‘Have you read it?’
‘He won’t let me see it. Not until the book’s finished.’
‘Do you know what it’s about?’
‘Just that it’s a thriller about a pandemic threatening the world.’
‘Hasn’t someone already done that storyline?’
‘That’s what I was wondering. But Edward says it’s a whole new take on the subject.’
‘Sounds like bestseller material,’ Maggie said lightly.
‘That’s what Edward thinks too. He’s estimated that if he can write two thousand words a day, he’ll be finished in less than six weeks. Easy peasy.’
‘Two thousand words? That seems like a lot.’
‘Not for Edward. He’s determined to do this. And I’m just relieved he’s not sitting around anymore, pretending he’s on leave.’
Kevin
Danni was back from her holidays. ‘It was fabulous,’ she told Kevin when she phoned him at work. ‘Did you get my texts?’
There had been half a dozen each day, adorned with emoticons. After replying to the first in the daily series, he had ignored the rest.
‘I have heaps to tell you,’ she said. ‘How about dinner at my place tonight?’
She had put him on the spot. The only answer he could come up with was ‘All right.’
‘I’ll text you the address. Six-thirty okay with you?’
‘Yes.’ Quickly he remembered his manners. ‘Should I bring something?’
‘Just your lovely self. Laters, baby.’
As Kevin put down the phone, he puzzled over Danni’s valediction. What kind of word was ‘laters’? Or had he misheard? As for the ‘lovely’ and ‘baby’, her use of those terms filled him with dread.
Kevin’s first week at the terrace house in Coverdale had passed in an uncomfortable blur of smoke-filled nights and silent mornings during which he was the only person out of bed. It wasn’t that he needed the company. It was more that he felt anxious about the others being late for their lectures or, heaven forbid, missing them altogether. Maybe they didn’t have morning lectures at all, only afternoons. He examined Marlena’s timetable, which was attached to the fridge with magnets. It indicated a nine o’clock class every day except Friday, and that was a ten o’clock start.
One morning during his third week, Marlena appeared bleary-eyed at the breakfast table just as he was leaving for lectures. She was dressed only in a skimpy dressing gown and had forgotten to tie it properly in the front. He forced his eyes to focus on her face.
‘You’ll be late for your nine o’clock lecture,’ he said.
‘Nobody goes to morning classes,’ she replied with a yawn.
Kevin frowned. ‘But if you don’t attend, you could fail the course. They mark the rolls, you know.’
‘I’ve been doing it since first year, Kevin, and I haven’t failed yet.’
‘But it says in the yearbook that …’
‘Kevin,’ she interrupted, ‘you don’t actually read the yearbook, do you?’
‘Of course. At the start of every year. You can’t be too careful.’
She started to laugh. ‘You’re such a funny guy, Kevin. I love the way you can keep a straight face when you say things like that.’
Kevin was about to tell her he didn’t have to try to be serious – it was a serious matter – but she had taken hold of his hand and was caressing it with her other one.
‘When are you going to show me your etchings?’
‘Etchings?’
‘You know, whatever was in those boxes you carried up to your room.’
‘You mean my notebooks?’
‘Notebooks. Do you write your secrets in them? Like a diary?’
‘Not exactly. They’re more like logbooks.’
‘Could you show me?’
‘Now?’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ve got a lecture in fifteen minutes. Maybe later on.’
‘I’ll be here tonight,’ she said, slowly letting go of his hand.
Danni’s text arrived only a couple of minutes after her phone call. As usual, it was decorated with little faces, one of which was winking at him in a most alarming way. He replied in his customary manner:
Dear Danni,
Many thanks for your text. I have noted the time and address and I look forward to seeing you then.
