The Thompson Gunner

by Nick Earls

  I’m hazy on the Bloody Sunday details though, and more certain of the things we found in the woods. Perhaps my parents steered me away from some of the TV coverage.

  I’ve stayed away. I couldn’t see the movie, though people told me it was good once you adjusted to the accents. I still don’t know how many people got shot by soldiers, or why.

  Looking back on it now, I had a Famous Five childhood in many respects, but it developed an edge to it. I did all the things they did, but I did more. They never seemed to watch the news. They never had their car searched by the army.

  My life was mostly like theirs, though, and close to perfect in those respects. My parents were very much in favour of blowing the cobwebs away on any clear day, so I spent a lot of time outside with my friends, at each other’s houses or in the woods.

  At harvest time, we’d build forts in the fields out of hay bales and no one ever stopped us. In the woods we’d see ghosts and terrify each other and run like hell. And we’d clamber over the lorries in the McKendrys’ field, coming to grief repeatedly in there. There was plenty to fall from and to fall onto, but again no one told us not to climb the way we did, though they did tell us to be careful.

  We’d find ways to get around in there that we were sure no one knew, and we’d give them coded names. If anyone came after us, that was where we’d escape them. We’d lose them in the McKendrys’ field. We knew the quick ways through, and the dead ends, and where to hide. I don’t know how many lorries there were but there must have been at least dozens, and tractors and other broken-down equipment. I don’t know why. Nothing ever seemed to leave. No adult seemed to go in there, and everything in the field seemed long past salvaging.

  So there it was, an entire field of rusting vehicles at one edge of a farm, and I never thought to ask what they were there for.

  I went to school with Sammy McKendry, one of the sons of Sam McKendry the farmer. He and I and a couple of others spent a lot of afternoons in the field, and there was endless scope for an eight-year-old’s imagination there.

  We once found a pile of smashed windscreen glass that we called diamonds, and we kept it in an old leather glove that Sammy had noticed under the seat of one of the lorries. It was a big man’s glove, with quite a capacity for diamonds. We shook them down into the fingers and filled the palm and called ourselves a country, or a band of pirates, depending on how we were feeling. We had the wealth of a country, surely, but we were pirates at least as often, and we’d found the diamonds at the bottom of the ocean or taken them from worse brigands than ourselves.

  We hid them in a glove box in a particular broken-down Bedford – whatever the story, that was constant – and we swore each other to secrecy. Even if they came at night and got us, we had to keep the secret. Deny the diamonds, deny we’d ever seen them.

  One day, we’d buy an island with them, or fast cars. Later it was guns, maybe a tank or a helicopter, green with a gun either side.

  Perth — Thursday

  I KNOW SOME of the tricks for photo shoots.

  Put one foot forward and rotate just slightly at the hips if you don’t want to look wide. Lean forward, not back – back has chins in numbers. Push the middle part of the tongue against the roof of the mouth to draw up the skin under the jaw. Open the mouth slightly, but don’t gape. Deal with the camera affectionately, and as though you’re letting it in on a secret. Let your whole face slump between bursts of shots, then toss it all freshly into place as required. Work it, baby. Beautiful.

  And no Glad Wrap necessary today. A good amount of technique and a suspension of the natural human fear of photography, and all is well. Or as well as it can be. If you tell yourself you’ll look like a bag, a bag is what you’ll look like, and that’s the first thing to know.

  I’m so good at this I could teach it. How can I criticise a TV producer for being reductionist about character outlines?

  The photographer from the West Australian comes without too many big ideas, but he’s shooting colour for the magazine so he gets the guy behind the bar to mix me a big red cocktail. We’re in the club I’ll be working at tomorrow and Saturday. There’s a small stage at the end opposite the bar, and French doors all along the side letting in more light than the room can handle. The wooden floorboards look grey, as though they’ve never been treated. There might have been carpet in here once. We’re upstairs in a pub, in the kind of room that hides its flaws with mood lighting at the right time and gives up every ugly secret in daylight.

