The Happiness Show

by Catherine Deveny

  One balmy night she met up with a friend for a movie and a beer. By the time she got home, it was almost eleven and the house was asleep. Still full of beans, Lizzie sat down at the computer to check out a website of morning-sickness remedies her friend had suggested for Jules. Then she checked her emails and began weeding out the spam. Ambrose Gold wanted to tell her how to work from home and earn $$$$$$$$$. Ada Nunez promised cheap mortgage rates. Abdul Bender would ship Viagra to her door and Adriana Lin could lengthen her schlong. Just as she was about to delete a message with the subject line ‘Hi’ from a T. Shorebrook, she suddenly realised it was from Tom.

  Hey Lizzie,

  I had a quiet moment here at work and I googled you. I hope this is not intrusive. I promise I’m not stalking you. I just thought I should let you know that Celia is fine. It was all so dramatic the last time we saw each other, I wanted to clear everything up. Anyway, this may not even be you; I just found this email address on a petition about a mobile phone tower near a school. Maybe I found another Lizzie Quealy. But I am fairly confident there is only one you.

  Tom x

  Lizzie’s heart raced. She read the email over and over again. She was thrilled. She couldn’t believe he had found her and she couldn’t believe how happy she was. Why had she not thought of googling him? How many Tom Shorebrooks were there in the UK? Probably millions.

  What to write back? She wanted to write now but she didn’t want him to think she was too eager. She needed to give it some thought. She googled him. There was only one Tom Shorebrook. A partner in the law firm Hemley and Shorebrook in Hetherington Lane, North London. Specialising in wills, trust accounts and body corporates.

  Lizzie rolled into bed and lay wide awake next to Jim, who was lightly snoring. She couldn’t sleep so she sat up and read a couple of chapters of Douglas Kennedy’s The Pursuit of Happiness. Every now and then she would remember the email and shudder with joy. She finally fell asleep around 3 a.m., but not before standing in the backyard under the fig tree, smoking one of Jim’s Log Cabins and getting lost in possibilities.

  CHAPTER 16

  ‘Mr Shorebrook, Mr Foxworthy on line two.’

  ‘Thanks, Bronwyn.’ Tom picked up the phone. ‘Tom Shorebrook. Ah yes, Mr Foxworthy, are you well? Tremendous. Now, there has been a slight delay on those documents but as soon as we receive them we’ll have them couriered to you. Yes, no problem. Goodbye.’

  Tom hung up the phone and looked at his desk. The pile of work was getting bigger and bigger, the unanswered phone messages, the overdue conveyancing, wills to be dealt with, contracts to finalise, discoveries to discover. He wanted to sob. It wasn’t the actual work that was the problem, but the backlog. He was paralysed by the sheer weight of it. He stood up and stretched, looking out the window at the people below. He wondered if they all felt like he did, overwhelmed, out of shape and tired. So tired. He felt as if he could sleep for days. The buzz in his head wouldn’t stop and he’d had a knot in his stomach for weeks. Life was speeding up and getting further out of his control; he felt as though he might be flung off at any moment.

  Even sleep was no help. It simply didn’t work anymore. He would go to sleep with Mr Psiakis’s settlement, Jim Hutchens’s payout, Father O’Leary’s injunction and all the rest of his cunting, ungrateful, selfish motherfucking clients whirling around his head. Then he would close his eyes, wake up four hours later and he’d feel no different. For the first time in his life he understood why people killed themselves as a way out. He didn’t want to kill himself. But he did want a way out.

  His computer beeped, announcing a new email. He turned around and looked at the screen. It was Lizzie.

  Tom,

  Well, fuck me, I was wondering how you were all getting on. You poor old thing. It must have been a terrible shock. But it is terrifying how things snap back to normal so quickly.

  My life is pretty cruisy at the moment. Lots of backyard barbies, trips to the beach, lying in the hammock eating watermelon. Start work on the series in February. Sometimes I just wish it would snow.

