by Nick Earls
The gym at the Christchurch hotel wasn’t bad, and it didn’t take me long to get into the ‘rolling hills’ routine on the bike. There’s something cruel about names like that, and their pretence to clean outside air and a view. The gym there was a small room underground, and I pedalled away getting teary-eyed watching a Nadia Comaneci doco. I don’t know what time it was, but it was the wrong time for my body, and for my state of mind, and I was teary about her triumph, about how young she looked, about the stories yet to come to do with life back in Romania, Ceausescu’s son, all that. In 1976 she struck me as a snooty overachiever, but in the doco, in my late thirties, every score of ten gave me a lump in the throat. Even as her public story was all about glory, her life was probably unravelling. As lives can do, without people knowing.
I cranked the hills up a notch, pedalled harder, and the burn set in in my thighs, the sweat fell from my hair and the screen showed all red dots and hard work.
Swimming became a habit in Calgary, and I usually had the basement pool all to myself. It had a low ceiling and warm water and the air was thick with the smell of chlorine, a smell that stayed on my skin afterwards and sometimes caught me by surprise since it seemed so out of season.
The Perth lap pool is on the rooftop, and the office buildings towering around it mark out a piece of blue sky shaped like a chunky badly-drawn star.
My turns still aren’t right.
‘This was the summer I learned to tumble turn.’ It’s not fully summer yet but if I could, at the end of it and long after, remember this summer just for that, I should be happy. It’s like an old diary entry, a line from a novel about one of those summers when the central character starts to find their way in the world, or learns that anything might be possible. But that can’t be. I’m far too late for my rite-of-passage novel. I’m simply not the swimmer I’d like to be.
I’m standing rearranging my swimming cap when my phone beeps with an incoming text message. It’s business hours in the east, and I expect that’s where it’s from.
Five more laps and I’m done, and hopping around at the side of the pool to jiggle some of the water out of my ears.
The message is from Emma: ‘Note to Mega – ensure rowing machine included in workout. Celeb canoe race only days away . . .’
I eat at an outside table at the CBD cafe, and the continental buffet is wasted on me with my broken tooth. I fill a bowl with yoghurt and a bowl with fruit, and I tilt my head to eat on the left.
I’m not sure why the tumble turns aren’t working. My friend Julie, a champion swimmer in her day, tried to teach me the technique in a pool at Noosa last summer. But each attempt I make still involves a motion more like a tumble dryer than a tumble turn, and every time I surface I’m surprised by which way I’m facing.
A voice calls out to me, a young male voice shouting my name.
I look up and some school students are standing on the corner, four sixteen-year-olds with striped ties and bags too big for them.
‘It was him,’ one of them says, and his friend says, ‘Bullshit, it was you.’
They come a few steps closer and they ask me what I’m doing in Perth and when I’ll be back on TV. This is the part of my audience demographic I could feasibly have given birth to, but it’s not something they ever seem to work out.
I tell them I’m here partly for the festival, but mainly because I’ve heard they’ve got great dentists. I tell them about yesterday, the bookstore, the experience with the designer and his sheaf of fabric. It’s only when I’m nearly finished that I wonder about the wisdom of shouting out some story about taking my bra off to an audience of sixteen-year-old boys on a city street. It works for them though.
One of them hangs back when the others go, and he says, ‘Hey, it’d be really cool if you could sign something.’ He pulls his modern history textbook out of his bag and hands it to me with a pen and says, ‘Anywhere you like. Somewhere near the end. We’re not up to that yet. And it’s Matt, Matt with two Ts.’
I open it at a photo of the signing of the Yalta Pact. I draw a cartoon of myself, a line sketch I worked out a while back for the times when my brain has run out of witty personal remarks. I put myself behind Churchill and Roosevelt, with a cartoon grin and crazy hair, and in the margin I write, ‘Matt, having a fine time in Yalta with the boys. Wish you were here. Meg.’
