by Nick Earls
My father slowed the car down but they waved us through and he said, ‘See, it’s nothing to worry about, really. I know they might look scary, but it’s all okay. If we just look straight ahead and don’t make a fuss, we’ll be on our way home in no time.’
We drove between the two tractors they’d parked in the road, and there were people on them with sticks and knives, and handkerchiefs on their faces – some of them even handkerchiefs I’d seen at school. They had a point to make, and it wasn’t about disguise. Sammy McKendry lifted his hand in a small wave to me as we passed through, and one of the bigger McKendry boys – the one with the gun – nudged him to stop it. But the gun was just an old shotgun, probably the one I’d first heard in the woods when I was three or four.
Later, on a walk with my father, I’d seen the fox it had shot, the little dead fox, and I’d been terribly sad. And the shotgun cartridges tasted mainly plasticky but also something else, and I could leave marks in them with my teeth. Then my father saw me biting them and took them away because they were dirty and because you don’t eat anything you pick up off the ground. I can’t have been more than three, maybe younger. But I wasn’t afraid of the shotgun, even though it had killed something. It was more like a tool, and that was its job. The fox had been killing chickens, probably, or killing something that it shouldn’t, at least.
I practised morse code in my room with a torch, sending messages to the far wall, but I was never very quick at it. I’d sit at the window if I couldn’t sleep, watching the back lane as far as its bend, watching how black the night became if there was no moon. And I’d signal morse code into the night sky, usually just ‘Hello’ one time after another. Light was amazing. We’d learned about it at school. The beam would travel forever, and sometimes I scared myself by wondering who I might be saying hello to. They might come to earth, come to my house, come for me.
I knew aliens wouldn’t speak English, not as their first language, but morse code was harder than English, so if they could crack that the meaning of ‘Hello’ shouldn’t be too difficult.
And I’d shine the torch into the lane sometimes, but the beam was too weak when it got there so I couldn’t see a thing. If the bed had been higher, I would have slept under it. That would have been better.
Perth — Friday
VISITING HOURS START at two p.m., so I decide to go and see Courtney at the hospital.
When I recall my father at the roadblock – when I think about the scene now, years later – I can see that his aim was to get us through it and on our way. He wanted to get me through it without me becoming too fearful of what was going on. That was his focus, and behind all his calm talk. What I didn’t see at the time was that his sense of calm was forced. He seemed genuinely calm, and I was too, so the roadblock never seemed out of the ordinary.
We drove on and talked about my grandparents – my father’s parents, who would be coming from Carrickfergus to visit us for lunch – and we talked about the kind of spring we looked like having, or at least my parents did, and around then they must have begun making plans for us all to leave. We needed to leave. I was learning to hate people I’d never seen, and hate is wasted energy on its best days, and sometimes far more destructive.
I want to get something for Courtney, maybe a book. I don’t expect I’ll see her again after this. She’s in a hospital bed being consumed by that cancer with the long name, and I can’t believe that she handles every minute of it matter-of-factly. I want to tell her that I’ve noticed her there, that she wasn’t just a photo op, that she’s still in my head.
I find a large bookstore in the Murray Street Mall and the staff direct me to the young adult section on the basement level. Courtney is four years older than Elli, and that’s near enough to a generation at their ages. The hospital says it is – ten-year-olds are treated as children and fourteen-year-olds aren’t. I know Elli’s books. I can’t guess what would be right for Courtney.
The manager of the section seems to have read everything, and she makes the choice for me when I tell her it’s for someone who is fourteen and very sick.
‘How about something funny?’ she says. ‘Something that’s funny but also a good book.’
With my Perth mini-map, I find my way back to the hospital. I will tell Courtney about canoeing practice, and that she shouldn’t be putting any money on me. I will tell her I’m lined up for paintball tomorrow, and honestly not looking forward to it but sometimes you end up doing stupid things of other people’s choosing, allegedly in the name of fun. I will tell her, yes, this is my life, the weekend ahead is no aberration. It’s how it is. And part of what I like about the job – though just a part of it – is that it regularly throws me things I’m not expecting, and not good at, and invites me to try them out in a ridiculously public way. It fascinates me – it still does – that that can be part of any job.