  Lizzie

  P.S. What happened with your car?

  And for five whole minutes Tom forgot. Forgot everything else and just remembered Lizzie and what she did to him. He read the email over and over again, immersing himself in the feeling of her. Everything lifted and he thought maybe he had found his way out. But Lizzie would have to come in with a search party.

  So Lizzie and Tom began emailing each other. First it was just funny stuff – kitsch seventies recipes with names like Caucasian Shaslicks and Mackerel Surprise, or links to preposterous eBay listings. Then they talked political stuff and books and movies. Soon they were both totally preoccupied with their emails. Neither knew how the other felt, but they both knew how the emails made them feel. New again.

  Tom took to having a wank in the shower every morning, thinking of Lizzie. It was his ritual and his escape and he wouldn’t give it up for anything. He kissed Felicity when he left for work and made sure he was home to read to Celia at night, but he wasn’t really there.

  Felicity left him alone. She was good like that. She knew when he was in a bad space and she had faith that he’d come around eventually. She also knew that hassling him would only make it take longer. She had learnt that men, or at least Tom, liked to discover for themselves that they had lost the plot. They weren’t too keen on being told, especially by their wives. When things got really bad, she would set a deadline by which she’d confront him. He always managed to get his shit together just before the timer went off.

  When they were first married, she would get annoyed that he never did the dishes. Finally she did an experiment. She let the dishes pile up, curious to see how long it would take him to notice. In a few days, Tom not only washed up but also cleaned the benches, scrubbed the stovetop and swept the floor. She repeated the experiment again and again, trying it with other chores around the house. And she found that their tolerance levels were different, but only slightly. If she left things a little longer, Tom would happily to do the jobs she felt she was always lumped with.

  One night when Celia was a baby, Felicity woke up to the little girl crying. Tom always said he never heard her, so Felicity, hearing that Celia was not very distressed, let her cry a little longer than she usually would. Tom woke up. He looked over at Felicity, who pretended she was asleep, and then got up, took Celia in his arms and rocked her gently to sleep, singing ‘How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?’

  She then reversed the experiment: she started putting the rubbish out before Tom got to it; she cleaned out the guttering; she loaded the washing machine before he had a chance to. She realised that they had different boiling points, as she came to think of them, and that it was useful to know where each other’s limits were.

  Felicity was now close to her limit with Tom. He was uncommunicative. His temper was short. He had nothing positive to say about anything. And she knew he could be better than this.

  One evening, after he’d finished reading the last Wimpy Kid book to Celia, he shuffled downstairs, sat down to the beef stroganoff dumplings Felicity had made and began to eat without a word or even a glance in her direction. Felicity had reached her boiling point. ‘Tom?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘You have to do something about work.’

  ‘Mmmm.’ Tom shovelled the meal into his mouth like he had never seen food before. He had been lunching on biscuits, coffee and Quick-Eze for almost a month now.

  ‘Tom. I need to know what you are going to do.’

  ‘I’m going to get through this backlog and things will level out a bit and then everything will be sorted.’

  They ate in tense silence. Felicity chewed her food but she couldn’t taste it, she was so full of adrenaline and anger. Raw, white-hot rage.

  The phone rang. Tom didn’t move. Just as Felicity put her napkin do
wn it stopped, mid-ring, and they picked up where they’d left off: resentful, steely silence. The hatred only people in a long-term relationship can know.

  Finally, Felicity spoke. ‘THIS IS MY … FUCKING … LIFE … TOO.’

  Tom looked up. ‘And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘This is my fucking life and you affect me. We share this life and if you go under, I go under with you. Every day I try to create as many happy moments as I can for us and you know what? Until recently I always thought we were in this together.’

  ‘Felicity, this is not a great time.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but there is never a good time and I am not going to sit here waiting for you to have a heart attack, a stroke or a nervous breakdown. Right now you are a walking zombie, Tom, and you are not doing anything about it. I don’t know who you are at the moment.’

  Tom tried not to flip. It didn’t work.

