The Thompson Gunner

by Nick Earls

  It was the morning cigarettes and the ugly binges that made me give it away. I still liked the pre-show solo cigarettes all the way to the end. They came with a sense of anticipation. They marked the last minutes of calm when I had nothing to do but blow blue smoke up at a dark sky before stepping into the light in front of hundreds of people.

  For a while after giving up, I’d still head out patting my pockets, my hands looking for the packet and at best finding sugarless gum instead. Now a work night involves none of the cigarettes and half the beers. I’m older and wiser and that affects most things, though probably not enough.

  The first act starts. I can hear an announcement over on the other side of the building, and applause. It’s a big crowd all right, a big noisy crowd, and the thought occurs to me that I wouldn’t give this up for anything. That’s one of those things people say in an offhand way, but it looks like I’ve gone and done it. I’ve put it to the test and here’s where I am, about to go on stage again.

  Thank you. Start with thank you. And it’s great to be back in Perth. And great to be here at the Watershed helping kick this comedy festival off. Actually, the first time I did a big event in Perth it was a debate a few years ago and it was broadcast on ABC TV. . . thought I should go a bit glam . . . turned up with a dress that needed a strapless bra. And had I thought that through? No, of course I hadn’t. And at the ABC they don’t have much money, but they’re great at improvising. So the make-up person found a roll of ABC tape – white with blue logos – and taped me into the best cleavage I’ve ever had. I felt like a fighter pilot being buckled into her seat, but trust me it cleaved like nothing you’ve ever seen. And, since I hadn’t thought through the dress, I really wanted to think through the tape. She told me no way would it come unstuck under the studio lights when it warmed up, no way would the lights make it visible through the dress. She was full of guarantees . . . then on to the after party, dancing in a club, UV light, the tape fluoresces through the dress, with ABC logos showing prominently around my breasts. And, of course, no one tells me for ages.

  . . . and on we go from there. And nice work too, making all those bold assertions to Felicity about female comedians doing more than ‘chick stuff, and then opening with a story about a frock and my breasts. But it’s there as a Perth story, and after that I think I can get through without relying on gender-specific body parts, or garments, and without a single brand name being dropped.

  The second act’s started. I’m ready.

  Later, hours later, while the band was playing and the comedians were cleaning up the food – but particularly the beer – Felicity put her phone away and drank too much and I did too. Not a stupid amount too much, but more than I’d meant to. And I caught a cab back to the hotel, leaving the others to finish the green-room stocks before roaming the town for the next drink.

  I’m sitting on my bed with the lights off, CNN on low volume. I’m on my third glass of water. It’s not that late.

  With the doors shut it wasn’t difficult in the green room to talk over the band, but it was cooler outside so we spilled out onto a balcony where the music was louder. But it didn’t matter. Bands are there to make noise, and they weren’t bad at all. A breeze came in from the west and I looked up to see some clouds blowing in across the stars.

  I told Felicity about the last time I’d played in Perth, at a festival a couple of years ago, when one of the acts was the famous throat singers from Kazakhstan. She said she’d seen a show of mine that time but missed theirs, so I did my best to demonstrate and beer churned up from my stomach and fizzed into my nasal passages. Just at the wrong moment for Felicity, who had taken a mouthful of beer herself and reversed it out her nose too.

  So we leaned over the railing, both of us dealing with the great discomfort of beer travelling backwards.

  ‘The famous stomach singers from Australia,’ I said to her. ‘You’ve heard of them?’

  And I noticed how much she seemed to have changed from the person who met me at the airport, though perhaps I was seeing only a change in circumstances. Here she was, beer in her hands and dripping off the end of her nose as she leaned out over the garden bed, laughing and spluttering. I asked her about the jacket she’d worn the night I arrived and she told me it was her mother’s. They’d talked, though Felicity hadn’t wanted to, and her mother had insisted that I would expect a jacket.

