Zigzag Street Read online

  The bestselling Zigzag Street was Nick Earls’ first novel for adults. It won a Betty Trask Award in the UK in 1998, and is currently being developed into a feature film.

  His other books include the novels Bachelor Kisses and Perfect Skin, the bestselling short story collection Headgames, and the successful young-adult novels After January and 48 Shades of Brown.

  His work has been published internationally in English and in translation, which led to him being a finalist in the Premier of Queensland’s Awards for Export Achievement in 1999. Bachelor Kisses was one of Who Weekly’s Books of the Year in 1998.

  Nick Earls has an honours degree in Medicine from the University of Queensland, and lives in Brisbane. London’s Mirror newspaper has called him ‘the first Aussie to make me laugh out loud since Jason Donovan’.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Zigzag Street

  ePub ISBN 9781742742922

  Kindle ISBN 9781742742939

  A Bantam book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney, NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  First published by Anchor in 1996

  This Bantam edition published 2000

  Copyright © Nick Earls 1996

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.com.au/offices

  This publication has been supported by the Queensland State Government through Arts Queensland

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  Earls, Nick, 1963-.

  Zigzag street

  ISBN 978 1 86325 286 7

  I. Title

  A823.3

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Imprint Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Acknowledgments

  1

  I basically blew my university days in the pursuit of one girl.

  It’s only now, half a dozen years later, that the idea strikes me with some clarity. Despite what people said at the time. Despite the fact that at every moment of those several years it must have been obvious to everyone but me.

  It was obvious. They told me. But I couldn’t listen to them because I still had hope. Several years of an entirely pointless hope, when I should have been having the time of my life. Not that I had a bad time. In some respects, I had a great time. But it could have been better. If I hadn’t blown it in the pursuit of one girl.

  Of course, hindsight is no substitute for insight, and this is all pitifully retrospective.

  I’m playing the album she gave me for my twenty-first. Sitting here on the bare boards of the verandah of this old house, studiously not renovating, listening to The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead. Watching paint fail to apply itself to the verandah rails.

  She gave me this album and a tie, a tie that even at the time was a bad tie, and is now long gone.

  Listening to the album makes me think we had no chance anyway. She gave it to me, I’m sure, simply because she knew I liked it, not because of its abundance of ironies, full as it is of loneliness and stricken unrequited love. She was neither cruel enough, nor ironic enough, for it to have been anything but a gift. It’s only now that I realise that she lacked irony absolutely, and we were in fact totally incompatible. Throughout the mid-eighties that eluded me, but I can’t imagine how.

  Since my enthusiasm for renovation has temporarily slipped and it’s approaching seven-thirty, I decide to eat. I decide takeaway, then straight back to work. I call Baan Thai at Milton and the guy recognises my voice and says, Usual order for Hiller?

  He tells me fifteen minutes.

  I stop for petrol on the way.

  Usual order for Hiller. I still get the usual order for Hiller. Two things have changed. There is no Hiller, and the price has gone up fifty-five cents, but the usual order for Hiller is still the order of choice. It just lasts two nights now. Chicken satay (four sticks), panang nua, large rice. Previously fifteen ninety-five, but still a bargain at sixteen fifty.

  I nudge the petrol up to the twenty dollar mark, and even this, even petrol, reeks of old crappy memories. The girl at uni, a month short of my twenty-first, my one and only chance.