‘That is so cool,’ he says. ‘So cool.’
And he slaps the book shut and runs off after the others, his shirt half hanging out at the back, just as it should be.
I call Emma, and it’s good to hear her voice.
‘I got your emails,’ she says, ‘but I want to hear all the rest of it as soon as you get the chance. It’s been weeks and weeks since we’ve talked properly.’
Emma is sitting in an office in a converted Sydney terrace house, sunlight coming in through the French doors that open onto the small courtyard behind her. I’ve visited enough times to have a picture of it in my head. There’s a round table with the papers on it, but no one will read them until lunchtime. She’s barefoot, but her shoes are nearby in case anyone comes to the door. Clients will call all day, in varying states of need and disarray. Venues and promoters and occasionally the associate producers of TV shows will call to book the clients, or to make one of a series of small but annoying changes to arrangements that have already been agreed upon. We won’t get the chance to talk now, either of us.
‘What about Banff?’ she says. ‘That night in Banff. What time were you emailing people?’
‘Late. Or early, depending on how you look at it. There happened to be a terminal outside my room, and you know I can’t miss a quick email check when the opportunity presents itself.’
Another phone line rings and she says, ‘Could I just get you to hold on a second?’
The phone clunks down onto her desk and she takes the call. It’s about a contract clause and I can hear her, in a voice that now sounds flat and far away, saying that archival recordings and national broadcast are two very different things, and she’ll get it sorted out. It feels almost as if I’m eavesdropping on the conversation physically rather than remotely, as if I’m in her phone, on a file or a pile of letters on her desk and looking up at her talking, looking across the room, past the bookshelves and the table and out at the sky beyond the courtyard. Sitting in her office on an incidental visit to Sydney, talking through the plans for this tour, or another. Working out what happens next.
‘Hi, sorry.’ She’s back, loud and clear. ‘Now, where were we? Felicity’s good, isn’t she? We’ve had a few nice conversations. I think she’s quite a fan of yours. Oh, how’s the tooth? I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to Parramatta yesterday.’
‘It was a flying visit. I didn’t expect you to.’
‘They said you were a trouper.’
‘As long as they pay for the tooth . . .’
‘They’ll pay. It was their food. We’ve had that talk. They are mortified, you know.’
I can see Felicity inside the CBD cafe, no jacket this morning. I wave, but she’s looking the other way. Emma’s other line rings again.
‘Bugger,’ she says.
‘It’s okay. I think we’ve both got things to do. Felicity is roaming the buffet right now trying to find me.’
‘All right, I’ll email. I’ve seen your schedule so that’s probably the best way to do things. But I expect a call as soon as you’re back in Brisbane. All the gory details.’
Felicity reaches the hot food and turns, and this time I catch her attention. She’s pulling the new itinerary out of her bag as she gets to the door.
‘All fixed,’ she says, and she sits down. She moves the sugar, sets the itinerary on the table and rattles her hand around in her bag until she finds her sunglasses. ‘You’re going to the dentist this afternoon, so the interviews this morning are the same as before.’ She turns two pages, then a third. ‘I’ve moved the two o’clock and the three-thirty to tomorrow and Friday, but you’ll still get a break tom
orrow afternoon for coffee with your friend before the opening party tomorrow night.’
She sits back in the seat and, perhaps for the first time, breathes out. I can’t see her eyes behind the dark lenses.
I tell her I’m obviously in good hands and she smiles and nods, but looks uneasy about taking it as a compliment. ‘There’s still one or two to confirm.’
‘Sure, but you get that.’
I’ve forgotten everything she’s said already, I realise. My mind stayed stuck in the unfinished conversation with Emma. Gory details. She wants all the gory details, and I’ve told her next to nothing for more than a month. I should call her back. I would, but the other line would ring too many times. She’s busy, I’m busy, it’s not the time to talk about life.