  ‘Speak in your accent,’ she said then. ‘The one you had when you were eight.’ So I did, and she said, ‘That is so cool.’ She found a tissue in her pocket, or a serviette from the buffet, and she wiped her nose. ‘You get asked the Irish question a lot,’ she said. ‘The one about Irish people being writers and storytellers and comedians. You don’t seem to like it much sometimes.’

  I told her I was supposed to hide that. It wasn’t a question that should surprise me, and I’m supposed to have an answer ready to go.

  ‘The problem is that people get all kinds of views in their heads,’ I said, knowing she’d just asked the Irish question no one else had. ‘And I’m too in-between to deal with them. I’m from there and I’m from here as well, so I don’t know. I don’t know what influences what really, and it’s not my job to bother too much about that. I’m just sick of people who have these simplistic views about the place when they’ve hardly got any connection to it. They’ve hardly spent any time there. Which’d be me, obviously. But I’m clearly talking about the other people.’

  I felt like a tired drunk digging a clumsy hole through their own argument at that point, but it didn’t stop me pushing on. I told her I’d had enough of the romanticising that goes on around the tale of the downtrodden Celt. And all that crap about craic and the funny instruments and, really, why the fuck can’t they move their arms when they dance? And all those stories about being dirt poor in Limerick where it was rainy every day and, to be sure, we had to lick the moss off the very stones for sustenance, and then we went on to worthy achievement in the New World, now a major motion picture.

  She asked me if I’d actually read Angela’s Ashes, and I asked her if she’d let me be a hypocrite in peace. I hadn’t read it, as such, but I had seen the trailer for the movie. And she couldn’t deny there was an awful lot of rain in that trailer.

  I tried to rise above the wreckage of my case – or tried to do something but I’m not really sure what – by saying, ‘Anyway, the whole notion of the “the Irish” or “the Celts” isn’t as straightforward as people think. There’s centuries of migration.’

  And Felicity said, ‘Yeah, I heard Colm Toibin talk about that. You know, the Irish novelist? He was here for the Writers’ Festival once. His name’s French, I think. Maybe Huguenot.’

  She thought we were arguing the same point, but I didn’t know any more. I’d finished my part of the show and coasted along for a while on the post-show high since it had all gone well, but by that part of the conversation I’d had a few beers and I was losing my staying power. I was about to talk about time zones and bed and stopping drinking, she was about to produce a Cabcharge voucher. That’s where I saw the night heading.

  Then the door behind her swung wide open in the breeze and clattered against the wall, and I saw Ken and Niall inside, at the far side of the room, charming the volunteers with their affable Irishness. And I told Felicity that we had a Huguenot castle in the woods not far from where I’d lived, and that I used to walk there with my father on Sundays. At least, it’s in my mind as a castle, though I can’t recall the building too well, only the woods, and the lane that took us there.

  She said she wondered how it would have been if I’d stayed, and grown up there, if I would have been dragged into the politics and all that.

  And I explained that it didn’t really work that way. You don’t get to grow up first, and it’s not so much about dragging if it’s all around you. I wanted to stop then, but my mind was a blur and I was already telling her that there’s no one more passionate about their politics than an eight-year-old being brought up in the
wrong place. If you don’t know much about the world, you can be far too sure of whatever it is you do know. We don’t get that here. We don’t understand it. There are armies of ten-year-olds with Kalashnikovs in Sierra Leone.

  I said it all, right up to the Kalashnikovs and Sierra Leone. And I thought about Elli then, who is also ten, and war is a million miles from her world, as it should be. She’s growing up fast, but there’s a lot I hope she never gets to know.

  Felicity, at the end of a long pause, breathed a deep contented sigh, took a fresh mouthful of beer and said, ‘It’s been such a great night. I’m such a big fan of yours, you know. I’d be your biggest fan in Perth, maybe the whole of Australia.’

  And that’s when I knew we should go home, both of us, Felicity back to her parents’ house and me to my room at Rydges.

  CNN is running a breaking news story about another suicide bomber in the Middle East. I eat a banana in bed, and I change channels.

