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  ‘She assumes. They don’t tell you. Lots of people have got Special Branch files. That’s one bunch of cops who take far more photos than they need to.’

  Embarrassing? Sure it was, but Sophie won’t have heard the story in its entirety. It all gets back to how my mother tells them, each time finding a way to step around the whole story while picking up a few of its better parts. And ‘injured in one of the right-to-march protests’ is certainly a good start when you’re standing in front of a media studies class.

  *

  ‘What is it with you and Frank?’ Sophie says through the toilet door on our next changeover.

  ‘He’s dangerous when he’s understimulated. His mind wanders, and his mouth stays open. It’s a bad combination.’

  A bad combination—Frank was shitty about how long our last changeover was, so he decided to sing ‘MacArthur Park’ continuously to Sophie until customers came and interrupted. And when they went, he picked up from where he’d left off and kept singing.

  ‘Yes, but, you’re his friend and most of the time he’s kind of, well . . . obnoxious.’

  ‘Yeah. Tell me something I don’t know. Next you’ll be breaking it to me that he can’t sing. But it’s only pretend obnoxious, and it makes a surprising number of women want to have sex with him.’

  ‘How many would you call surprising?’

  ‘Well, one, but there are actually a few more than that. It’s a little easier to take if you tell yourself it’s bravado. A combination of bravado and simple directness. In cowboy movies those are both virtues and Frank could be either the sheriff or, more likely, the wronged outlaw with the good heart.’

  ‘And in real life? Real life in the late-twentieth century?’

  ‘Here and now he’s more like the outlaw, and there are times when bravado and simple directness can be a lot to forgive. In real life his big issue is that he’s been displaced from his natural genre. Sometimes I think he lives to shit people, but he’s a good guy really. Frank is a low-rent rock star without a band. He plays life as if he’s a connoisseur, but he thought cuisine in this town reached a new high when he found out that, with the aid of just one phone call, pizza would come to your home. It took a while to convince him that we don’t all think the way he does, and that the world doesn’t work for me in the same way that it works for him.’

  ‘And how does the world work for you?’

  *

  It was my turn for ‘MacArthur Park’ after that but I was ready for him. I didn’t care about his cake, I didn’t care about how long it took him to bake it, I welcomed the rain.

  How does the world work for me?

  It’s not fair that a conversation should be left hanging on such a question, that Frank should call out then, threatening to resume singing and immediately going through with it. I’m never sure how the world works for me. Most of the time, it’s best not to think about it. Term Four is general practice. That’s what the world has for me two months from now, and I know what happens next year and the year after that, or what’s supposed to. But, in the end, that doesn’t mean I know a lot.

  I’m glad the evening’s done and I’m away from the World and ‘MacArthur Park’, home in my room, watching TV with the volume down and sucking on a Sustagen milkshake. The bullworker is getting me nowhere, and I should accept that. I should have had bikini babes lounging around every rippling muscle long before now. Do I want anything so shallow? It wouldn’t hurt. Worse could happen, and has. For example, the past seven months have given me plenty of study time. Plenty.

  Frank tells me I should keep putting myself out there, because sometimes something comes back. It’s a matter of projecting confidence. Frank projects confidence to the point of projecting recklessness instead, and sometimes he scores. He says that there are people who find confidence persuasive, even if it’s got no basis, and I think he might be right. He calls this kind of confidence ‘pure confidence’, as though it’s a better kind by being untainted with content issues.

  During psych I put it to him that it might, in a way, be the flip side to existential angst, so we should maybe think of it as ‘existential confidence’. He told me he thought that was worth a shot. About a week later he said he’d tried it on a girl and found it had worked pretty well. ‘Sometimes a reference like that can make you look kind of intellectual,’ he said. ‘And that can be good, depending on the girl. You should bear that in mind.’

  Unfortunately, being pseudo-intellectual was already one of my better things, and hadn’t been as persuasive as I’d hoped.

  At least Sophie didn’t seem to make the connection between Phoebe my girlfriend and Phoebe my mother. But why would she, I guess? It’s not a common name but it’s not exceptionally rare, either.

