‘No, no, not at all. He’s very happy with Jessie. Who’s a very winning child, I have to say.’
‘So is he one of these religious types who wants you to see the light?’
‘No. No, that’s not it, either. It seems important to him. Like it’s a matter of ethics to raise a child.’
‘Well, la di da,’ said Beth. ‘In any case, he has no right telling you how to live your life. He sounds like a bit of a tosser.’
‘No, definitely not. He’s thoughtful. Modest.’ Hazel held up her hands, by way of surrender. ‘I suspect he’s not even interested.’
‘Give it time, Hazie.’
‘Well, whatever happens, or doesn’t, he’s a good man. So I hope we can be friends.’
Beth put an arm around her. ‘You’re full of shit,’ she said.
Thea. It sounded like a whisper, or a sigh. Hazel said it aloud to make it seem more real. Was it short for Theodora? Had she been a bit loud and zany, like her sister, or more subdued? And how long had she and Adam been married? Why didn’t Adam wear a ring anymore? Or maybe he never had. Maybe he’d been one of those married men who liked a bit on the side. Which was a very ugly expression and didn’t sound a bit like Adam.
All these pointless questions and puzzled speculations. It was like stumbling in a room, blindfolded.
She turned her attention to checking for jobs to fill up her weekly quota. She had to find something vaguely relevant to her qualifications (since she had no skills or experience to speak of ), and adjust her CV accordingly. She finally managed four applications in retail (she could talk literature or philosophy to customers as she wrapped up their sexy lingerie); two jobs in admin (she knew how to spell prioritise and excel); one as a librarian’s assistant (given her voracious reading, she hoped to be of assistance). Next she applied for a tutoring job in a private coaching college (in the unlikely event of succeeding, she’d need to make sure it wasn’t one of those companies that ripped off foreign students and didn’t pay the staff; thank you, federal government, for deregulating the education system). Finally, exhausted and at the point of self-immolation, she applied for a position as the editor of a literary journal. Why not aim for the stars? Especially since the government insisted that you could be anything you wanted to be if you just pulled your lazy finger out or were prepared to relocate to the ends of the earth to pick strawberries for $8.50 an hour, or had a father who’d left you a hugely profitable iron ore company massively subsidised by the taxpayer and on which you paid a piddling amount of tax. Or you could fork out a few more thousand dollars on top of a hefty HECS debt to get another qualification so you could keep applying for jobs you were never going to win because winning was the name of the game.
In desperation, she checked out the nursing degree online. Three-and-a-half years. She was hoping it had been shortened since her mother had tried to enthuse her. Still, she’d only be twenty-eight when she finished. Or was it twenty-nine? Numbers had never been her strong point. Which could lead to serious consequences if you were sticking a needle full of morphine into a patient’s arm.
Then she limped towards the end of Persuasion, with its predictable happy ending. But what took her by surprise was the absence of an answer to its central moral dilemma. Had the heroine been right to follow her mentor’s advice? Or should she have believed in the Captain from the start? Because seven years after Anne had rejected him, deeply disappointed him, he’d amassed a tidy fortune, while she had lost the bloom of youth, begun to wither into spinsterish gloom. But then again, maybe Austen was rewarding Anne’s constancy, her enduring love for the Captain. Or was his return just a stroke of good luck? And wasn’t comedy meant to give you the answer to that unruly, vexing thing called life?
Hazel was not impressed. Had Austen dragged her through all these pages just for this? Leaving her to decide for herself?
Still, there was always the Captain’s letter, his passionate declaration as the story drew to a close, to lift her flagging spirits. I am half agony, half hope, he’d written, hoping to persuade Anne to marry him.
I am half agony, half hope. Now who wouldn’t fall for a killer line like that?
The next day, at a loose end (some might call it frayed, she thought), Hazel phoned some friends to suggest a movie, but everyone was studying or working overtime. Even Chloe was thinking of going back to her PhD because she’d figured that research in cultural anthropology was far less daunting than serving ice-cream in a shop called Heavenly. (Would you like a ton of chocolate sprinkles with that…a fistful of jelly beans…a bucket of double whipped cream…a heart attack…honestly, Hazel, people are disgusting.) In the end Hazel was glad no one could spare the time; movie tickets were expensive, even with a discount, and you’d have to raise the limit on your credit card if you wanted to buy a choc bomb. She’d checked her bank account online and the forecast was grim: storm clouds approaching, possibly a tornado. And it didn’t help, either, when the landlord put up their rent by a heartless thirty bucks a week. What had happened to the reasonable old guy who’d once changed their light bulb?