  ‘This is outrageous. Do you know how hard I work for this family? I am working my arse off. You have no idea how much stress I’m under. I would swap my life with yours any day. Any day. I am so fucking tired, and this is what you call support? Well, thanks very much.’

  ‘I am supporting you, Tom. Who’s been ironing your shirts, cooking your meals and caring for your child? Who has been paying the bills, doing the shopping and keeping the household together? But you are simply not there for us. We can’t count on you. You throw us a few scraps when you feel like it but it’s not enough. We can’t live on scraps.’

  ‘What do you expect me to do? I don’t even have time to eat lunch.’

  ‘What do I expect you to do? Let me think. Have lunch, exercise every now and then, look after yourself, don’t drink so much, hire someone to help with the load at work, face up to the fact that Harry isn’t coming back, take thirty minutes to deal with your car, ask me how I am, ask me how my day was, cook dinner occasionally and some physical intimacy wouldn’t hurt either.’

  ‘Sure. Right. And when am I going to have time to do all that?’

  ‘All that? No, Tom, I just want you to do one of those things. Just one. Any one. And I want you to tell me what you are trying to prove and to whom.’

  ‘FAAAAAAAAAAAAARK!’ Tom was wild. He picked up the remains of his dinner and threw it across the room. The stroganoff sauce splattered the couch, the fridge, the coffee table, the benches, a picture Celia had drawn and, so cliché, a photo of the two of them on their wedding day. But Tom didn’t see and would never know because he had already walked out, slammed the front door and was halfway down the street.

  Felicity sat stunned, silent and alone. Until she heard a noise. It was Celia. Felicity pulled herself together and loped upstairs to see what was wrong. Celia was sitting up in bed, crying.

  ‘Darling, are you okay?’

  ‘I wet the bed, Mum,’ Celia said groggily. ‘I wet the bed.’

  Tom walked so fast and so hard he didn’t realise how cold he was in his shirt sleeves. When he finally stopped two hours later, he was numb and sweating and he thought he was going to be sick. He stood heaving over the kerb near a tube station. He started to retch and then his chest began to tighten. Fuck, he thought. I’m going to die.

  He pulled out his mobile phone to call an ambulance, looked up at the street sign and realised he was on the corner of George Street and Finley Close. And he remembered those Australian girls and their backpacks, the week before he’d bumped into Lizzie at Keith and Becky’s. He tried to slow his breathing down but his heart kept pounding. Then he vomited: the stroganoff, three coffees and half a packet of HobNobs, all swimming in a sea of antacid.

  Felicity had just got off the phone with Becky when Tom walked in. He was grey, drawn and clammy. But his chest pains had vanished and he no longer felt angry, just numb. He walked over to Felicity, knelt down in front of her and put his head on her lap. ‘I am so sorry, Flick. You’re right. I know those are your favourite words but I’m serious. I am just so shit right now. I’m not very good at life. I’m going to try and do better. I’ll put an ad in the paper for another solicitor tomorrow.’ He looked up and there were tears pouring down her face. He put his head back down on her knee. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m not coping. Let me make you a cup of tea.’

  He stood up, kissed her on the forehead and put the kettle on. Finally Felicity spoke.

  ‘I just want you to promise me one thing.’

  ‘Anything,’ said Tom, poking around for the tea. ‘Gender reassignment, body piercing, vow of poverty?’

  ‘Can we go for a holiday this year? Somewhere sunny?’

  ‘Sure. You book it and I’ll be there.’

  ‘And another thing?’

  ‘Okay, just one.’

  She picked up his suit jacket and pointed to a loose thread on the arm. ‘Get this fixed. You’re unravelling.’

  He handed her a cup of tea and she handed him the coat and he wondered what he had caught it on. And then he remembered. Lizzie’s bracelet, in the London Eye. He rubbed the thread between his thumb and forefinger. He was unravelling.

