Letter to George Clooney

by Debra Adelaide

  At www.whitepages.com.au, she has to select a name and then choose by city, area or suburb depending on the size of the population. That way she will get, say, all the Thomsons in Eagle Vale, Queensland. But she only chooses places she’s heard of, in case they’re too small. If she posted letters to all the Thomsons in a place with only a population of three hundred and fifty that would be counterproductive. They might all be related and think they were being targeted.

  She chooses her names carefully. Mainly Anglo names, and it is surprisingly hard to think of surnames apart from obvious ones like Smith or Lee, but after consideration she decides that every letter-mailer would go for Smith, and Lee has the ethnic disadvantage, which she will address next time round. On the floor next to the computer is the pile of paperbacks that Margie brings from time to time after they go through her friends at the community centre, in case Dawn wants to read them. They are all so thick and she has never started one, but the authors inspire good names. She selects Keyes, Roberts, Patterson. Easy names, not too long – they all have to be handwritten – conservative white names, or at least she imagines so. Using one of the blue Rollerballs she’s taken from work and is squirrelling away before there are only Stabilos, she writes out about thirty or forty envelopes using names like Turner, Keyes, Mitchell, White and Patterson from various places around the State. Then she decides her efforts must represent every State, however she excludes WA since David Rhodes is from WA and there’s a good chance that people there will be sick of getting his letters. She makes a special effort with Tasmania, which everyone forgets. This takes her forever, partly because it’s so boring and partly because she has to keep getting up because the DVD player is mucking up and she has to hold the button down to skip back and Jackson wants to see his favourite bit of Spiderman about a hundred times. Then she has to go out anyway to get Lacey from the netball gala day and then when they return the kids are hungry. She goes to heat up the leftover spaghetti but they say no, they want a snack not dinner, which means chips and biscuits and stuff, which she gives them because then it’s peace and quiet until the end of Spiderman, so long as Lacey gets to watch Legally Blonde 2, after which it will be dinner time properly.

  But by then she will have finished her list. For fun and variety because it’s extremely boring – frankly she’d rather be weeding or tidying the linen cupboard – she chooses place names that interest her. Names that suggest something pleasant. Ferntree Gully. Emerald. Paradise. Places that sound full of promise, though she hopes they’re not retirement communities as she doesn’t imagine pensioners going for this sort of scheme. Where would they get access to a good photocopier for a start? Closer to home she chooses Fairfield, Merrylands and Prospect. She has never really thought about these names, and now she thinks if she lived in a place called Fairfield she might like it. Except she knows what it’s like. It’s getting dark and the day’s been overcast and she likes the sound of these names, they warm her, they fill her with a small amount of cheer. She chooses nice-sounding or even amusing street names too, if only for the pleasure of writing them out. Evergreen Ramble. John Dory Avenue. Honeysuckle Street. Resolution Street. Ithaca Road.

  Remember, a good list will always yield a good response.

  She does not choose more than three names the same in the one suburb. Families tend to cluster together. Nor does she choose more than two names in the one street, since they might be friendly neighbours and feel there is a conspiracy afoot. When there are still at least one hundred envelopes to go, she is struck with another good idea. If the White Pages lists two residents at the one address, for example EB and SJ Goodall, then she addresses it to the latter on the basis that this will be the wife in the household and thus the one on the lower income, or on none. Thus more likely to regard the scheme with a sympathetic eye. She imagines Mrs SJ Goodall, who would naturally collect the mail in the household, saying nothing to her husband but quietly going about sending out her ten dollars just as Dawn has, copying her two hundred (minimum) letters and mailing them out as she is, then surprising EB two months later with wads of cash. She would pay off the house, they would have a holiday. Just as Dawn will. She will buy Jackson his own respirator so they can go anywhere they like and not have to be within close range of a hospital just in case, then they will get passports and go away. She has not told the kids this yet but they have discussed holidays generally. Lacey wants to go to Bali and Jackson wants to visit a planet, preferably Mars, but the moon will do.