  The rash

  We went to a movie. She asked me. And I thought maybe this isn’t just us going as friends. Maybe this is a date. I got excited. I imagine I talked throughout the movie and probably annoyed her by trying to impress her. We had coffee afterwards and she talked about what we were going to do for my twenty-first. We. I remember that. I remember the enormous thumping erection triggered off simply by the notion of we. And I could see us together at my twenty-first, her standing next to me. I could see I was going to be a winner after all. And on the way back to her place after coffee, already into the sixth hour of this new phase of our relationship, we stopped for petrol. It was winter, two am, cold. The petrol cap didn’t come off easily. Something trivial like that. Something trivial that led her to make the vaguely funny emasculating remark that prompted me to take the pump, having finished filling up the car, and point it into my pocket like a pistol, to make a joke of completing the process of emasculation. Of course, at that very moment, the last gravi
tational penile dribble from the pump, or a twitch of my cold shaking hand (it matters little which), filled my pants with petrol. Really cold petrol, spreading out black across the front of my favourite faded black jeans and running down both legs. Stinking the car out, all the way back to her place. She laughed more than she needed to, and she didn’t invite me in. She told me not to go near any naked flames. And when I got home and threw away the pants and saw my dick shrivelled up like a pale poisoned worm I thought, fine, you’re no good to me anyway. Over the next few days I lost quite a bit of skin in that area, and I stayed in my room as much as I could wearing nothing from the waist down. It was only when I thought it wasn’t getting better that I asked one of my housemates, a hospital intern, what I should do about it. And the story was out. Fuck confidentiality, when there’s a story in it.

  I think I was given the birthday present by a friend on her behalf. The Queen is Dead and a crappy tie, and there seemed to be some understanding that that was that. My one and only chance had passed, and we were better off as friends. ‘Let’s still be friends’, the card might even have said, as though this offered me something I could live with, some survivable compromise.

  So here I am, filling the petrol tank of the same car, the same early-eighties Laser I’ve had since the mideighties, the car that has carried me through a range of foolhardy misadventures and artless attempts at seduction. Here I am, twenty-eight and trashed again. How does this happen? Sometimes with petrol, but what was it this time?

  The guy at Baan Thai says, So how is your wife? I haven’t seen her in here for a while.

  No, she’s in Melbourne, I tell him.

  Oh, business?

  I think I must just nod at this, nod and fix on some grin, because I can’t bring myself to lie to him, or tell him the truth, hence limiting me to non-verbal options.

  I can’t believe how many people you end up having to tell when you’ve been trashed. There are several thousand more opportunities to revisit the instant of trashing than could possibly be anticipated, and most of the time I’d really rather not talk about it. But it comes up. It comes up and there’s nothing that can be done to stop it. Bumping into anyone and going through the blandest of social enquiries seems to end up with me having to choose between spilling my guts again or lying. Melbourne, business, a pitiful half-truth. She trashed me. Melbourne, months ago, she trashed me.

  We always ordered in her name out of habit, so the guy has no idea I’m not Hiller. And I just can’t tell him now. I can’t shout this over the top of the cluster of other people waiting for takeaway orders, because whatever I start shouting I’ll inevitably end up shouting the trashing story. Then all their conversations about not much will go quiet, and they’ll have me to talk about as soon as I’ve left. Poor bastard, he’s so trashed he shouts about it even when he’s picking up takeaway.

  I pay for the usual order for Hiller and I go, enduring my own idiot grin all the way to the car.

  At home I measure my meal into two almost exact portions, and put one into the fridge. It’s great, this panang nua. Always great.

  And Anna Hiller is the bane, and possibly love, of my life. That’s how much this sucks.

  2

  Renovation is endlessly complex, I realise after dinner as I flick from one channel to another trying to work out which movie to watch. It’s endlessly complex, despite my mother’s assertion that it’s quite straightforward if you have a plan. If you take it one step at a time and prioritise.

  I have a plan. I have steps, I have priorities. But so does she. So while I’m planning to start at the front verandah and work back, she’s coming round with swatches of fabric to talk about blinds, even when I make it quite clear to her that blinds are too far into the house for me just now.

  She almost seems worried about me when she has to come to terms with the fact that I’m just not ready to look at blinds yet. As though there was some period in my life when I was stable and normal and easily entertained by chatting about fabrics. She wants the blinds to make me happy. She doesn’t say that, but I can tell. I should tell her that blinds have never made me happy or unhappy, so however great the blinds are they are unlikely to resolve any of the big issues, other than the penetration of sunlight into the house. My long-term happiness will not be influenced by the blinds at all.

  I told her my front to back plan. I explained its elegant simplicity. I explained that this way I’ll miss nothing, and I guaranteed she would be pleased with the result. So she put away the swatches and we had a dispute about the colour scheme for the verandah railings instead. This lasted several weeks.

