The Thompson Gunner

by Nick Earls

  Sometimes you meet people, I told myself. You meet new people and you click. And gender doesn’t come into play and, when you’re old enough to know that, it’s all good. It stays uncomplicated, you stay in contact, you’ve got yourself a new friend.

  We stepped out into the freezing air, and it seemed several degrees colder than just minutes before when I’d left the Uptown Showcase on a post-performance high.

  From the outside of the Ship and Anchor there was no sense of what you’d find inside. It was low and quiet and sealed against the cold. How do you ever know these places are there, if you don’t know already? It’s not like home, where all year round the crowds spill out of the Regatta and the RE, and the beer garden noise travels across the neighbourhood.

  The air was thick and warm inside. The others had their coats off as soon as we were in the door, but I kept wearing mine. I haven’t hung a coat since I was eight and my mother wasn’t there to remember this one.

  But Jen saw me stuck there with it still on and said ‘I will remember your coat’ in an ideally maternal way that placed emphasis on each word, so I went with it then and trusted her. ‘I will remember your coat and, believe me, so will you if you get two steps out the door without it.’

  I wasn’t thinking that way, since it’s never that cold at home. I lose umbrellas all the time. The second rain stops, they’re out of my head. With a cheap umbrella that’s no calamity, but the jacket I was wearing was borrowed from a friend and made from an expensive synthetic thermal fibre. She hikes in New Zealand with it, above the snowline.

  Jen’s coat was the real thing – ankle-length and elegant – and I looked like a tourist who didn’t know much. She held my jacket at arm’s length and looked at it and said ‘You are so Australian’ and in that context it was clear that ‘Australian’ was a kind Canadian euphemism for clueless. ‘I bet you throw the first snowball when we get to Banff.’

  The Ship and Anchor had wood trim everywhere and smelled like old beer and warm damp wool. It was full of people and noise – alcohol-driven conversations shouted over the music. It was obviously the place to be on a Friday night in Calgary, if it was in fact Friday. I’d been less certain of the days ever since I’d crossed the dateline. I always make a habit on tour of knowing what’s coming next, what my itinerary has for me tomorrow, since that’s what I have to deal with, but it does mean your understanding of everyone else’s calendar can start to drift.

  The name of the day counts for less when you move on twice a week. No matter how much you like people, you can’t make regular plans with them when you’re on tour. Neither one of you gets to say ‘How about next Tuesday?’ since you won’t be there. There’s just tomorrow and maybe the day after, then email and the small chance that future itineraries will collide, or that you’ll be back some day.

  We sat at bench seats on either side of a long wooden table that someone called Gary had been holding for us against all odds. He was a volunteer too, a college student trying to grow his first beard, and we all squeezed in – we’d picked up a couple more people by then – and the others started talking about friends and writers and bands I didn’t know.

  Gary sat opposite me, picking up the conversation about writing and making a point about authenticity, saying that authentic writing from Calgary would have people not walking on the streets at times like this. They’d use the fifteen-plus walkways that go over the streets, whereas a foreigner mightn’t know that, and might send their characters outside and write the story as though it was happening in a half-populated city. Which wasn’t what Calgary was at all, and they’d just be exposing their lack of any real connection with the place.

  ‘I think a lot of what creates place gets down to detail,’ he said. ‘The small details. That’s where the truth is. Like, how do people get around? Which beer do they drink?’

  I was a foreigner there, and nothing made it plainer than the fifteen-plus walkways. They hadn’t become part of my Calgary story, and they never did. I don’t understand walking fifteen feet above everything, and I find streets hard enough to navigate at the best of times. I wouldn’t last one winter in Calgary.

  We drank Big Rock Traditional Ale, and Jen taught me to call it Traditional so I’d get it right when it was my turn to go to the bar.

  With the movement of people around our table, I ended up opposite Rob Castle when I got back, and he said, in a lull in the music, ‘Hi, stranger. Imagine seeing you in these parts.’