Kind regards,
Kevin
He thought back to what Maggie had said about ‘a natural progression’. What did she mean by that? She had used the term with such nonchalance she must have assumed he understood its meaning. But surely Maggie had realised by now that he wasn’t like everyone else. He didn’t know what was ‘natural’. He couldn’t gauge increments of social ‘progress’. And he wasn’t attuned to the signals and cues that indicated a transition from one stage to the next. It was like the secret songs of elephants. He’d seen it in a nature documentary on TV. The trumpeting sound that mankind can hear is only part of an elephant’s song. The rest is heard only by other elephants. Kevin’s problem lay in the fact that he wasn’t privy to the entire song made by his fellow humans, only snippets. And he was never sure whether he had missed the important parts or not.
Everything about the Coverdale house was unsettling. Not just the reluctance of his flatmates to keep regular hours or to observe their lecture schedules, but the fact that no-one ever seemed to be working on an assignment or an essay. In the evenings they played their music so loudly it kept him awake, notwithstanding the closed hardwood door and thick walls. And then there was the endless stream of strangers who trooped through the house in search of an impromptu party. He never knew who he might meet on his way to the bathroom. Yet despite the disturbing randomness of his flatmates’ lifestyles, he couldn’t go home. Not after what he’d overheard his father saying. He would have to stick it out, no matter what.
Kevin stopped at a grocery store on the way to Danni’s and bought a bunch of carnations. He was never sure about flowers. They had secret meanings, didn’t they? Red roses for love, for example. He examined several buckets full of species he couldn’t identify, before deciding carnations were safer. After all, his mother used to take carnations to people when they were sick.
Danni’s flat was on the second floor of a modern block with timber-slatted balconies and hedges cut into geometric shapes. When she opened the door, the first thing he noticed was the pair of tight jeans made of shiny material that resembled snakeskin. How could she breathe in something like that?
‘Come in, Kevin. Are these for me? Thank you! I looove carnations. They’re sooo retro.’ She wiggled her way into the living room. ‘Make yourself comfortable and I’ll get you a drink,’ she said, indicating a huge leather sofa. ‘Red or white?’
He wanted to say a lemonade would be fine, but that didn’t seem to be an option. ‘Red, please.’
He took off his suit jacket and folded it carefully over the arm of the sofa. Within a couple of minutes she returned with the carnations arranged in a vase which she placed on the coffee table. Then she brought him his drink, together with a large white plate filled with all kinds of things he didn’t eat, like olives, and vegetables covered in oil, and funny-looking little fish he suspected were sardines. They looked like cat treats.
‘Help yourself to the canapés,’ she said. ‘I’ll just check the entrée.’
Among the delicacies were some crackers, so he took one of those. From the kitchen, where Danni was making the entrée, he heard, ‘Kevin, could you put on a CD, please?’
He spotted the player and a jumble of CDs lying on the floor. Kevin’s own collection was housed in a tower, arranged alphabetically – Beatles and Beethoven to Vivaldi and the Walker Brothers. As he examined the covers, he couldn’t find a single performer or piece of music that he recognised. Music since 1990 had passed him by. One of the CDs had a nice picture of a waterfall on the cover, so he chose that, hoping it would produce gentle, melodic sounds. It turned out to be quite the opposite – a thr
obbing cacophony in which the words were incomprehensible. He ejected the CD and searched again. This time he selected one with a photo of the night sky on the cover, but it sounded just the same. Oh dear, did this sample reflect Danni’s taste in music? He lowered the volume and returned to the table. As he did so he scanned the room. There was something missing. It took him a while to work out exactly what it was. Then it dawned on him – there were no books. Not a single one. Even if she read her books on an e-reader, surely she would have some hard copies from pre-digital times. Maybe they were in her bedroom. But best not to think about that particular location.
Kevin was in his bedroom at the terrace house, updating his tide charts, colouring the high tides of 1.7 metres or more in blue and the extreme lows in brown. Then he added the full moon, the new moon and was about to colour the half-circles for the first and last quarters when there was a tap at the door.
‘Come in,’ he said tentatively.