There’s not the same sense of excitement when I get to the ward today. A young doctor is by himself in the office area, writing in a file, and he doesn’t look up. He sniffs and clears his throat and keeps writing. I never see anything of him but the top of his head.
A nurse appears from a nearby room, pushing a blood pressure machine on a stand, and she stops abruptly and says, ‘Oh, it’s you. I didn’t think we were expecting to see you today.’ She takes the stethoscope from around her neck and folds it up in her hand. ‘But you’re very welcome, though. Courtney’s been talking about you ever since your visit.’
‘I didn’t get to talk to her much yesterday, and I’ve got a gap in my itinerary this afternoon, so . . .’
‘I know she’ll be glad to see you. She’s just in her room. Reading the new NW.’
Courtney’s door is the fourth or fifth on the left, and it’s open when I get there. I’m reaching up to knock on it when she sees me. She looks surprised, but it’s not the same look as yesterday. She’s watching a soap, with the voices distorted by poor reception on the small TV. She’s holding a magazine, the new NW, with the obligatory Nicole Kidman cover. And ‘Meg’s shock break-up’ as one of the stories flagged.
‘Meg’s shock break-up’ next to a face that doesn’t look like Meg Ryan, but looks a lot like I might in an off-guard moment.
It hit us both hard, Courtney and me. And she had less hair than yesterday, I’m sure of it. There was a brush next to the bed, set down beside her with her hair caught in it. My visit was useless. I gave her the book on the way out. She was distraught on my behalf. She hoped the article was wrong, all of it, but one look at my face when I saw the magazine told her it wasn’t.
I had to explain how these things happen, even to people who care about each other very much. It took a handful of her tissues for me to get through it. I found myself saying things I’d said to Elli weeks ago, and again today in my head in the Internet cafe, about the bad luck at the heart of this. I pulled up short of only some of the detail, but what the hell, she’d read the magazine and it turned out details weren’t being spared. I told her she shouldn’t be put off by it, that sometimes relationships work and keep working and then I realised she would die soon, almost certainly, and I wondered what the hell I was doing.
Meg’s shock break-up. There I am, in a photo from Canada: ‘Meg Riddoch partying hard in Calgary with Canadian alt-country star Rob Castle and a friend at the PanCanadian Comedy Festival.’ I look drunk in the photo, but I’m not. It was early in the evening, after the Uptown Showcase but before anything else, and I’ve got my arms around Jen and Rob Castle, and a Big Rock Traditional Ale in one hand. The photo was taken in the Ship and Anchor, before we’d even sat down. It was Gary who took it, I think, the guy who talked about writing and the fifteen-plus walkways.
Soon I’m on the couch at Claire’s place with a copy of the NW that I picked up on the way. And she’s out of herbal tea, and I’m staring at the article when she hurries back in from the kitchen with two peppermint Cornettos.
‘There you go,’ she says, and we start eating them. I’m well into min
e before it registers. ‘I know,’ she says. ‘I looked in the fridge and it was the closest to comfort food. I thought we could do with one. Should you stop looking at the article now? Just for a bit?’
She takes the magazine from me and sits in a nearby chair with it in her lap. For a minute or two she talks with her hand over the story, as if it would be wrong to look, and then she picks up her glasses from the table, and she’s reading it, and responding, and I’m moving her on from the ‘Oh my god, how could they . . .’ phase, and finding myself working through useless distinctions. I’d just met Rob Castle when the photo was taken, for instance. I’m confident that it was my first beer, and jet lag never comes up well.
But she’s reading on, charging into battle for me again. ‘Are they implying . . . yes, yes, I think they are . . .’