  After another beer or two, we all sang along to ‘Blister in the Sun’, though I wouldn’t normally sing a note when sitting across the table from anyone musical. I was the last to join in, but Rob Castle said, ‘C’mon, Meg, it’s the Violent Femmes. It’s not about singing. And it’s perfect with beer.’ And he nudged my leg under the table with his foot, as if he were daring me. I felt like a schoolgirl whose ponytail had just been pulled by the cute boy in the playground.

  I joined in at the next chorus, as loud as the rest of them, and Jen reached over and clinked her glass against mine. I avoided Rob Castle’s eyes, and told my cheeks not to go red. I took another mouthful of beer, Traditional, before the verse, and I remembered Elli at seven sitting on the floor at home with a jigsaw puzzle in front of her singing ‘Why can’t I get just one fuck’, and thinking that’s the last of that Violent Femmes album for about ten years.

  Next up, with people in the mood for singing along, there was a song that’s either called ‘The Saskatchewan Pirate Song’, or at least referred to that way. It’s as funny and rollicking as it should be, and all the others could sing along with it as well. Jen leaned forward during the second verse and explained something about the improbability of sea-going piracy in Saskatchewan. I didn’t catch it all, but I picked up the sense of it and already knew from the map that oceans weren’t an option there.

  In the bathroom shortly after that I sat in a cubicle, drunker with the brightness of the light in there, thinking more about Elli and the Violent Femmes. I felt a nausea that I put down to jet lag, but a deep head-swirling nausea that made me cry into my hands even though I didn’t feel particularly sick. I didn’t want this, I didn’t want to think about it, I didn’t want to be reminded. Outside the cubicle door, girls were talking, planning their lives in the coming days and weeks, and discussing the boys they were with, all of whom it seemed had had too much to drink and were creating a very poor impression.

  I washed my face, and drank no more.

  In the street perhaps an hour afterwards, we walked and talked and the group reshaped itself in a way that put me next to Rob Castle. The temperature was close to freezing then. It must have been. I had my hands in my pockets, since I don’t have gloves, and only my face was exposed and it felt like it was stiffening up.

  We walked along streets I hadn’t been on before, past closed cafes and offices and a cowboy-themed bar where the doors would swing open for a second or two and whooping and hollering and crowd noise would surge, and then be clipped off as they closed again. A hum still passed through, but as an indistinct mixture of music and people, and easily drowned out by the occasional passing car and even the wind when it gusted.

  We stopped to look in through the high windows and I could see girls dancing on tables in cowboy hats, but I got no clear sense of whether they were staff or patrons.

  We turned away and started walking again, and I said something I forget now and Rob Castle said ‘You crazy thing’ and he messed up my hair with his hand.

  I was feeling very tired, physically still not myself in this new place, and I felt tears well up, out of nowhere. Maybe it was just the cold dry air on my eyes, but his gesture seemed way out of line, and great, and perfectly friendly, and almost unbearably intimate. His hand settled on my shoulder for a second, then moved away. The others were two steps ahead of us down the street by then, beyond the windows of this crazy place, breathing vapour, smacking their gloved hands together, heading for the traffic lights.

  And I said, because it seemed t
he moment for it, ‘Your music, it’s so sad, some of it.’

  And he said, ‘Well, I guess it is. I don’t know that I mean it to be, always, but I pick up my guitar and ideas come along and I guess they become what they become. And I’m not very metaphorical. I want to get to the heart of it. So they’re simple songs. I’m surprised how sad some of them become.’ We walked a bit further and he looked down the street and into the far distance and he said, ‘Maybe that’s just in us, that capacity.’

  And the guy on the door at the cowboy place called out ‘Hey, aren’t you Rob Castle?’ even though we were five steps past him by then, and onto something else.

  I called him in his room, but at a time that turned out to be three-fifteen a.m. I thought my head had just hit the pillow, but that my eyes had snapped open because I suddenly had one more thing to say. He answered with a sleepy edgy voice, like someone expecting bad news, or a fire. And that’s when I woke up enough to look at the clock, so the first thing I said was ‘Oh my god, it’s three-fifteen, three-fifteen a.m. in Calgary’.