It was Marlena, holding a bottle of red in one hand and two glasses in the other.
‘I’ve come to see your notebooks,’ she said, placing the bottle and glasses on the bedside table.
Nobody had ever shown any interest in his notebooks before, except for his mother.
‘Which one would you like to look at?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. You choose,’ she said, pouring two generous glasses of wine.
His tide book sat open in front of him, but the memory of telling his family he wanted to be a tides specialist and Beth calling him crazy as a cut snake flashed into his head. Best not to show Marlena the tide charts. She might think him crazy too. His eyes scanned the collection of vinyl-clad ledger books lining the bookshelves above his desk, each one colour-coded according to the subject matter. Finally his gaze rested on a series of yearbooks listing important events for every year, starting from the one in which he was born. Maybe she’d like to see one of those.
While he was hesitating, Marlena had taken a seat on the bed. ‘Come over here, Kevin. And bring one of your books with you.’
He chose 1974. The year Cyclone Tracy struck Darwin. That particular event had confirmed for him once and for all the unpredictable nature of meteorological phenomena. One minute people were celebrating Christmas Eve, the next their houses were obliterated by the force of the wind.
He perched himself on the edge of the bed, clutching his notebook.
‘Let’s have a drink,’ said Marlena, passing him a glass. ‘Cheers.’
‘Cheers,’ Kevin echoed and took a sip. It was really quite pleasant.
‘So you’re doing Honours?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘What are you going to do when you leave uni?’
‘Join my father’s accounting firm.’
‘You must be good at maths.’
He nodded.
‘I hate maths,’ she said. ‘I’m thinking of dropping Psychology because of the statistics. I just don’t understand them. What the hell is a standard deviation anyway?’
‘It describes the variation from the mean.’
‘Yeah, but I don’t even understand about means or medians or any of those things.’
‘I could teach you,’ he said.
‘Really?’
‘We could start now, if you like.’
Danni announced that dinner was served and led him into a dimly lit area, illuminated only by candles. The entrée was some kind of shellfish, still partly in its shell. He wasn’t sure he could eat something that was still wedged inside its carapace, but he made an attempt. Danni was so involved in telling him about her trip that she didn’t seem to notice that he had eaten only the sauce and left most of the meat inside the shell.
The main course presented a major problem – slices of lamb so pink they were virtually raw.
‘I hope I haven’t overcooked the lamb,’ she said. ‘The contestants on those cooking shows get into so much trouble whenever they do that.’
He almost gagged on his first bite but continued to chew for what seemed like minutes. Finally, he knew he would have to swallow it. Fortunately she’d only given him a tiny portion, not like his mother’s leg of lamb, piled on the plate and smothered in gravy. The difference was that his mother had always cooked the lamb until it was brown. He ate as much as he could and pushed the rest under a pile of spinach leaves.
The dessert was much nicer than the rest of the meal: creamy chocolate mousse served in a wine glass with raspberries and cream. He ate all of it.
‘Men always love chocolate desserts,’ she said, smiling at the empty glass. ‘Now, how about coffee in the living room?’
Once they were seated on the sofa, drinking their coffee, Danni said, ‘You’re such a mystery man, Kevin. You don’t give anything away. Who is Kevin Dwyer, anyway?’
The question flummoxed him. ‘I don’t really know,’ he finally replied.
‘I think you’re a man of many secrets. Maybe you just tell people you work for the tax office, when you really work for MI6 or whatever it’s called.’
‘Actually, in an Australian context, it would be ASIS, unless, of course, I worked for the internal intelligence organisation, in which case that’s called ASIO. In the UK, the equivalent would be MI5.’
‘So you really are a spy?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Well, how do you know all that stuff?’
‘It’s general knowledge.’
For a moment she frowned. Then she seemed to lose interest in the topic and offered him a liqueur instead.
‘No thanks, Danni. I really must be going. I have a big day tomorrow.’