  The photographer closes in for a tighter shot – me, my red drink, my red lips, my red dress. He’s making a theme out of red, and it’s starting to feel as if he’s pushing it too far.

  I changed at the hotel after the ABC interview and tried to sort out my hair. There was no time for a shower, no time for much, but time enough to fake it, and that’s when my red Tim Lindgren dress is always the choice. It’s travelled everywhere with me since I modelled it at a Melbourne Cup charity fashion event last year. It was my fourth dress on a hot humid day and the others had all looked very wrong, but as soon as I put it on I felt great and I knew that I’d regret it if I didn’t buy it.

  We do some shots with the drink and some without. Some with me on a bar stool and some standing. When I follow his instruction to lean casually against the bar he tells me I look like a shearer about to order a beer, and then he takes about ten shots of my response, and says, ‘Excellent. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone who looks less like a shearer, but you’ve had far too much practice having your photo taken.’

  He finishes the roll of film, and says he’s done. Felicity gets me moving towards the stairs while he’s still crouching down disconnecting his flash.

  ‘We’ll be a few minutes late at the hospital,’ she says. ‘I might call them and tell them.’ She waves down a cab as soon as we’re outside. ‘Now, what else do you need to know? I found out that the canoe race is raising money for a cell separator. That’s the specific project. It’s some kind of cancer research machine, I think. I don’t think I have anything on the person we’re visiting, though – only that she really wants to meet you.’ She tells the cabbie the address, and starts pulling sheets of paper out of her bag, printed emails, hand-written notes. ‘The PR people found her, the hospital PR people. Just to give a kind of human interest angle to the race, you know, connecting it to where the money goes.’ She stops, and reads through an email. ‘We’ve got a ward number, so I guess she’s actually in hospital. They really only need one picture of the two of you. You’ll probably even be early for coffee with your friend.’

  So, we’re getting there. Felicity has both weekend papers covered, I’m knocking off another day in my itinerary. A few more photos, then something as normal as coffee with Claire, then a couple of hours all to myself. A couple of hours in which I can shut up completely, run, walk, swim, watch TV, take a long, long bath. Then off to the opening night party, where I’ll do my twenty minutes, then probably drink like a shearer. Some nights you can’t hide in your room.

  The main building of the hospital is large and brown and brick, and the carpet inside the entrance is a vibrant blue with geometric shapes in other colours, the kind of carpet that keeps people awake at airports. The hospital PR person is waiting at the reception desk.

  Her name’s Desley, but as we walk through the hospital to the ward people call her Dee. She wears glasses of a style and size that haven’t been in for ten years, and power shoulders, and she accessorises with a bright scarf. She says it’s great of me to come in for this, and to line up for the canoe race on Sunday. She says she’s been at the hospital fifteen years and supposes she’ll stay till they carry her out in a box. The journey to the ward involves four corridors and two lifts, and I start to wonder if we’ll come out in the Pan-Canadian building in Calgary.

  The photographer from the Sunday paper is in the ward when we get there. One of the nurses has brought her own camera, and Felicity says she’ll take a photo of the two of us together.

/>   We stand in front of a filing cabinet and the nurse starts to blush and says, ‘Come on everyone. It should be all of us.’

  She waves her friends over into the shot. One of them has roses she’s about to put in a vase, and we take one each and clench them between our teeth. Felicity laughs and takes the photo, then we rearrange the group, strike a new pose and take another.

  I sign their noticeboard with a red Nikko, adding the much-practised cartoon of myself, and they say they’ll never wipe it off. I tell them about yesterday’s trip to the dentist, and the dental-dam voice gets better each time I try it.

  ‘I don’t think we’ve ever laughed so much in this ward,’ the nurse in charge says, as she gathers us up and steers us into the corridor. ‘We should do ward rounds like this all the time.’