  And Rob Castle said, the edge gone from his voice and an amused kind of warmth in its place, ‘Meg, I was missing you. Meg the talking clock . . .’

  I told him I was sorry, terribly sorry, even saying the word ‘terribly’ though I never would usually.

  ‘Oh, no, it’s not very rock of me,’ he said, still with the warmth and one of those fuzzy not-quite-woken voices. ‘I was just three hours into this deep deep sleep, and I was hoping you’d call and update me on the party situation.’

  Here he was, my new best friend with his Dr Seuss references, his capacity for sad sad songs and his shy-boy charm, and I was calling him at three-fifteen a.m. and there was no fire, no news of any kind, no party I knew of where people more rock than either of us weren’t giving up on this night just yet. I was stuck between things to say. I wanted to talk, I realised, but I didn’t know how to put that. Suddenly, I was less sorry, less tired, and wanting to talk to Rob Castle. Wanting him to be a little more rock, and to wake up.

  And that’s when he said, ‘Could we have breakfast maybe? We could meet in the lobby, say eight-thirty? There’s a cafe in the mall, the Good Earth, I’ve been there a couple of times. I don’t know what your schedule’s like . . .’

  I told him my schedule was good, nothing till ten or so, and I lay awake until four or later, wondering why I’d called him.

  He was in the lobby at eight-thirty, as planned.

  We walked outside on the way to the Good Earth, since he said he preferred the fresh air unless it was seriously cold, and he didn’t really know how to navigate fifteen feet above Calgary anyway. I looked like crap that morning, I’m sure I did. Washed out, with bags under my eyes that my concealer stick was struggling to hide. The wind blew right at us on the way to the mall, and the cold came through the legs of my jeans. He didn’t seem to feel it. His jacket was wide open, his hands in his pockets in a jaunty sort of way, pointing forwards and gesturing as he talked.

  ‘I’d recommend the spinach and feta scones,’ he said, once we’d sat ourselves at the window table at the Good Earth.

  He was right. They were just as they should be, crusty on the outside, soft in the middle. The coffee was good, too.

  We each had a scone, and he broke his into pieces with a fork and then looked at the plateful of crumbs and shrugged, as if it hadn’t quite worked.

  We talked, mainly about inconsequential things. We talked about touring. He told me he always kept his house keys in his pocket so that he had some connection with home. He ordered a second coffee. He signed an autograph on a paper serviette for a customer who was on her way out, and he did so very obligingly.

  We sat and looked out at the mall. I looked at the people traffic in this place that I hadn’t seen before, the hundred-year-old buildings, the shops that were closed or being refurbished. The lack of people traffic, actually.

  ‘My father was a travelling salesman,’ he said, and I think it linked to our conversation about touring. ‘He was away a lot when I was young. More than I would’ve liked, anyway. I was the last kid in my class to learn to ride a bike because no one got around to teaching me. But it was an era of travelling salesmen, and there must have been kids like me all over North America.’ He laughed at himself then and said, ‘Where am I getting this melancholy vibe? Do I really think you’ve got any interest in my bike riding?’

  We talked about when we were young, and he guessed correctly that I’d been a big Anne of Green Gables fan. He also guessed that I would have picked Shaun Cassidy over David back then, which wasn’t right, though I had friends who would’ve gone that way. He told me his first crush was Carly Simon, without a doubt, and his second was a girl in his sixth-grade class who never noticed him.

  ‘I wrote a song about that once,’ he said. ‘Well, kind of.’

  He yawned and stretched his arms above his head and out to the sides, and I apologised for my late night call, about five times, and about five times he said it was no problem. He said he’d slept either side of it, hours each side, and he’d slept pretty well.

  He told me he’d been expecting more ‘chick stuff when I got up on stage, so I told him that, after a while, the general hopelessness of men starts to look a little obvious.

  He laughed and said, ‘I never get sick of seeing that kind of act. Men can do with reminding, you know. Some of them are appalling – full of tedious stories about absent fathers, and what it’s like to be a twelve-year-old with trainer wheels.’

