by Nick Earls
Tachycardia.
No.
Well, I obviously wasted six years at uni.
Palpitations. It’s palpitations.
Well, close, yeah.
What do you mean?
Tachycardia means fast heart. A palpitation is a sort of subjective thump when your heart suddenly does something you’re not expecting it to.
Has anyone ever told you you might be a bit pedantic?
Oh, yeah. But it doesn’t bother me. I’m fine with it. And I can control it, you know. Some more naan?
I push the oily brown paper bag her way and she says, Thanks, and takes the last garlic piece. Hey, the CD’s finished. Is it your turn to pick one?
I go inside to change the music. It’s getting dark again, night this time. I flip through the CDs and settle on some old Go Betweens.
Do you have that thing, I say to Ash when I’m back outside, where some songs get linked to events? Or people?
How do you mean?
Sorry, this is related to the topic. I mean where you’re having one of those days when there’s a heightened sense of reality – to do with something great or really shitty – and the next song you hear is permanently associated with that day, any time you hear it, or even think about it. It’s like, the first massive crush I had, nothing got to happen. And then suddenly, when it looked like it might, the girl left town. We were going to be doing something that day, and I got a call from her friend to say she’d gone. Some family problem in Adelaide, or somewhere. And she never came back. And I went into my bedroom and turned on the radio, and the first thing I heard was a Phoebe Snow song. And it’s now stuck in my mind as part of that day. Fortunately it wasn’t her big hit, though, so I’m relatively safe.
Who’s Phoebe Snow?
Safer than I thought. But you’re right. It’s not as though I can even name the big hit any more, is it? Anyway, she probably wasn’t such a big deal, really. The girl. Mild tachycardia at the most. No palpitations.
Have you wrecked a lot of songs that way?
A few. I managed a few seething, silent crushes in my time. At school and, tragically, still when I got to uni. After that I had a rather bad phase.
A being-single phase?
No. No, that’d been the easy stuff. I’d had a lifetime of that. Hence the bad phase afterwards. I’d become too good at desperately wanting people to take an interest in me, so I was hopelessly unprepared when they did. And I sort of got into this ‘shoot first and ask questions afterwards’ mode of operating, and it’s not a popular way to conduct relationships. One way or another, I didn’t handle things particularly well. The word ‘thoughtless’ comes to mind. And then I was kind of involved with someone I really liked, or thought I might be about to really like . . .
Sounds like you put a lot on the line with that one, if you were thinking that you might be about to really like her.
Yeah. I wasn’t exactly big at risking things then. She was an OT, an occupational therapist. And I’d got into this cycle where, in the face of impending commitment, I’d get people to dump me.
Some seriously unresolved Erikson Six issues then?
Really? You mean none of it was my fault?
It sounds like all of it was your fault. It doesn’t mean Erikson wouldn’t have had a view on why you were doing it.
He’s a tough man. But that was it. I was Erikson Five and playing with the Erikson Six crowd. And I hadn’t got it sorted out when I met this OT, so I freaked out a bit – probably because of the possibility of some serious liking happening – and she didn’t take a lot of shit from anybody, really. So, before I’d thought it through, I was gone. Dumped and suddenly feeling seriously dumped. And after that there was just Mel.
Well, you loved her.
Yeah.
And it catches me like a surprise, someone coming out and saying that. Almost as though it’s an accusation, an attempt to catch me off-guard. It’s not what people say. People who know ask me if I’m all right, really, and usually they leave it at that.
So what about you?
I think I might have met a couple of guys like you in that postgrad bastard phase.
I’m not sure that I said ‘bastard’. And I didn’t know it was a phase. I thought it was just me.
No, I think it goes loser at uni, then postgrad bastard.
I’m sensing you don’t approve. I’m sure it’s just normal development.
Well, of course you’re sure. You wouldn’t want to have to accept responsibility, would you?
Never. There’s not a crappy act in my life that I can’t at least link to extenuating circumstances.