  She has not decided what she will do with all the money but she knows that Ron and his pale face and even Anne and Maria and their committees and meetings could all get stuffed. Plus she will get the house painted.

  By dinnertime she is confident she has an excellent list and will thus obtain a good result. The kids have finished their movies but the TV is still on. They eat with their plates on their laps again, besides she has taken over the dining table with her envelopes. There is a re-run of that Jamie Oliver show where he tries to teach schoolkids to eat better. He is holding up a bunch of asparagus, they think it’s onion. They have never tasted a strawberry, and don’t want to.

  STEP 5: Fold the photocopied letters neatly to fit into a DL envelope, seal them up and stamp them all. IMPORTANT: Do not fold the letter more than twice.

  Why? Is there a magic difference between two and three folds? The folding and putting them in envelopes takes her so much longer than she imagined, more than three hours. She is very glad that she was not required to do this with a smile on her face. After ten minutes the kids are bored so she keeps doing it in front of the TV while they watch Jamie’s kids going on strike by refusing to eat the chicken drumsticks in spicy tomato sauce and green salad. One of the kids announces he’s never eaten salad in his life and is not about to and where are the turkey twizzlers and chips that he has for dinner every day? She wonders when Lacey and Jackson last ate salad, but she doesn’t expect them to eat cold food in winter.

  As she works through the piles she stops wondering why she is not allowed to fold the letters more than twice and starts to be glad instead, as it takes so long. Both kids fall asleep on the lounge as NCIS is starting, which is good as she doesn’t think they should watch it with all the corpses. By the end her back is killing her and the dishes still haven’t been done, but she takes them into the sink just in case Margie decides to drop by early in the morning. She leaves Lacey with a blanket over her, but Jackson really does weigh next to nothing so she takes him to his bed.

  STEP 6: Copy your 200 names and addresses onto your sealed envelopes and drop them off at the post office. SPEED is EVERYTHING.

  There are definite flaws in these steps. She does not think she will have ruined her chances of success by adapting these steps for efficiency. Why copy out two hundred addresses (Step 4) and then copy them again (Step 6) onto the envelopes? No disrespect to David Rhodes, but she decides this is a total waste of time. Also, getting bulk order postage as he advises is not worth the trouble and definitely no cheaper. The next night she brings home her two hundred stamps and it doesn’t take that much time. She takes half the envelopes up to the postbox. Early the next morning, before the kids wake, she takes the remainder up in a plastic bag, and when she comes back she finds a plate of cookies, peanut choc chip, Jackson’s favourite, and a bag of marshmallows, which would be for Lacey. Margie always treats the kids fairly, so she can’t complain. But it proves her theory. Luckily last night she had the dishes rinsed in the sink so if Margie had come in she’d not have been able to witness a lapse.

  Remember your life will be transformed! I am very proud to be able to say I have fulfilled my duty to my children by securing their future in an uncertain world.

  The first phone call comes the very next night. Right on six pm, when all the market researchers call, she is taking the hash browns from the freezer when a woman asks her who she’s speaking to. Just as Dawn realises it is not a market researcher or the Guide Dogs Association the woman demands to know why she
’s received this letter from someone she’s never heard of, and is she out of her mind and how much damn money has she spent on this scam? Oh, and where did she get her name and address from anyway?

  As if Dawn is some kind of con artist. Scam? There is nothing underhanded about getting names and addresses from the White Pages, is there? The caller says it’s a form of spam and she’ll be reporting Dawn to Trade Practices. Her heart is beating a bit faster by now; first that guy who drove into her car then reckoned it was her fault, now this. Could she really be in trouble? She hadn’t counted on phone calls. Maybe she should have sent all her letters interstate where getting her phone number would have been too much trouble.

  Within 60 days you can expect to be receiving over $70,000 in cash!