What do you call one hundred landlords lying at the bottom of the ocean?
A good start.
Beth had insisted on paying the extra rent until Hazel found a job. Which made Hazel feel both immensely grateful and even more despondent. A touch humiliated.
The week dragged on until Saturday and the dinner party: Todd and Dora, their first ever dinner party as a different kind of couple, as though the baby and the ring had changed everything. The Baby and the Ring: it sounded like the name of a weird English pub. But how great it was to celebrate Todd’s brand new job, even if the bookshop was more like a gift shop, he said, selling hand creams and scarves and tea towels, while the books cringed with shame in a corner. But the children’s section was terrific, he said, as Dora smoothed her hands over a tiny pregnant belly. There was Beth’s brand new job to toast as well, as she filled them in on what she had to learn and how much she was looking forward to helping people have adventures. Because everyone needed an adventure, she said, everyone needed to have fun, as long as it was safe, legal and didn’t cause any harm to any living creature. Hazel felt happy for all of them, even as she wished she wasn’t so broke. Broken and aimless and watching her two best friends about to begin a new life. Beth had even decided to stop drinking during the week. I’d better slow down myself, Hazel thought, so I don’t slip from low-grade self-pity into brutal self-laceration. Three glasses usually did the trick.
‘So there was this woman…’
Simon. Entertaining them now with darkly funny stories about his doorknocking day. A tale about a woman who knew, just knew, that the Greens would let all those people out of detention and there’d be terrorism and disease and mosques sprouting all over the place and then where would we all be?
‘I told her we would be in Australia,’ said Felicia. ‘But she kept throwing words and I was throwing back and we were wobbling all over the place.’
Beth laughed, in a warm kind of way.
‘Then there was this dumb med student,’ said Simon. ‘He said he knew the Greens were planning to force every doctor to work for the government for peanuts. I was about to give him some facts but Felicia sorted him out.’
It seemed that once she’d understood working for peanuts, Simon told them how Felicia had flared her nose and lectured the guy in a very stern voice that medical care was for all the people.
Felicia looked around the table. ‘My father is a doctor,’ she said. ‘But he is a doctor of cosmetics. A prick.’
Simon put an arm around her. ‘One of Felicia’s first Australian words,’ he said.
Beth was looking captivated. Little wonder, since Felicia was at her smouldering best: thick black eyeliner and a slash of bright red lipstick. Those cheekbones. That flawless, sunfire skin.
Felicia pursed her lips. ‘My father in Roma makes women large or small in different places,’ she said. ‘And my mother is telling me how the size o
f his stomach is now inversely proportional to his brain.’
‘Your mother’s English is very good,’ said Beth.
‘Her English has always been very good. And she does the maths, like me, so she knows about inverse proportional. But my father, he runs along with young girls with plastic breasts who only want him for his money. He is—how do I say this? He is not real?’
‘A cliché?’ said Beth. ‘Your father is a cliché?’
Felicia nodded vigorously, which made the two sparkling chandeliers attached to her ears tremble in the candlelight.
‘I owe him no respect,’ she said. ‘But he has given me a beautiful apartment in this place because he wants me to love him. I still have no respect but I use his guilt to have a beautiful apartment. So now he is happy and I am happy but not in the same way.’
She turned to Beth. ‘Your hair is like fire,’ she said. ‘It is dazzling me.’
Beth glowed with the compliment. It was like Jessie and the quiet eyes. Which was a touching thing to say, Hazel thought, as though the child had been observing her, appraising her, liking her. Then, as if on cue, Felicia asked her what had happened with the shy Green man. Hazel picked at a bread roll and tried to change the subject but Felicia kept pressing and Hazel kept resisting because she didn’t want advice or cheering up, and she didn’t want Adam being served on the menu. What she wanted most of all was a new kind of silence in her head. A space in which to think about a mind she couldn’t read, a body that she longed for, as she dipped her spoon into the soup, one dip and swallow, another dip and swallow, focused on the creamy texture.