‘But it’s only nine o’clock. You can’t go yet.’
‘Well, maybe just one.’
‘Good,’ she said, pouring an iridescent green liquid into a shot glass. ‘You’re so clever, Kevin. Have you ever thought of going on one of those TV quiz shows?’
‘No, I wouldn’t want to be on television.’ Memories of his audition with Frank Fortune flooded back.
‘I don’t suppose they’d let you anyway, would they?’
‘Who?’
‘The CSI people. They wouldn’t want your face on the TV, or your cover would be blown.’
The doof-doof of Danni’s music was giving him a headache, but he tried to smile. Obviously she must have been attempting a joke.
‘What do they call spies in Russia, Kevin? I can’t think of the letters.’
‘They used to be the KGB. But ever since the start of the new millennium they’ve been known as the FSB.’
‘Are you sure you’re not ASIO?’
‘Sorry to disappoint you,’ he said wearily. ‘I’m just ATO.’
‘Well, there’s something you’re keeping hidden from me.’ Then she paused as if she had made a startling discovery. ‘You’re not gay, are you?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Surely at your age you’d know one way or the other.’ She stared at him for a while, as if she was seeing him for the first time. ‘I know what your secret is. You’re bi!’ she announced triumphantly, adding, ‘That wouldn’t be a problem for me, not if you took precautions.’
The conversation was becoming far too complex and disturbing.
‘I’m not gay and I’m not bi.’
‘Then why are you so standoffish?’
‘It’s the way I am.’
‘Shy?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Well, we can deal with that.’ And she leaned across and kissed him until he felt his heart racing so fast he feared he might have a heart attack.
At Coverdale they settled into a routine of sorts, which pleased Kevin, particularly in a house where routines were sadly lacking. Twice a week he would run a tutoring session in his room. She always brought a bottle of red and they had Chinese takeaway or pizza, sitting on the faded dhurrie rug that some previous tenant had left behind. Marlena pretended it was a picnic. At the end of the session she would usually ask to see one of his notebooks.
&n
bsp; ‘Which one?’ he would ask.
‘Surprise me,’ was always her response.
After a few weeks the statistics lecturer gave the class a quiz. Marlena scored full marks. That night she shouted Kevin a meal at the local Italian restaurant. The end of semester exams were the next hurdle. He pored over Marlena’s statistics textbook, made summaries and prepared sample exam papers. He desperately wanted her to do well. It became as important to him as his own results. The night before the exam he set his alarm clock and gravely handed it to her in the hallway.
‘You wouldn’t want to sleep in and miss the exam,’ he said.
‘I’m sure you’d be knocking on my door, reminding me,’ she replied, standing on tiptoe and giving him a kiss on his cheek which sent a shiver through his body.
‘I’ve left some breakfast things on the table for you,’ he said. ‘Just a packet of cereal and some fruit. Scientific research shows that having a good breakfast can improve one’s ability to concentrate.’
‘Thanks,’ she said and gave him one of her glorious smiles.
He longed for the conversation to continue, but it seemed to have run its course.
‘Well, good night. Sleep tight,’ he said. It was something his mother used to say when she tucked him in at bedtime.
‘Don’t let the bed bugs bite,’ replied Marlena, turning towards her door. For a moment she hesitated, as though she wanted to say something else, then she went inside and gently closed the door, and he padded back to his room.
Even though he had his own accounting exam that day, his mind kept drifting to Marlena and her statistics. Would she remember the difference between norm-referenced tests and criterion-referenced ones? Would she recall how to graph a bell curve? Would she be able to calculate a variance, let alone a standard deviation? When she arrived home late that afternoon, she seemed unsure whether she’d done well or not. Even though she had her copy of the question paper with her, she refused to allow Kevin to look at it or undertake any form of post-mortem. As far as he was concerned, that augured badly. Anyone who didn’t want to discuss their exam paper had most probably failed it.
The Trivia Man Page 15