerations full rein, sleep would be impossible.

  ‘She’s not that friendly with other women, is she?’ Max observed.

  ‘I reckon you’d have to own a chateau to impress her,’ Johnno added.

  Eric hoped that a long pause signalled the end of this discussion, but it only gave Maggot time to shape more unseemly thoughts about Emma.

  ‘Wealth’s just the half of it. She’d be after an action man. Skydiver. Muff-diver … Geez, what would
you give to snorkel that reef ?’

  What worried Eric most about his colleagues’ appraisals was that they almost exactly matched his own. Emma was out of reach to a man like him.

  Emma Ray was not someone who would trade down when choosing the man to father her beautifully spoken, immaculately presented children. Assets would be important. Real estate. Emma would fancy a man with eccentric travel tastes: rafting down the Nile, ballooning across South America. She might like to be chosen by a man who’d had affairs with starlets, writers and get-ahead politicians. Emma’s dream man would recognise that she was superbly prepared for any eventuality, and to that man she would give herself entirely.

  Eric was nothing like that.

  Although his father had made a fortune from plumbing, Eric’s heritage was working class down both lines. Factory-workers, brickies and butchers. But, despite these origins, Eric never drank beer and couldn’t change a tyre, let alone unblock a toilet.

  Eric was only truly comfortable reading a book, or sitting in front of a screen. He had four lines of schoolboy French, was clueless in the kitchen, and would inevitably be exposed as an incompetent lawyer. Could having a good heart balance so much inadequacy? Eric wished that he could be more confident about the goodness of his heart.

  After graduating, he’d dated Gabriella, the shy but brilliant younger sister of his friend Yuri. Each weekend they saw films and bands, and moped about talking. Having taken it for granted that Gabriella’s friendly regard would eventually become more passionate, Eric was devastated when she accepted a grant to undertake research in Vienna. Human behaviour was an unfathomable mystery to Eric, and you wouldn’t impress Emma by being easily mystified.

  ‘A mate of mine knows a bloke at a gym who says that he fucked her and her sister on consecutive nights. Totally fried his brain.’

  ‘Wouldn’t mind seeing the sister … That’s prime breeding stock.’