‘Still, it wasn’t all bad news,’ said Simon, jolting her back. ‘We even had some good conversations’—turning to Todd and Dora—‘we call the good ones a Meaningful Encounter, people being open to thinking about stuff. Climate change especially. Once you get the chance to explain that the government’s Direct Action plan has to be one of the most ironic policy names ever invented. Paying polluters to keep polluting. Opening more coalmines. But hey, plant the odd tree and we’ll all be saved.’
‘So you just give people the facts?’ said Todd, as Dora gave a mighty yawn.
‘Doorknocking’s crucial,’ said Simon, ‘because the mainstream media doesn’t analyse the issues. Or hold politicians to account.’
‘And they think the Greens are loony,’ said Hazel.
Wanting to say her feeble bit.
Simon gave her a sheepish look…Clean forgot to ask…how was your day, Hazel.
‘I’m learning,’ she said, quietly. ‘Learning to stay positive, for a start.’
‘Well, I’m sure Adam’s debriefed you.’
When she felt brief enough already: truncated, abridged, a five-hundred-word short story.
‘Adam’s a very positive kind of person,’ she said.
One spoonful, then another.
‘This soup is amazing,’ she said.
She watched Dora stroke Todd’s cheek.
‘Toddy made it,’ said the girl with the diamond ring. ‘He’s just as AMAZING as the soup!’ She looked around the table. ‘I’m SO THRILLED to have you all here!! I HAVE NEVER BEEN SO HAPPY IN MY LIFE!!!!’
At least four exclamation marks, Hazel thought. But how could she possibly diminish sweet, happy Dora? How could she refuse to smile, like everyone else at the table?
On Monday, Beth came home from her first day at work with stories about her trying-to-do-fifty-things-at-once kind of day: the computer meltdown, the problems with ticketing, old people wanting luxury accommodation at budget prices, plus all the bits and pieces that cheap airlines added on when you weren’t looking, even when you were. She told a story of a cashed-up client who’d already done Paris and Rome, Cairo and Istanbul, and then rolled his eyes when Beth suggested India because he’d already done India, and the Taj Mahal had been such a disappointment.
‘How can it be a disappointment?’ Beth wailed. ‘Just the pictures in the brochures are enough to make me giddy. And then there was this grumpy old couple who wouldn’t stop arguing. All that money to go all over the world and all they could do was snipe at each other. As for my boss! Talk about a slavedriver, only she doesn’t live in Egypt. How does that happen? All sweetness and light when she interviewed me and then she gives me a twenty-minute break for lunch. It’s worse than bloody teaching and probably illegal.’
She was just so tired, she said. So damned tired.
Over dinner on Tuesday she was all fired up about all the pricks she’d met in a matter of a few measly hours. First up there was a military-looking man who refused to make a booking with an airline employing coloured people. Beth’s jaw had dropped to the floor, she’d said. Hadn’t people like him died out with the Tasmanian Devil—no, the Tasmanian Tiger? Then she’d tried to disguise her outrage by telling the douchebag that white was also a colour.
‘Although I remember from school that white is the absence of colour, scientifically speaking,’ she said. ‘Or maybe it’s black. But anyway, morally speaking, he was just a racist prick. So then I told him there was no such airline and he told me I was lying, and he got up and left. Except I had to keep it quiet in case the boss was listening. I mean, she might have backed me up, who knows, but I wasn’t prepared to risk it.’
Another guy had kept asking her age, like a bouncer at the door of a nightclub, she said. Not to mention the old guy with a warty face and spindly comb-over, wanting to book a flight to Adelaide. She’d wanted to send him to Timbuktu by the time he’d finished staring at her boobs and asking her out on a date.
‘I’m constantly amazed,’ she declared, ‘how even plumb-ugly men can have so much confidence with women. And then, when I dashed out for lunch at the café next door—god, it was awful. I ran into my cousin Carson and I started telling him all that stuff. Except I don’t think you’ve met my cousin Carson.’
‘No.’