‘Tomorrow night’s booking well,’ Felicity says. ‘And your own shows are, too.’
Calgary — two weeks ago
THE PANCANADIAN COMEDY FESTIVAL started with a big opening event called the Uptown Showcase. Before I flew in I’d had some ideas about what the Uptown part of that might mean, but it turned out that our venue was the Uptown Screen – an elegant old cinema that could seat about four hundred. I couldn’t have guessed that.
‘I hear Uptown’s a Canadian brand of cigarette,’ Dave Stone had said when we compared our schedules at the opening reception, so I told him I was pretty sure his first event was sponsored by the people who make clubs for harp seals.
The Uptown Showcase featured several comedians – two Canadians well-known from the Toronto club circuit and now TV, someone from Scotland, and me – as well as tumblers from Cirque du Soleil and a singer/songwriter called Rob Castle, who happened to be in town at the right time.
‘I know it’s eclectic,’ one of the festival people said, ‘but that’s the idea.’
The show was being taped for broadcast by the CBC, so variety helped, as did the apparent star power of Rob Castle who, I was told, was quite like Ryan Adams but a few years older and big only in Canada so far. We were to sit in the front row, all the performers, and then take our turns being interviewed on stage before doing our bit. So one edge of the stage was to be laid out like a lounge room and the rest of it set up for performance, with the CBC host disappearing into darkness once each interview was over. And I’ve done years of events, but that format was totally new to me. Then, five minutes out from show time, I was told there would be opening remarks by the Lieutenant-Governor of Alberta.
I stood in the green room with the minders and the other comedians and the muscular tumblers of Cirque du Soleil, and everyone but me was bustling and had some sense of purpose about them, or they were clustering in small groups to talk. In the distance, beyond the doors, the noises of a sound check could be heard – instruments, a voice, talking sometimes and then singing a few words.
I felt a long way from home then. The green room was dark and messy, and looked like it had hosted some other event just minutes before we arrived. There were tables pushed back, and a whiteboard with red scrawled writing on it that I was sure wasn’t to do with us.
That’s when I met Rob Castle, as I was having my ‘long way from home’ moment and using canapés to deal with it, as is my practice, ambushing the sushi trays on their way out of the kitchen. It’s all those laps of the pool. I’d swum that afternoon, and carbs are essential. Rice, salmon, seaweed – a perfect combo. Along with the statement: ‘No, Meg, don’t eat more than fifty, or you will puke.’ So I took a beer. Big improvement. The bubbles in beer occupy stomach space, and have no metabolic implications.
I wasn’t up for meeting anybody just then, not even ready for a word of conversation, and Rob Castle turned out to be standing next to me exactly as I was feeling overstuffed with food and foreign and jet-lagged and strange. And crushingly stabbingly unfunny. What was I doing in Calgary? There’s so much needing to be done at home, so much that in that instant looked wrongly abandoned. There were conversations I needed to have. I missed people, Murray and Elli. I missed our life.
And Rob Castle said, ‘Hey, that guy, that guy over there,’ pointing to the slump-faced husband of the catering coordinator. ‘Is he Sam I Am from Green Eggs and Ham, or what?’
Those were the first words he said to me. And he was right. And the two of us had a mean secret laugh at this poor Dr Seuss character of a man, and I snuck a couple more small pieces of sushi into my mouth, and Rob Castle loaded up a handful himself and jiggled them around like dice and said like a shy boy, ‘Rob Castle, by the way.’
So we had to sit next to each other after that, like perfect new best friends.
We rearranged the seating down in the front row of the crowded theatre, and we sat next to each other and kept up the mean secret laughing, at almost anyone’s expense – the host, other comedians, the chunky tumblers from Cirque du Soleil, even the kindly Lieutenant-Governor of Alberta, a woman who reminded me only of my long-gone grandmother, someone I loved dearly. But Rob Castle and I, in our sly muttering way, were out to take no prisoners. We became quite obviously rude but couldn’t stop it, talking behind our hands at inopportune moments, even after he said, ‘You have to understand that I’m not always this impolite, but I just turned twelve and I think I could be about to dive into a very messy adolescence.’