She laughs, and asks me to pass the butter chicken. Perhaps I’m just oversensitive. I think I’ve had my share of postgrad bastards. So, now I’m down here and away from all that. Much safer. But anyway, you don’t seem like someone who commits a lot of crappy acts to me.
I’m reformed. I think I was getting better, anyway, but it’s surprising how having another person depend on you completely makes you think of things differently, and stop always putting yourself first. Last night, I had this horrifying moment when things had just come back under control and I realised I’d left Lily in the car. And it hadn’t been for long, and nothing happened, but I’d forgotten about her and that really scared me. It made me scared that I might forget her again sometime. That something might actually happen.
Is this when you’d had the knife pulled on you by the cat woman?
Yeah. I shouldn’t have put that cat-woman idea in your head either. I’ve made her sound insane.
I think it’s fine to be distracted when something completely out of the ordinary happens. You’re great with Lily. Don’t doubt that for a second.
Yeah, but I have to be great with her, don’t I? And I have to be great all the time. But I want to be too. And it’s not like I don’t get a lot out of it. Think about it. She’s an amazing opportunity. The best chance I’ll ever have to pass on a whole bunch of crappy opinions as wisdom, to explain the simple mechanics behind things happening, to teach someone leg spin from the day they can stand, in case getting in early makes a difference. I’m going to bore her.
I pick her up from her rug and she wriggles in my arms, twists around until I let her stand on my lap, looking at Ash across the table.
You probably won’t bore her all the time.
Thanks. You know what’s bad? I’ll be at my worst when I’m meaning well. And I’ll embarrass her. I understand my own father a lot better now. He’s very embarrassing, and I’m going to be just the same. From when I was about four he told me that footwork was the key to batting in cricket, and we put in a lot of time on the footwork. So what if the bat was up to my chest? My footwork was sound. What he didn’t take into account was that I was naturally utterly talentless, and my footwork fell to pieces any time a ball got involved. Shit, we worked at it though.
So what makes you think you’re going to do the same things with Lily?
I just am. I already want to throw things to her to see if she can catch.
Ash laughs at me, at this confession of dagginess.
Just soft things. I sit there thinking, Yes, baby genius, you can catch this squishy toy. You can play for Australia. You can make movies and cure disease, be a senator with influence. But no pressure, you know?
Lily stops standing, thumps back into my chest.
Sure. No pressure.
But the nice thing, actually, is that she knows who I am. Look at her. She stands up – with assistance – till she forgets she’s standing and then she falls over. She can’t even trust gravity yet, but she trusts me. And she laughs at things. Boats in the bath. Thinks they’re hilarious. And I don’t get it, but I like it. This is all great, this stuff. And you get to see it happening, evolving right in front of you. You get to see her develop new levels of sophistication every week. I’m pretty keen for her to talk though. That’ll be good. You know the picture on the fridge? That big one stuck on there with magnets?
/> You’re not telling me she did that?
No, no.
Good, cause I’d probably have to go with your baby genius idea if she’d done that by six months.
That was Emily. The daughter of Wendy at work. She’s three, but she’s one of the first people I’ve seen while they’ve been developing language. And do you know what she says when she’s mad with you? ‘I’m not your friend.’ That’s what she says. She doesn’t say she’s mad. She withdraws her friendship, since she knows that’s a much bigger deal. How sophisticated is that? And in the same day you can realise how many things she doesn’t get. She asks me lots of things. Some of them are buggers too. Like, what’s a parsnip? What do you say to that?
What did you say to that?
I said it was like a pale carrot that tasted funny.
You’re totally ready for this. What’s your problem?
Lily pulls a piece of bubble wrap from a parcel that’s lying on the table, and starts flapping it about. Waving it and saying Wah, and squishing the bubbles with her fingers.
Hey, is that . . .