  Outside the window, a busker stood with his back to us, tuned his guitar without any real hurry and started playing Bonnie Tyler’s ‘It’s A Heartache’. But his only audience was a magician on the other side of the mall, the Great Cosmo, who stood at a boarded-up shopfront, his name surrounded by spangly gold moons and stars on the small sign hanging from the tray table jutting out from his waist. He wore tails and a top hat, but his face let him down by being not even a little mysterious. He dealt cards out onto the table, executed a trick for practice or simply to keep his hands doing something in the cold. The busker played on.

  ‘He’s quite terrible, isn’t he?’ Rob Castle said to me behind his hand. ‘And yet I can’t look away.’

  The busker finished and bowed from the waist to the empty mall, and the Great Cosmo called out, ‘That was special, Hal. You’re making it your own, I’m thinking.’ And the two of them laughed in a way that was about sharing the absurdity of it all, and getting through it.

  ‘It’s a goddamn Larson cartoon,’ Rob Castle said and, as was fast becoming usual, I thought it was brilliant.

  On our way out, I threw the busker a dollar and I noticed his case was mainly full of one-cent coins.

  ‘I hear they met years ago,’ Rob Castle said when we were well beyond earshot, ‘on the festival circuit, and that’s what becomes of such things.’

  ‘A chance collision somewhere and, years later, you’re facing each other down in an empty mall and playing for pennies.’ That’s how I put it, but it sounded wrong so I said, ‘Something happened there. That was way sadder than it was meant to be.’

  And that’s when I told him about Murray, breaking up with Murray two weeks and three days and several hours before, for the time that Murray insisted was the last time. And that it probably really was the last time, because we’d worked through it and fixed essentially nothing, and that had taken a lot of energy and some months as well, and he hadn’t returned my calls in the last seventeen days. Not that there had been many, because you get the message soon enough.

  And I told him I knew that was too much information and a stupid thing to talk about, but he said it wasn’t, and for a buck he’d do some Bonnie Tyler for me, if it’d help. His arm was around me then, which was good.

  Perth — Thursday

  ‘BATTLE OF THE SEXES’ – who starts the day this way by choice? Across the country, commercial radio stations wake people up and welcome them to the morning with this girl-versus-guy tussle over
inanities.

  I should get Emma to add it to my list of tour requirements. Needs access to a gym, ideally with lap pool. Needs a regular supply of fruit and water. Will not do stupid dawn or red-eye flights. Will not participate in ‘Battle of the Sexes’ under any circumstances.

  The last time I did, I gave the guy a pounding, simply because I was so irritated with myself for forgetting to tell Emma I’d never do it again. Of course, the guy’s always a sitting target. He’s nervous about being on radio and annoying me merely by phoning in, endorsing the ‘Battle of the Sexes’ concept and keeping it on air. Plus, he’s up for a prize and I’m not. But I can’t let that have too much of a bearing on my performance when I’m fighting the battle for women everywhere. I can’t look weak, caring, nurturing. It’s in the interests of challenging stereotypes that I have to set out to pound him. And he should understand that.

  He’s Tyson today. He’s standing at the breakfast bar in the kitchen at home, wearing a cap, just old enough to shave semi-regularly and wondering if the fuzz on his chin might amount to something if given the chance. He’s on his parents’ phone, he’s taken completely off-guard by seven-forty a.m, just fast enough and just slow enough to be the sixth caller, not a chance when it comes to best-of-three-questions any time before ten o’clock.

  That’s the Tyson I’m seeing anyway and, when one of the hosts asks if I’m ready to go, I’m psyched enough to say, ‘I’m going to crush you like a bug, Tyson. Like a little bug.’

  The hosts both go ‘Oooooh’ and one of them says, ‘Sounds like fighting talk, Tyson.’

  Tyson comes back with ‘Um, yep, righto . . .’ and then, when they start reading question one, he talks over them with a better comeback and the question has to start again.

  I’m up two-nil inside a minute, feeling a sudden flicker of the urge to nurture, and three–nil looks harsh. They ask a sport question. I give him a few seconds but all he gives back is silence.