  She sweeps us along – me, Felicity, a nurse, the photographer, Desley – and she stops us halfway down to knock on an open door.

  ‘You have a visitor,’ she says brightly, and I’m propelled forward and into the room.

  In the bed lies a girl whose smile is huge but about the last thing I see. She’s emaciated and on a drip, pale and losing her hair, and then I realise that her right leg ends above the knee.

  ‘Oh my god,’ she says, with a young glee that’s for a moment oblivious to whatever it is that’s destroying her. ‘Oh my god, you came.’

  The nurse’s hand is on my back, steering me forward, and I hear her say, ‘Well you did tell us you’d like to meet Meg. Meg, this is Courtney.’

  Courtney sticks her hand out, ready to shake, and her IV line rattles against the metal bedhead. Even her bones feel small when I take her hand and shake it as gently as I can. Courtney must be about to die. I tell her it’s good to meet her. I try to look as though I’m not still reeling from the shock of seeing her without any preparation, but she’s full of excitement and bordering on awestruck so she notices none of it.

  I have a sudden urge to cry or be sick, but I simply have to push through it so I ask if she’d mind if I sat on the edge of the bed.

  I put myself closer to her, and I try to think about what she might want from this. That feels more important than the photos. They should have told me, dammit, they really should have told me. I’ve done two hospital photo shoots before, each time with someone who was getting better. That gives you expectations. Expectations that you’re about to sit in on another good news story.

  Courtney’s lying on a sheepskin and, now that I’m near, I can hear the rasp in her breathing and see that she has ulcers in her mouth. I pick her hand up again and hold it and preposterously say, ‘So, how have you been?’

  And she says ‘Good’ in a chirpy way. ‘What are you doing in Perth?’

  ‘Oh, you know, a couple of shows, a bit of canoeing, that kind of thing.’

  I have no idea what I should say. She might be fourteen or fifteen years old, but she’s shrunk back to twelve and her time is surely very short. Elli keeps coming into my mind. She’s years younger then Courtney but tall for her age. I don’t want to think about her now.

  I can’t help but feel that there must be something much more useful I could be saying to Courtney, or doing. I could have been great here, with some warning. I could at least have entertained her, and been the version of me that she’d want me to be.

  It’s Courtney who reminds us all that we’re here to take some pictures. ‘So, are we going to do this, or what?’ she says, urging the photographer to get to work.

  I swivel around in the bed so that I’m sitting next to her instead of facing her, and the photographer moves to the windows. Desley and Felicity look uneasy, stuck in the doorway. Felicity looks as if this is all new to her. It was supposed to be another clever way of putting my picture in the paper, just another item in the itinerary we could put a line through in the cab straight after, and forget.

  Courtney grins like a maniac in every photo. I keep holding her hand. Her skin has almost no colour at all, and I can see veins on her cheek and temple.

  I ask her if she’s okay with all this and she says, ‘Sure. It’s for the papers. You and me in the papers,’ and the okayness of it is a truth she holds to be self-evident. We have burst in on her in what must be her last days, but she’s asked for it and she wants it now it’s here.

  The photographer doesn’t take long. He doesn’t even change film. When he’s done he pulls a small notepad out of his pocket and checks the spelling of Courtney’s name. He says he’ll need a few quick details, if that’s all right – Courtney’s age, why she wanted to meet me, a bit about her health problem, if that’s okay.

  She’s fourteen, she’s as quotable as can be on the issue of wanting to meet me, and then we get stuck.

  ‘What I’ve got,’ she says matter-of-factly, ‘is osteoblastic osteosarcoma. It’s in my lungs now, but it started in my leg.’

  The photographer’s pen hovers over the page. He looks at me and then towards the doorway, but the nurses have gone. Desley looks back at him helplessly. The room is silent. None of us can spell Courtney’s cancer.