  The next letter comes the following week. This time it has a five-cent piece sticky-taped to the top. And it is very neatly presented, clearly the work of a person who has retyped the whole letter because there are none of the grey freckles and lines that were in hers, the telltale signs of pages copied again and again.

  By now she is kicking herself. First the phone calls, then the five-cent piece. As soon as she spots it she realises what a brilliant idea it is. Why didn’t she wait to send her letters out? If she had, she would have easily been able to stickytape five-cent pieces to hers as well. She has a huge jar of coins, which the bank has rejected. It’s got rid of that change-counting machine and won’t take kids’ moneyboxes unless the change is all counted and placed in the correct denominations in little plastic bags and she doesn’t have time for that.

  She is ashamed. This letter is so neat. Its five-cent coin is shiny, like new. The author has added a line at the start saying it symbolises all the wealth she will enjoy once she follows the six steps to success. To think she has sent out such shabby letters by comparison. People will think she doesn’t care. And if she has received so many letters, then others will have too. They will not follow her letter, they’ll follow one like this. They will not ensure the circle of prosperity she has sent on continues unbroken. Her circle will be breached forever. They will trash her letter.

  Jackson wants to know why there’s five cents on the letter. She prises it off and gives it to him for his moneybox, but he doesn’t want it, he is only collecting fifty-cent pieces and not the ordinary ones either, only the commemorative ones. Margie gives these to him when she finds them in her change. The five-cent coin is sticky so she replaces it on the letter.

  That night Jamie is showing the schoolkids what chicken nuggets are really made from: ground-up chicken carcases, skin and fat. The schoolkids shudder and squeal and declare they’ll never eat chicken nuggets again. Jackson nestles into her side and tucks his head in her armpit, just a chicken carcase himself, all bones with a bit of skin stretched over, and she asks him if he’ll ever eat them again too. Yes, he says, and she knows she will give them to him, she’ll give him whatever he wants to eat.

  Lacey announces she is never eating chicken again, in fact she has given up meat as of yesterday, and hadn’t her mother noticed she picked out all the filling from her pie? Dawn reminds her about that fundraising sausage sizzle she’s going to after netball on Saturday, which she’s already paid for. Lacey rolls her eyes, then says she can just eat the bread and the sauce without the sausage, they always burn them anyway. What, Dawn wonders, would be the point of wasting food and fundraising money, then she realises the point is fundraising, so there is no point.

  The five-cent piece letter sits on the table for a week, reproaching her. Either she acts right now and sends out another two hundred letters, or she trashes it and forgets about the whole enterprise. Can she afford another two hundred, not to mention the time? She places it in the folder with the other letters, then places the folder in the document tray along with the final letter of demand from Friend & Holmes. They are saying their client holds her responsible for the incident six weeks ago when there was a collision on the corner of Buffalo Road and Simmonds Street. This time there is a quote attached, $1,895.

  She should respond to this letter. She is sure it was their client who drove into her. She is tempted to write, Your client is a rude, aggressive young man who is also a liar. Instead she invites them to come around and inspect her vehicle which is gouged all down one side by his van. Jackson cried when he hopped out of his van and started yelling at them.

  TESTIMONIALS FROM PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS: ‘After two months I had received $71,970 and it is still arriving. We have paid off the house and all our credit cards and had a wonderful holiday.’ Mrs C Collins, Brisbane.

  She thinks about turning on the computer and looking through the White Pages for a Mrs C Collins in Brisbane. If she tracks her down perhaps she will tell Dawn if that’s really true.