And that’s when I realise I’ve spent all my energy keeping this at arm’s length – out of my head, away from Emma and anyone else – and I have no energy left to lie. I could do it. I could get away with it – these stories are all about speculation – but I don’t want to. Claire’s support is too necessary but, more than that, it’s too honest. She’s right in front of me, slapping the magazine down on the table, outraged on my behalf.
The picture’s face up – three people with hardly a thing to care about, which was a lie even then, for me anyway.
So that’s when I have to admit that I slept with Rob Castle. I have to admit it in Australia for the first time. Admitting it to Jen in Calgary was one thing, when the incident had happened hours before and was almost part of a dream, but it feels worse owning up to it in Perth. I was a long way from home, I explain to Claire, and alone, very alone, and the weather was wild and cold and something happened that night at the Uptown Screen that I couldn’t rationally account for. And the next night too, back in my room.
I was single then, I tell her, but she’s already leapt deftly to stick by my side.
‘These things can happen,’ she’s saying.
‘It had ended with Murray, weeks before.’ The fact of it comes out of me as if it’s not something I can control, or pause to word a better way. ‘Weeks ago, or a month now if I add it up, and I was very sad one day in Calgary and I couldn’t tell you yesterday. I should have but I couldn’t.’
And she says, strongly, ‘Of course’ with a look at me over her glasses as if it’s mad to even think it. ‘Of course you couldn’t. This is all far too painful. And we were just having a nice cup of coffee and some cake at the Blue Duck.’
The afternoon passes in a stupid haze.
Emma leaves a message on my voicemail saying, in a fake-calm voice, ‘Hi, don’t know if you’ve seen it yet, but I just picked up a copy of NW. Give me a call.’
I can’t talk to Emma. She likes Murray and I love him, and I can’t bear the details. I can’t bear to have to put it into words. Next week I can do that, next week when the tour is over.
I tell Claire about Rob Castle, though this isn’t ultimately about Rob Castle. I tell her about his wife and three children in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and about the note, which I realise I’ve almost committed to memory word for word, despite making myself tear it into pieces in Calgary as a first step towards getting it entirely out of my life.
‘I don’t even know what alt-country is,’ I tell her needlessly. ‘Not that I can say it would have had a huge bearing on my actions. He sounded kind of folkie to me. How did they get that photo? I don’t even know that. I never wanted to see his face again. How do they get photos like this?’
And I tell her about Murray, but I want to talk about why I was with him, not why it ended, though it’ll make me sad either way. I tell her about Murray and holidays, because we’ve got one booked for a month’s time and I’d forgotten until now. We made the booking almost a year ago and I don’t know what’s happening with it. It’s two weeks at the start of the school holidays.
Murray loses the plot on holidays, in the nicest of ways. He’ll obsess about one CD and play it to death, day after day. Somehow the record industry seems to know there are men like this, so they always bring out something like The Best of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers at the start of summer. He’ll drink litres of orange juice as if he’s just discovered it. He’ll buy a juicer, and oranges by the bagful, carrying them up the stairs to the apartment on his shoulder, talking to Elli in a voice he is suddenly calling his ‘peasant voice’, and then handing around glasses of Freshly Squeezed Orange Juice (and don’t dare leave any of that out and just call it orange juice, since that doesn’t give the peasant his due).
He’ll eat bagfuls of pistachios too, and there’ll be fragments everywhere and handfuls of shells in any empty glass left sitting around. He’ll try three days in a row to make a packet cake. At home, none of this is ever mentioned. No orange juice, no pistachio nuts or nuts of any kind, and he’s a pretty good cook but only savoury.
On holidays he’ll hold out on shaving and relent no more than twice, each time shaving in stages. He takes a week of beard and sculpts it back to nothing, via the look he calls his George Michael look, then the Satan beard, then his porn star mo, which is far too Saddam Hussein when it really gets down to it, and a few minutes of Hitler at the end before he’s clean-shaven. Each stage comes with its own enthusiastic caricature, with me interpreting it all for Elli in the best way I can.