‘In any case, I was telling him, shouting really, cos the place was so noisy, I was shouting how some men must think women are always gagging for it, and right at that very moment the whole place went quiet. The coffee machine and people talking and—thank god—Mariah Carey on the sound system. Everyone must have heard me cos everyone was staring. And then as I’m leaving, some sleek-looking guy hands me a card and he’s written on the back: When you feel the urge to gag. I swear, Hazel, I’m giving the male of the species one more chance and if it doesn’t work out, I’ll either, a, take a vow of chastity, or b, throw myself off a cliff, or c, have sex with women so I don’t have to deal with predatory men. Which one would be easier?’
‘Definitely c,’ said Hazel. ‘But it’s easiest. Grammatically speaking.’ She poured herself more water. ‘I’m sorry about your day, Beth. I guess the travel business isn’t that romantic.’
She remembered reading a poem at school about a girl who longed to travel. How something had stirred inside her.
‘She wanted to travel to the edge of the world…saw herself dancing to jazz in a flimsy dress on an ocean liner. Isn’t that entrancing, Beth?’
‘Well, I love the image of a flimsy dress, but the ocean liner would be a bit of a drag. Third-rate entertainers, deck quoits and shitty movies. Hundreds of people stuffing their faces with prawn cocktails and triple-decker chocolate cake.’ Then she laughed, tossed away her gloom. ‘There was this shy kind of guy who came in to book a ticket today. He was really sweet and looked like Joaquin Phoenix when he first started in the movies and his real name was Bottom.’
‘The sweet, shy guy?’
‘No, the actor. He changed his name from Bottom to Phoenix.’
Hazel had to smile. ‘Thereby rising from the ashes of his cinematic arse,’ she said.
Knock knock, round two
After a dull Sunday and an even duller Monday, Hazel took a bus to the shops to check out a birthday gift for her father. Wishing she knew how to knit or cook so she could make something on the cheap. Wishing she’d inherited her mother’s domestic skills, as well as her long legs and g
olden hair. She passed the shop that sold lustrous pearls, remembered looking in the window last year and imagining a sign: Look on my jewels, ye impoverished, and despair. And then she saw it: the toyshop. She’d never given it a second glance, because no one she knew had a child, of either the small or large variety. Jessie. She would buy a little something for Jessie. Maybe another animal to reflect on or object to, to help him decide for himself. But the instant she stepped inside she was overwhelmed by so many objects, colours and brands: board games like Monopoly Millionaire, Cranium, the old-fashioned Snakes and Ladders. Bouncing putty, Slime Barf and Barrel of Slime, robots, transformers, water shooters, lawnmowers, tea sets, doll sets, Pie Face, Duplo, Lego, light projectors, Chubby Puppies, My Little Pony, Peppa Pig, Hungry Hippos, Play-Doh, magic sets, computer games. A person could go mad in here with so much choice. No doubt parents did go mad, with their kids whining and screaming for more.
And then at last, back to the basics: a jumble of plastic animals in a basket on the counter. What did Jessie already have? Cats and dogs, pigs and elephants, a lion. There was a lion, wasn’t there, among all the beasts he’d so oddly disapproved of. Ah, there it was! A gnu. With a long head, and a beard and mane made out of wool. She hadn’t spied a gnu in Jessie’s menagerie. He’d love the beard, wouldn’t he, and the horns, the way they curved like upside-down commas? She could already hear his questions when she handed it over. Because she would be seeing him again, wouldn’t she? There would have to be another lunch. Maybe even that trip to the zoo, compromising her principles for the sake of an outing with Adam.
She remembered the joke: Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them, I got others. Groucho Marx. Who was a whole lot funnier than Karl.
She was wide awake at six am on Wednesday. Doorknocking day, round two. She knew she had to stop fussing and worrying about what might happen or not happen and what she hoped might happen, tried to settle down with a book borrowed from the library. She’d decided to skip the rest of Austen and move on to the letter B, because art was long and life was short, as well as nasty and brutish, solitary and poor. Thomas Hobbes. Another man you wouldn’t want to wake up to in the morning. She’d made a start on Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, in English, and a doorstopper. He’d written a hundred weighty tomes, apparently, about poverty and injustice; people clearly couldn’t get enough of the nasty stuff of life.
The Art of Persuasion Page 11