Proof that bubble wrap is indeed a toy, despite what they say. Don’t worry. I’ve got a good grip on the other end. We won’t be putting it in our mouths. You know, I think the first sign that a child is growing up is that they can tell which bit’s the present and which bit’s the packing material.
And somehow that puts them only a matter of days away from an appreciation of brand-name specificity and gender stereotypes.
All that Lily talk. Where did that come from? That’s what I’m wondering later, when I’m by myself mixing formula and hanging out the load of laundry from hours ago.
It just came out of me and came out of me. And came out of me. Was I boring Ash by talking about boring Lily? I’m turning into one of those mad baby people. Those people who don’t have lives. Who have photos of drooling and sleepless-night stories instead.
Years ago, Mel and I talked about how we wouldn’t get like that. How we’d be the kind of people who take reproduction in their stride and make sure they keep going out to do things. You’ll have to make sure you still make time for the two of you, the therapist said, as recently as thirty-eight weeks into the pregnancy, so it was part of that process, too.
Perhaps tonight was just another manifestation of what George warned me about – the strange disinhibition that’s part of all the singing and talking recommended by the baby book. No way would I have blathered on so much until very recently.
But maybe it was also the first chance I’d had to work some of it out. And all the nights when it’s just me and laundry and formula-mixing and a quiet, big-eyed dog, I’m fixed on the processes – the mundane, repetitive cycles that underpin each day. That have changed the way I look at time, and use time, and notice that large amounts of it have suddenly gone without me knowing.
All those Lily things I said tonight. I don’t think I’ve said them before. And it’s far from the whole story – it does no justice to teething and inexplicably bad nappies and fussiness with food and bouts of undiagnosable grumpiness – but it is part of the story.
Fortunately, I’m not completely without judgement when it comes to what I say and don’t say. When Lily picked up the bubble wrap, I was on the brink of slipping into another piece of inappropriate self-disclosure, but for once I pulled up short. Ash doesn’t need to know my father’s bubble-wrap car-bumper plan. Not yet. She knows my stabilising sheet and the takeaway menu folder, and that’s enough innovation for now.
Months ago, my father nudged another car in a car park. His bumper clipping the corner of its bumper, and inflicting an easy eight hundred dollars’ worth of damage. I can remember him fuming about it, about car companies and how they wanted this to happen, how they wanted the most minor of accidents to require the replacement of major parts. He was going to write to the papers, but then he came up with the bubble-wrap bumper plan.
It’s still at the prototype stage. He’s sure there’ll be millions in it, when it takes off. It involves a long wad of bubble wrap, several centimetres thick, attached along the length of the car bumper, with a very cheap (but aesthetically acceptable) plastic cover over it. On the classic minor car-park impact, the bubbles burst. You feel (and maybe even hear) the impact, but you have those several centimetres in which to pull up, and prevent real damage.
And it’s matt black, my father said. Very discreet.
So I didn’t tell Ash that tonight but, in my disinhibited state, it’s safe to assume I came close. My father, inventor of the bubble-wrap bumper, curator of Jim’s Fractal Gallery (‘the place in the virtual world where art and maths collide’). There’s a lot she doesn’t need to know yet.
Besides, I’d talked enough. I wanted to hear more about her. Tickle-Me-Elmo, Gingernut biscuits, whatever. I wanted to listen to her brain work, like a brain that’s not yet cluttered too much by twenties and thirties and other years of opportunities and obstacles, compromises and lessons learned. The realities that can see imagination too much tempered or put safely away.
I admire her. She has ideas. She’s unafraid to have ideas and put them out there. And I’m now too well aware of what I don’t know to take chances like that most of the time. A few dubious remarks to do with Erikson is about the limit for me, and I had to go reading to manage that. And sometimes it feels as though, when I’m not with her, there’s no prospect of excitement at all.
I hang out my last pair of underpants. The house is quiet. I’d like her to still be here. I don’t know if that’s smart.