  ‘Oh, shit, how embarrassing,’ she says when she works it out. ‘It’s my disease.’ She closes her eyes. ‘Okay, osteo . . . O, S . . . I’m pretty sure it’s only one S . . .’

  Desley stops her, and says it’s easy to check the file. She says it’s a big name and she’s sure a lot of doctors can’t spell it, if you can read their writing at all.

  Courtney looks defeated. ‘Well, you could just put “bone cancer” I suppose,’ she says, and the photographer nods and writes it in slow capitals.

  I offer to stay for a while after the others go, and Courtney says, ‘Really? Would you do that?’

  We talk for about twenty minutes, until her dinner comes. The meal trolley rumbles along the corridor, stopping to serve each room, and I help Courtney to get set up in bed. I help her move, and she’s all bones. The meal comes on a tray, and a hot steamy institutional food smell comes out when I lift the steel lid off the plate.

  ‘Usually I spew,’ she says, ‘but I’m getting this new drug in the drip that means you don’t spew and it even makes you hungry. Even for this.’

  She already has the fork in her hand.

  ‘That hospital PR person should have done much better,’ Claire says, sounding affronted on my behalf. ‘The festival publicist should probably have asked her for more information, but it’s really down to the hospital PR person. You want to be ready if someone’s seriously ill. It means something to them. It’s not just a picture, then.’

  We’re at the Blue Duck cafe above Cottesloe Beach, drinking coffee and eating cake. Claire interviewed me once a few years ago, and it was only a phoner – she was in Perth, I was in Brisbane – but neither of us had any time pressures that day and we talked for half an hour or more after she had all she needed. This is our second meeting since then, and we email sometimes.

  Claire is a freelancer who does a lot of celebrity pieces, as well as some food and travel. She has dark eyes and dark straight hair and rings on most of her fingers, some obviously from generations ago, some much newer. She’s the kind of person who probably has a story to go with each of them. She thinks intently about things. She’ll sit, holding her coffee cup in both hands and weighing the arguments up in her mind, and she’ll come out with a firm view about what she thinks is right or wrong. And we’ve agreed every time in two-and-a-half conversations to date, so coffee with her is one of the better parts of a visit to Perth, one of the parts that most resembles life.

  I don’t blame Felicity for what happened at the hospital. Felicity is already good at this job on her first attempt, and she can’t cover everything. I got the chance to say that before she left the ward. I followed her into the corridor on the pretext of checking the details of the evening event, and I spelled it out to her that it was not her fault and I did not want her dragging herself over the coals about it, while expecting me to watch. I took a Cabcharge voucher from her and had it in my hand when I went back in to Courtney. I
t made it look as though some business had been done.

  It also gave Courtney something new to be amazed about. We talked about the Cabcharge voucher and how life on tour works, and about the people you can end up doing events with. I told her some tour stories and made out that they were the type of insider stories you never get to read in magazines. That’s what she wanted, something that was hers alone.

  Claire and I are sitting at a table on the deck, above the beach and with the afternoon sun dazzling over the sea. We compare notes on several people we’ve each met once or twice. In most cases we have the same sense of them, but sometimes they’ve shown us something different – perhaps urbane conversation with me over a drink at a function, evasiveness in interviews with her.

  ‘He was quite charming,’ she says of one author, in a way that suggests she wasn’t entirely charmed. ‘But all he gave me was quotes. He was very good at quoting other people, which doesn’t surprise me – he’s a great stylist and you get the impression he’s very well read – but he didn’t give me much about himself.’

  Claire does not expect me to be a comedian in front of her. I don’t have to pick up the flowers on the table and clench them between my teeth, I don’t have to drag up the old stories. I can take in the view, I can listen most of the time instead of talking, and we can discuss things. Actually discuss them. Discussion, on tour, can be painfully rare at times.

  She did a phoner this morning with the actor Simon Baker in Los Angeles. It was the second time she’s spoken to him and she says he seems like a genuinely nice guy. He lives with his family at Malibu and seems unaffected.