  During that time I painted an old wardrobe, first in regulation white and then with blue dabbed over it using a loofa I found in the bathroom. And while I was doing it I really thought it seemed artistic. Seemed like a hell of a good idea.

  Then my mother apologised for making a big issue of the paint and the next time I looked at the wardrobe it looked like trash, like something my mother would hate, something she would take as a personal affront. So I put it in my room and apologised right back to her about my role in the colour dispute, and I said to her that this was her house, so we should use the colours she wanted.

  And that, I suspect, is the basis of the problem. It’s her house. Ever since my grandmother died. And the deal is that I live here rent-free if I renovate.

  So I sit around in the musty, shut-up, old people’s smells, the exaggerated security and cardboard boxes, not yet renovating, while my sinuses play up like buggery.

  I talk to myself out loud. I talk to Greg, my grandmother’s cat, who was there when she died and doesn’t yet trust me. I need to hear voices in the house, even if they’re all mine. I am adjusting only slowly to living alone.

  I can’t get into the movies tonight, not any of them.

  I look out at the verandah, at the painting that isn’t being done, and I think fuck it. Instead I sit down at the piano. I let my hands loose on some scales and they run up and down with the finesse of a couple of fat pink spiders. For some reason, some reason I shall never know, the sheet music for ‘Always on my Mind’ was curled up under the lid the first time I opened the piano. I’ve now flattened it out and it’s starting to become playable. This evening I do it first as Elvis, then as Willy Nelson, with appropriate introductions, but I can’t do it like the Pet Shop Boys. I try to imagine myself sitting under Michael Bolton’s hair and doing it the way he would, and I try to do it like Nick Cave. And when you do it like Nick Cave it’s a no-shit song. You can take it from me, when he says you were always on his mind, he means you were always on his mind.

  It’s probably only Greg’s incessant shouting for dinner that makes me stop. He purrs as he eats and he seems happy, in an unreasonably simple way. I want to take issue with him about this. And I want to explain that I didn’t mean to make his dinner two hours late tonight, and that this isn’t easy for me. That I’m not used to being responsible for feeding anything other than people, not used to living alone, not used to having a piano in the house, not used to arguing about paint, not used to a hundred and sixty-eight days of celibacy, and I’m not quite sure what happens next.

  My previous record was a hundred and two. That was at least six years ago, and I must admit, I thought it would never be broken, that I’d be old and toothless and hopeless before I went without for a hundred and two days again.

  Greg licks up his dinner and copes with all this change a little better than I do. It must be very different for him here now. The noises I make. Music, TV, ‘Always on my Mind’, one crap version after another. Very different to my grandmother and her deaf person’s exaggerated human sounds, the loud clatter of pots and pans, the casual slamming of unheard doors, the unmonitored flatulence.

  Greg, the big-shouldered, confident orange cat named, my grandmother once told me, after her red-headed doctor of whom she was fond. He used to shout at her and write notes and smile, and receive graciously the biscuits she made for him because he looked to
o thin for his own good.

  How can I renovate these loaded rooms? Where do I begin in this House of Boxes? Whose past do I start to dismantle, rehabilitate, dispose of? Mine or my grandmother’s? Everything that is each of us is packaged here, dumped into scavenged boxes with the undue haste of death or forced departure.

  Dozens of boxes. Many dozens of boxes, scavenged from bottle shops in August last year, and then November.

  I need some boxes because I just got trashed.

  I need some boxes because my grandmother just died.

  But you can’t let yourself hear it in your own voice, so you say something like, I’m moving house and I need some boxes to pack things into. When I was doing it the second time at least one person remembered me and said, with some suspicion, You move a lot. As though there could be any reason to be suspicious of a person scavenging old cardboard boxes.

  From my mother’s point of view, the boxes are all part of any reasonable plan. A plan that she says is easy, all you do is go through one box a night. Incredibly pragmatic. Barely possible.

  It’s hard to believe I lived successfully for years without my mother’s reasoned and gratuitous advice. During the months I stayed with my parents before moving in here, she decided to resume high level nurturing and seems to think me incapable of caring for myself.