16
Of course, if I’m being consistent, I should also be admiring my father for getting out there with the bubble-wrap bumper. Or at least for showing that imagination doesn’t have to fade at twenty-something. On the other hand, who on earth decided that art and maths should collide? What is the man on about? As some Italian duke probably said about Leonardo da Vinci . . .
Tonight it’s me who doesn’t sleep well, though there’s no real reason for it. Lightning flickers, off in the distance. Another storm cell moving through, but so far away that there’s no noise. It’s like the weather on the night Mel moved out early last summer, two weeks before Christmas. She was gone two days, and no-one knew but us. So now no-one knows but me.
She left work early, and I got home to a message on the answering machine. She said she had gone to think, to spend time alone. I wasn’t to call her on her mobile. She couldn’t say when she’d be back. If she’d be back. I remember pacing around the house followed by Elvis, who knew something was wrong. I remember the conversations I had with her in her absence. Rehearsals for fast talking, for anger, for distress, for my own clearheaded leaving.
I wasn’t sure how to handle work the next day, how to tell the others that Mel, all of a sudden, wouldn’t be turning up. But she did turn up. She was there at work, in new clothes, and she kept herself away from me all day. And again the next day, again in new clothes. And if we passed in the corridor she’d look down, and look at the wall, and walk faster. The one time I went to speak, I’d said no more than her name before her hand was up, signalling me to stop.
I cancelled therapy. She turned up at home. She apologised.
She said, I always thought we’d be happier than this.
And that didn’t work for any of the things I had ready to say to her. She cried and I said none of them. We went out, to the nearest pub to home, the RE. We listened to a band, bought a jug of beer and then another. It was Mel’s idea to go there. It wasn’t the usual kind of place she’d choose to go to, nothing like it. We’d both spent some time there when we were at uni, but never with each other. So it wasn’t about reminiscing. I could remember – can remember – noticing her back then, but only a couple of times and in the distance, and as one of a group of people I recognised from my year but didn’t really know. So we were each revisiting our separate student days, perhaps as though we were meeting for the first time. In case, in some unspoken way, that could be like starting aga
in.
So I looked at her that night, took a fresh look at her, as best I could. At the mess that crying had made of her face and that she hadn’t quite been able to fix up. Mel, staring at the band, willing things to be better, her hair clipped tightly back. The sideways looks she’d give that had a kind of smile in them. That said, We’re on a break from all that fighting, and no-one knows. We’re playing at normal, and maybe we can play some more.
Nothing had changed in the RE beer garden since our uni days, as far as I could tell. Except for the new red chairs (replacing the old red chairs) and the crowd. They’ve turned over a few generations of college students since we were at uni, and the band, of course, was younger too. I can remember Mel saying, Hey, that girl singing, she’s young enough to be our daughter, just about.
That was fifteen months ago, maybe slightly more, now. Lily was conceived that night, almost certainly.
And I can remember the strange horror of the answering machine message two days before. The thought of Oh my god, it might actually be over. The weight that lifted, and the weight it dropped on me. The times during that sleepless night that I wanted her to come back, and the times I didn’t. And she did come back, and I kept every thought from that night to myself, since we both agreed to try again, and to call it a new start. And we told, as far as I know, absolutely no-one.
After Christmas, the bills came in on our joint credit card. Her two nights at the Sheraton and all those clothes. I couldn’t think here, she said. And then I found out I couldn’t think there.
In the morning, I take Lily to childcare and drive back to St Lucia to run. Ash is there waiting. I apologise for my ramblings last night and tell her that I hope I didn’t come across as one of those baby-obsessed people.
And she says, That’s okay. You whipped out that packet of photos on about the second time we met. It’s not like I didn’t know what I was up for. I must look horrified, because she laughs, and then says, God, you’re paranoid.
Who’s clean? I’m saying to Lily when the doorbell rings after bath time that evening. Who’s the cleanest person in the house? Oh yeah, you know who it is.