  *

  ‘So I’ll be arriving the first week of February and we’ll start shooting then. We’ll have six weeks, interstate stuff first and then the rural stuff and then cram the Melbourne and studio stuff into the last two weeks,’ said Keith. She could hear him smoking down the line.

  ‘That sounds fine. Now what do you need from me?’

  ‘A rough outline of the interviews and stunts and how you see them executed. Maybe a couple of top and tails for the first few episodes.’

  ‘Have they worked out whether they want eight or six?’

  ‘Oh sorry, Lizzie, yeah, six. Listen, where should I stay in Melbourne? My PA is sorting me a serviced apartment.’

  ‘Anywhere. Where are you looking?’

  ‘Hang on, let me look.’ She could hear him tapping away on the computer. He was eating something. ‘What have we got here? East Melbourne, Richmond, St Kilda, Carlton …’

  ‘Any of those would be good. What are you after – pubs and clubs, cafés and restaurants, or hookers and cocaine?’

  ‘All of the above.’

  ‘Well, you can’t go wrong with any of those places. Hey, listen, Keith, how’s Tom’s little girl? Lucy, was it?’

  ‘Celia? She’s fine. Bit of a gammy leg and a touch of epilepsy but otherwise right as rain.’

  Of course, Lizzie knew Celia was fine. She and Tom were emailing every couple of days. But she thought it would seem odd not to ask. You know, put Keith off the scent. Not that there was a scent. They were just harmless emails, right?

  In two different countries, two different seasons and two different time zones, they had this little safe place, their cyber island. Neither knew if other people could see their emails and neither knew what the other was thinking. They hoped they did. They so hoped they did.

  Lizzie, I love the way you crap on about your working-class cred. I don’t think most working class would consider you one of them. More one of us, I’m afraid to say. The whole class issue is full of paradoxes. Why is it fashionable to have working-class roots, but not desirable to behave in a typically working-class way? E.g. eating cheap and nasty food, being a couch potato, wearing baggy tracksuit pants and smoking Benson & Hedges when you have twins on the way?

  You are such a knob, Tom! I see myself as culturally working class in the same way I see myself as a cultural Catholic. It was terrifying the first time someone pointed out to me that I was middle class. An accusation I refute vehemently.

  If I recall correctly you have a penchant for wearing sarongs. This is a very middle-class garment, although it is not necessarily beyond the financial means of the working classes (Nike sportswear is much pricier). So why do you wear it?

  Geez, Tom, I am trying to eat my way up the food chain. This is my pathetic attempt at
shabby chic! At least I don’t shave my head to look more working class.

  Hey, I shave it so that I look less bald. I put it to you that you are at once proud and ashamed of your roots.

  I prefer to think I have the courage of my contradictions.

  Well, I am (and you won’t like this) much more classist than I am racist.

  Seeing as class is such a preoccupation with you Brits, this is not surprising to me. I myself am a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll.

  Some of my best friends are working class.

  I don’t believe that for a second. The only working-class people you know would be your cleaner and your nanny. Oh, and your kids’ nanny.

  Now it’s a little bit later. I’m just back from lunch. I had sushi. Why do I always think of you when I eat sushi?

  Because I taste like fish?

  Ha, ha. It always takes me by surprise when they speak to me in Japanese at this place. It’s my fault – I wish I’d never started it. I don’t ever properly understand what they’ve said until about half an hour later.

  Oh yeah, the Japanese thing is weird. Australian tourist places tend to be full of happy-snappy Japanese. I’ll be muscling through the turnstiles at the Steve Irwin zoo, the Neighbours theme park or Crocodile Dundee on Ice and the little bit of Japanese I used to know (Hello, How are you, Excuse me, Go left, Go right, Go straight and Please don’t spaff in my hair I just washed it) comes flooding back. It must be bizarre for the office ladies and salary men, seeing this crazy Celtic woman speaking Nihongo. Or when I’m in Melbourne and eating balls on sticks at some yakitori joint. Hearing Japanese again feels like having a long-distance phone call.