  Elli will be okay. She hasn’t learned to hate anyone. She hasn’t learned the way of hating blindly, making it part of your being, making true sworn enemies of people you’ll never know.

  What is that quote? It’s something to do with the Jesuits. ‘Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man.’

  If you were a fanatic anywhere and conscience didn’t enter into it, you’d train children. They will take on your views, they don’t get afraid in the adult way, they present a small target. Everything’s wrong about it, except it makes too much sense.

  Now more than ever, I want to call Brisbane. I want to check that everyone’s okay, that’s all. But it’s two hours further into the night on the east coast, and there’s not a reason I could give. Elli’s safe in her bed there, and Murray’s in Shanghai, in the same time zone as Perth and in a hotel room that, I imagine, is much like this one. He’s looking out across the lights of a half-familiar city that will never be home, spreading himself out across the king-size bed and, like me, watching the breaking news on CNN.

  We were together long enough not just to know each other’s habits, but to see some of them converge. Bed TV is the unheralded luxury of the hotel stay, and it didn’t take me long to turn him. We ironed out a lot of differences over time, I’m sure we did, but most of them may just have been habits.

  I went after Murray when my career was on the way up and not much to speak of. I made the moves, but he held back for a couple of weeks and later admitted it was partly because I wore a man’s watch.

  I’d stopped smoking by then. I hit thirty smoking and wheezing, losing it at high speed. I went for Nicorettes and a lot of exercise to kill the tension and it worked, but maybe I was lucky and not as addicted as some people. I wandered around the floor at work at the times that would have been my cigarette breaks – I was with a health insurance company then – I drank water from the water cooler in little paper cups, I banned myself from going to smoky places where I’d drink too much and where one wrong nostalgic song might magic a cigarette back into my hands. I made it a mission, and I’m good with missions.

  My body changed. It toned, it firmed. And there might be thigh cellulite that I’ll take to my grave, but that wasn’t the point. Parts of me that had done nothing since school netball got going again, and I was determined not to let them down.

  I ran in the morning, I got myself my man’s watch since it was better for timing. And this is where I’m bad with missions. I started to get competitive, way beyond my means. I snuck onto the running track at the uni campus after hours, and ran a lap or two. I put my name down for a fun run with ten thousand other people and got so keyed up about it that a friend had to take me aside the day before and say, ‘You realise you aren’t going to win? They aren’t even going to let you start at the front.’ I’d stopped realising any of that, even though the big names in the field were Olympians.

  I linked up with Murray some time during this process that now looks like a metamorphosis. I had been depressed in my twenties, sometimes. My thirties were better.

  He told me later that he couldn’t read me at first. The man’s watch, the tough-girl hair that I might have had then, the career I was pursuing. I met him the first time through mutual friends when they had eight people to dinner and sat us two seats apart. Two weeks later, I made them bring him along to something I was doing at a comedy club. I was on early and joined their table afterwards. I tried to keep him at arm’s length and charm him at the same time. I tried to play it cool but I didn’t. I made him agree to have a drink with me, just the two of us.

  We had the drink the following week and it was pretty awful as we each pretended that it wasn’t happening, and that it happened all the time, no big deal. He talked about the finality of his recent divorce, I cringed inside because most of the routine he’d heard me do was about men being crap in relationships.

  ‘Well, that was great,’ I said at the end of my second drink, subtly invoking the past tense, and with a meaningful look at my man’s watch. ‘I’m glad we did that.’

  And Murray said ‘Yeah’ and it rang equally hollow. Then he took a look at the small stage where, on a better night, a band might play and he turned almost back to me and said, ‘You know, I eat too many meals that are dip and a packet of biscuits, and I quite like to cook.’

  And with that we were on our way to our second date, by which time we had something to talk about since the first date had been so grim.

  Comedy was starting to work for me then, and the more it worked the harder other jobs became to bear. I developed a need for it, a need to be doing it, working in front of audiences, getting a response, working hard to get better at it. Lucky breaks came when I least expected them.