  I shouldn’t have let her talk me into doing the Elizabethan stuff for her. Pure confidence isn’t easy but that’s no excuse to project pure strangeness instead, even if her lack of availability meant that my guard was down. It would be smarter to remember that she’s a girl, and to use her as practice.

  The Elizabethan stuff is my mother’s fault. Damn her and her insistence on eisteddfods. I can’t even quote things in a cool way. I know people who can go, ‘Well, Nietzsche did say . . . ’ as though they were just talking to him this morning. Doing slabs of Shakespeare that I’ve deliberately rote-learned, and doing them while chickening, is not the same.

  I hated eisteddfods at the start. The worst part was being corralled into side rooms at City Hall before taking the stage to orate. Something always went very wrong with my hair and my mother would slick it down with water from a sink in the toilets.

  Eisteddfods were an early attempt at finding the means to project confidence. And has the ability to recite sonnet thirty-one from Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella (while water from your slicked-down hair trickles to your collar) improved anyone’s confidence in the last four hundred years? I don’t think so. For me, it was all nothing more than the bullworker and Sustagen equivalent of five years ago.

  How is it that I’m much more confident reciting things as the chicken than as Phil Harris, confident enough that I’ll make up Shakespeare and almost dance about it? The chicken is tall and broad and fearless, and a place to hide. The bigger dick I make of myself in there, the less chance there is that anyone driving past might know it’s me. I play the chicken like I’m playing Frank in a good mood. Devil-may-care. I think it was even the chicken that paid Sophie the earring compliment.

  I can’t believe the things my mother says about her Special Branch file. She was destined to be involved in media studies.

  The Joh Bjelke-Petersen state government banned protest marches when I was at school. Perhaps they’d always been banned, but that’s when it became a big issue. The biggest reason to march then was for the right to march. And, since there was no right to march, there were plenty of arrests.

  My mother decided she couldn’t stand by and let everyone else do the marching for her. She worked in town then, and she left work early to be part of the protest.

  The police decided that the line for action would be the kerb. They made that very clear. One foot off the kerb and onto the road and you’d be arrested for marching.

  My mother wasn’t with the main group of marchers—she didn’t know anyone else who was marching—and she was left behind, some distance away, when they surged onto the road. She stepped off the kerb but, because of her highish heel, turned her ankle and crumpled into the gutter. Two young police officers rushed over and, just as she was thinking of the great pictures she was creating for the next morning’s papers—a forty-something well-dressed woman being carried off, arrested—they were totally polite.

  They thought it was an accident, one of those things that can happen in a crowd, and they helped her over to the St John’s Ambulance people, who strapped her ankle. She couldn’t bring herself to say that she’d been setting out to march.

  ‘I was born into a world of manners, Philby,’ she told me later that da
y, her ankle strapped, iced and elevated, a cup of tea beside her. ‘That was my downfall. I can’t help but respond to manners. And they were so nice. I couldn’t disappoint them.’

  Then she said it was important that we all contribute, in our own way, and she settled for writing a stern letter to the Courier-Mail. I don’t think it was ever published.

  Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen has been the Queensland premier the whole time we’ve been in Australia, and the state is a national joke for having a Deep North government that’s said to resemble governments of a generation or more ago in some parts of the US Deep South—governments that always talk about getting things done and never talk about rights. Governments that send in the police to clear protesters before felling rainforest, or that set demolition crews onto old buildings in the hours before dawn. By morning it’s too late. There’s just rubble left, and pictures for the papers.

  We’re an easy target for remarks about crossing the border and turning the clock back fifteen years, or a hundred. We’re a state that’s known for pineapples and cane toads, old bad attitudes and the brain-addling heat that comes from the Tropic of Capricorn sitting right across our middle. We’re that kind of state—hot and steamy, unlovely and unloved, far too much fodder here for metaphors about festering and putrefaction.

  There are times when you get tired of it, tired of the easy bashing of the place. Sure, you’d like it to be different, but most days here are just like days in a lot of other places. They must be. You get on, you live your life, you try to vote them out when the chance comes.

  Rigged electoral boundaries don’t make it easy and, at the last state election eighteen months ago, Joh got back in without needing much of the vote. My parents were at a party that night. It hadn’t started as an election party, but the topic couldn’t be avoided. TVs were on and everyone was watching the tally room. There had been a split in the government coalition, and we really thought they might go down. My mother left for the party, anxious but hopeful, having campaigned during the day. As the results came in and Joh looked like clinging on to power, my parents sensed they were perhaps the only people at the party wanting a different result.