For Elli, that’s life, that’s Dad. It’s hilarious, but it’s also unremarkable. It’s more than that for me, and this year I won’t have it.
The article says it was mutual, according to a source close to us, but I guess that depends on your definition of mutual. It calls it ‘a communication breakdown’ but it was really more of a dead end. We never stopped talking, not until it was over. Another fine and irrelevant distinction. The article is as on the money as it needs to be, I turned myself public years ago, this is part of the deal.
‘Yes, but . . .’ Claire says, and I’m not sure that there is a but.
Murray anecdotes are in my show. Murray, poor bastard, got pulled into the public domain. I took our lives on the road, I put our lives on TV, this is the consequence. But I never thought I’d be this interesting. I thought we were safe because I’m well-known but not famous. I thought there was a line there, and that I knew where it was drawn. And that I had some control over where it was drawn. I didn’t think I’d be worth a two-page feature or any sort of close scrutiny. I thought I still had privacy of a kind. I thought that was the deal I’d bought into, not this.
‘He had to take my photo down at the office,’ I tell her, remembering the day he came home with it in his briefcase. ‘And it was one he’d always liked. He had it on his desk. And then he started saying I was just an ugly rumour.’
‘Rumour alone would have sufficed, I would have thought,’ Claire says.
‘Well, yes, that’s what I told him. Thank you.’ She smiles, and I wipe my face with the back of my hand. ‘But he said it was more convincing that way. And I know why he had to say something. People wouldn’t leave him alone. Or at least that’s how he felt. And he still kept hearing things about me anyway – the kind of things that go around about people with public jobs, people who do jobs that put them on TV or in the papers.’
‘That can be horrible,’ she says, and the look of concern is back on her face.
‘Or in my case stupid, a lot of the time. He went to one meeting where two separate people were convinced I bred dogs as a hobby. No one in the room knew that he had any connection to me. I just came up in conversation. One of his complaints was that the rumours weren’t salacious enough and that he’d have to start something better. It could be pretty amusing. But it got in the way as well, and I think it boxed him in. We hadn’t expected it. We didn’t know it might be part of the deal. We thought that, if my career worked out, the good things we had going for us might get even better, not that they’d end up . . .’ I’m trying to find the right word ‘. . . neglected.’
That’s it. That’s what happened. The good things
in our life were done no harm – not directly – but our attention was turned away from them, long enough that they faded, or somehow stopped being what they once had.
I get melted Cornetto chocolate all over my hands, Claire brings a cloth from the kitchen. There’s a small chocolate patch on the sofa too, but she tells me to forget about it. And on my pants. Did any of the bloody chocolate end up in my mouth?
‘It’s a hot day,’ she says. ‘Very melty.’
I explain that it all got complicated with Murray and now he’s in Shanghai, where he would have been anyway. He said I was shutting him out, ultimately, that I was getting his full story and ‘What is it with you? Some days I don’t know you’. Most days he did though, and where was the credit for that? We all have moods. So what? He knew me. He knows me as well as anybody does.
Through counselling we reached ‘a conclusion’. That’s where we found ourselves, with an agreement that it was over, and that we would be in contact only when we were both back in Brisbane, and then only to finalise details. I broke the rules by calling him several times. He screened me to his voicemail and I didn’t hear from him again. I knew I couldn’t keep doing that.
And Claire says, ‘You’re rubbing your hand. Is it okay?’
I can feel a lump, a small hard lump, and I tell her it might be glass, a fragment of glass from a long time ago, an accident once. Or it might be scar tissue. There are scars there from the incident with the glass – a small scar at the base of my right thumb in the shape of an Arabian dagger, another at my wrist like a star, a third in between and fading. In time maybe they’ll all fade, line themselves up with creases and wrinkles and disappear, and my hand will just be old and not injured. That’s what I’ve been thinking. It’s been years since we last found glass.