  I didn’t stop taking them, I didn’t stop pushing for more. You get into the habit of pushing, so you don’t stop when things start to move the way you want them to. And I went on with the simple belief that, in the end, it must be workable – there must be a way to combine life and the job you most want to do. The steps forward did sometimes seem to come at a cost, but I kept going as if they didn’t or at least shouldn’t. I kept going in the expectation that it could all be made to work. Because any other outcome would be really unfair.

  I left Murray stranded back there, somewhere. That was the word he brought up once with the counsellor: stranded. ‘I’m sorry, but that’s how I feel,’ he said. ‘Sometimes.’

  Elli was three when we met, and Murray not single by much. We both had issues to deal with, him more than me, and we decided we’d make it out the other side together. Maybe that’s an assumption you shouldn’t make. I was shaking off some listless years and getting more determined, but neither of us knew what that might mean.

  It would be good to know that Elli’s happy, and to hear about what she likes at the moment, what movies she’s seen, school.

  Concert rehearsals should have started by now, and she’s in the choir. Before I left, the teacher told me they’d be doing Louis Armstrong’s ‘What a Wonderful World’.

  Ballystewart — 1972

  WE SANG SONGS in the schoolyard when we were playing games. Popular songs of the time, but often with new words and I don’t know who made them up. It was none of us, I’m sure of that.

  In the rest of the world, the song line ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing’ became ‘I’d like to buy the world a Coke’, but we had a different version. We’d sing it when we were skipping or playing hopscotch or running around throwing a ball at each other, a game that was called brandy when I got to Australia but I think we had a different name for it in Ballystewart.

  And the version of the song that we would sing began ‘I’d like to crucify the Pope’ and then went on to say what we’d do with his blood. I think the final word of that line in the original ended with ‘love’. The only other part I can remember was the line that I think was our last: ‘with Bernadette and Gerry Fitt to keep him company’. Bernadette was Bernadette Devlin. I asked my mother who Gerry Fitt was. I don’t know what she said, but I
can remember asking. I think I have the name right, though I might not, and I think he was a Catholic politician.

  These people are now largely forgotten by the wider world, and I don’t honestly know what they meant to it at the time. There was no CNN in those days, and not the hunger we now have for twenty-four hours of story.

  My mother asked me why I wanted to know who Gerry Fitt was and I said, ‘I heard his name.’ And sang about his crucifixion in the playground at school, but I wasn’t going to tell her that part.

  I tried to work the song out, but I couldn’t completely. The only crucifixion I knew of was Jesus with a thief on either side, and that was a bad business all right but necessary for there to be a resurrection. If we were to do to the Pope what they did to Jesus, wouldn’t that say he was a hero?

  Our song didn’t work that way. When we sang about crucifying the Pope it was about killing him, and showing people. It was about turning religion on him for a last laugh, killing him that way. It made me scared, a little, even to sing it with the others, it was just so horrible. But I did. I sang it anyway because it’s what we sang. But I knew it wasn’t a song for singing at home. At home we played Nana Mouskouri and Cliff Richard.

  I remember seeing Bernadette Devlin on the news, and another woman whose name, I think, was Corrigan. And sure they were the enemy – the word was passed on at school, and we sang about it – but seeing them might have been the thing that put in my head the idea that I had as much right as any boy, as much responsibility as any boy, to pay attention, to take on views and believe in them. And I heard stories about Catholics at school, and not one of them favourable.

  At home it was different. There wasn’t the same sense in my parents of duty, or purpose, of a historical rightness going back centuries, of the need to refight old battles, the necessity of not giving an inch. At home, the only thing that was ever said back then about Catholics was that they thought Mary was really important, but we believed she was just Jesus’s mother. I knew we were right, of course, I knew there was nothing too special about her, but I also knew the issue wasn’t as simple as a debate about religious technicalities. The TV news never had people arguing about the importance of Jesus’s mother, even if that’s where it all started.