  The re-runs of Jamie’s School Dinners are over but Lacey has entered that diet-conscious stage of teenage life Dawn has heard about. She insists on watching Jamie’s Simple & Healthy, which is live. He says yeah and innit and darling a lot, and dashes around the set for half an hour while five guests from the audience, including a boy who looks younger than Jackson, stand there holding a spoon or dipping a finger into a bowl. Then he produces a plate of yellow pasta strips with garlic, lemon and extra virgin oil. Everyone oohs and claps. Lacey wants to try it and asks if Dawn will buy her a pasta maker. She says you can get the same result with bought pasta, plus she’d never eat something dripping in olive oil, but Lacey insists it has to be fresh, really fresh. Dawn wonders if she’s also entering that stage where they become vegan or only drink Diet Coke. That used to happen when she was about sixteen but it’s different these days. Eleven would not be impossible to start holding strong views about exploiting cows and bees, and rejecting supermarket quality pasta. She reminds Lacey she hates garlic too and she pulls a face. She is still sore about the netball thing, especially because Dawn said in front of her friends at the gala day that she couldn’t afford the fare to New Zealand. She has nothing against kids going off to play against other nations, but privately she feels that eleven is too young and the team manager should not have agreed, Trans-Pacific Netball Club Annual Play-off or not. She did not want to sound like an unsupportive parent, but it’s the Wildfires, not Test cricket. And Lacey is only in the third division. She tells herself that when her $70,000 starts rolling in she will buy a pasta maker. She will go to David Jones and buy her the best electric one.

  She should have attached those five-cent pieces. She could have gone one better and attached ten-cent pieces, there are enough of them in the jar too. Ten cents by two hundred letters is twenty dollars, and what’s an extra twenty dollars to a woman who’s going to make thousands, tens of thousands? She examines the five-cent coin letter again. Maybe she couldn’t have put five- or ten-cent coins on hers because the letter definitely states DO NOT change any of these steps even slightly. Would taping coins on count as changing the steps? She is still considering this when the phone rings again but it’s not another angry recipient of one of her letters, it’s the angry young man himself who yells at her, Aren’t ya gunna reply to me lawyer’s letter, bitch? and then tells her he’ll see her in court if he has to, then hangs up before she can reply. If she could have, she would have said that when she makes her tens of thousands she won’t have to deal with insects like him, she’ll be getting her legal advisor or insurance representative to handle it, and he will indeed be no more nuisance than a housefly. But no, she wouldn’t tell him about the scheme, he’s not that type, not deserving. She congratulates herself that she’s not sent any letters to Hamids, Friends, Holmes or any name connected with him so there’s no chance of him or his relatives or his lawyers getting a chance of what she’s got.

  The next letter comes in a recycled envelope with a scrap of lined notepaper stickytaped over the window. The scrap is cut crookedly, and right up against the pink margin is her name, surname first, then initial, in biro block letters, the whole thing looking like a child’s done it. She is aghast at the evidence of such cheapskate
s. If someone would go the trouble of collecting two hundred (at least) recycled envelopes, then surely they would buy proper labels, which are a few dollars a roll at the two-dollar shops, and write the names neatly. She would not bother responding to a letter that’s been issued with such obvious lack of care and definitely not in the spirit of generosity, as David Rhodes advises. She drops it into the bin straight away, knowing that M Cody of 6B Jenner Street Kilgore (NSW) will not receive a single letter with ten dollars inside it and a note wishing him or her good fortune. She doesn’t need to read it to know it will be a blurred photocopy containing more typographical errors than the one David Rhodes sent her.

  Even now as I write this story for you I find it hard to come to terms with the fact that, like most people, I’ve worked hard and struggled all my life just to get by, then something so ridiculously simple drops into my lap and turns my life around immediately.

  Apparently Jamie just got lucky when a TV producer noticed his boyish charm and convincing patter behind the counter. Now look at him, bouncing around a stage larger than her house with an audience of hundreds and five guests all overcome by the fact he has produced a rocket and pear salad in minutes before their eyes. Go on, he says to the guy meant to be crushing red, green and white peppercorns onto crusted veal, give it a good ol whack there, yeah thassit, whack it like that, don be afraid. The guy brings the mallet down once or twice with a look on his face as if the veal’s going to leap up and bite him back, while Jamie grabs the Bamix from a woman and plunges it deep into the jug of chopped onion and tomato she’s meant to be pureeing.