And I giggled, actually giggled.
And he said, ‘You know, I might share my lunch with you some day. You’re that kind of girl,’ and I told him, ‘Hey, no way, boy germs.’ But I don’t know if they have boy germs in Canada, since he either didn’t hear me properly or didn’t get it.
It didn’t matter. I’d swept up from my slump, I wanted my turn, I’d become completely fearless and I put in one of the best gigs of my life. I starred, and they didn’t know that’s not always where I fit in the pecking order.
Then the host called Rob Castle to the stage.
I couldn’t believe how good he was, my new friend. Good enough that my first instinct was to feel surprise, and my second was to cry at the instant solemn sadness in his songs. I caught it on the way out and stopped myself, and reminded myself I was still part of the show here, down in the front row. There were eyes on me now.
It was probably just the usual tricks of the singer-songwriter at work, but deftly done. Songs about love and loss, the classic and essential topics, effortlessly poetic but each line true. He made me wonder, for one dumb romantic-moment, if they all have broken hearts. One dumb romantic jet-lagged moment. I don’t lead the life I invent for performance, after all, and I can’t expect that singer/songwriters have only their own lives to tell us about.
And when he finished his final song, the last note hung in the air as if suspended or rising on an updraft, and the applause fell on it as loud as four hundred people could make it. Rob Castle smiled a boyish smile, bowed and waved and bounded from the stage for the seat next to mine, his guitar, quite by accident, still in his hand.
The Lieutenant-Governor of Alberta hugged us both on the way out. ‘Oh, you two,’ she said, ‘you were wonderful.’
And I blushed fiercely, since I’d been so rude about her during her opening remarks, and because of the way she squished the two of us together in her broad grandmother’s hug.
Perth — Wednesday
IN THE CAB on the way to the second radio interview, Felicity says, ‘I’ve been meaning to apologise about Adam last night. We haven’t been going out that long, and he really wanted to come and . . .’ It tails off there, and she stiffens up. ‘It won’t be happening again.’
‘Why? You’ve had him shot? There wasn’t a problem, not as far as I was concerned.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. I think I was the one who brought up the subject of the boning knife.’
‘In the airport. Yes.’ She takes a quick laugh at herself for that misguided swipe at Adam, and she gives her head a shake as though it makes less sense this morning. ‘He’s probably sulking today. I’m beginning to think he might be a bit of a sulker. I’m not sure how I feel about that.’
She laughs again, at the great creative sulking of her stocky novelist-to-be boyfriend, presently pulling a surly espresso or two nearby in Northbridge. I tell her she should bring him to one of my shows. We should put his name on the door.
‘Well, I don’t know if I can do that,’ she says.
‘Maybe you can’t. But I can.’
‘Good,’ she says, in an ambivalent way that I hadn’t expected. ‘Well, he’d love to come. I know he would.’ She opens her bag, gives it a shake and reaches into it for her phone. ‘I told him he was kind of banned, so that’s how I know. But I can unban him now, I guess.’
She glances out the window, then checks her messages, makes a couple of notes on the itinerary. She underlines something more than she needs to, then puts a box around it.
I can see her going, ‘You are banned, Adam,’ with a finger-pointing sternness that he’d have to laugh at, which might make things worse, or better.
We take a detour around some roadworks and come out with a park to our left and the river to our right. We’re back on the edge of the city on the way to the ABC studios. I want to tell her that boys like Adam like that kind of thing, some decisive treatment, but only a certain amount of it and it’s not always easy to measure it out right. But what do I know? For a start, I don’t know Adam.
‘Tell me about this person I’m talking to next.’ That seems like a better thing to say instead, and it’s what I go with. Back to business. ‘What are they like? What’s the story?’