  I’d turned the coverage off early and I was asleep in bed when they came home. I woke to hear my mother throwing up in the garden, having drunk too much for the only time I can remember, moaning about ‘bloody fascists’ as my father’s voice murmured something supportive beside her.

  Of course, the families of most of the people I’m doing medicine with probably voted for this government or for their ex-coalition partners. Not everyone’s like my mother.

  5

  On Sunday I borrow my mother’s car so that I can drive to the Greens’.

  ‘AJ’ll be a while,’ Frank says when I get there. ‘A big night, apparently.’

  ‘Work or play?’

  ‘He didn’t say. You want a beer?’

  ‘Sure.’

  AJ—Arthur Junior—is a couple of years older than us, and shares a flat at Paddington with a friend. He’s an interior decorator, or something like that, but on weekends he DJs for weddings and twenty-firsts. It hasn’t been long since he moved out and, when Big Artie decides there’ll be a barbecue on the weekend, the decision’s binding for the whole family, including his first-born namesake.

  ‘Weekends,’ Frank says, when we’re out the back, ‘there’s nothing like ’em.’

  He clinks his stubbie against mine, takes a mouthful of beer and keeps talking. He’s straddling Fonzie, the Green family’s pet sheep, and both of them seem particularly nonchalant about it. Frank’s talking as though he isn’t on the back of a sheep, even though he’s patting Fonzie’s head. Fonzie’s pulling up mouthfuls of grass, occasionally looking at me as if I’m the strange one, this free-standing beer-drinking person. Surely I’m going to fall over any second, without a sheep under me.

  Years ago, Big Artie—who loves nothing more than a fiercely irrational opinion—was mouthing off about butchers being a rip-off, so he went and bought a live lamb. But he couldn’t kill it. Then Frank’s little sister Vanessa called it Fonzie, so he definitely couldn’t kill it. Now Fonzie’s fully grown and Artie bullshits on about the savings on mower fuel instead. Once, in a cocksure moment about eight beers into a barbecue, he is said to have declared, ‘No one sticks it up bloody OPEC like the Fonz.’

  I know that sometimes, when Frank gets bored during study, he puts David Lee Roth (their Yorkshire terrier) on Fonzie’s back and tries to train them to do laps of the yard. ‘Next,’ he said to me once, ‘there’ll be a hoop to go through. Maybe even fire. That’d give us something I could tour.’ But so far the excitable David Lee Roth and the dull-witted Fonzie haven’t come to the party. The one that should stay still, can’t stay still. The one that should be lapping, munches grass instead of moving. At its brief best it does look very silly, but you couldn’t call it a show.

  Today, while we’re drinking beer and everyone’s waiting for AJ, David Lee Roth is with Vanessa under the house. She’s playing an Alice Cooper album, loud enough that Frank can’t resist and takes a stab at the chorus of ‘You and Me’ (holds it down, takes a stab at it, leaves it for dead).

  Vanessa is working on Frank’s car. He tells me he does most of it himself, of course, but she’s up on the electronics and he wouldn’t want to stand in her way.

  ‘I’m going to do something,’ he says, turning purposeful. ‘Something about that bastard O’Hare. I should have got eight out of ten for that case. I shouldn’t have to cop his bullshit.’

  ‘Yeah, but his bullshit is all about copping his bullshit. You cop it, you do what you’ve got to do and then you move on. He wants you to take him on. You do that and he’ll get you.’

  ‘I’ve got to go and see him. Tuesday. Between him and bloody Ron Todd . . . does that guy get to you? He gets to me.’

  ‘Why? He’s odd, but why does he get to you? What’s the point?’

  ‘Aren’t you hanging out for a time when you don’t have to deal with guys like that? When there’s No one who’ll come up to you and put a hand on your shoulder and give you some patronising advice and a blast of halitosis? And you’ve got to cop it because he marks your cases or pays your wages or whatever. Not that Ron’s like O’Hare. Okay, on one level I admire him—Ron, I mean. He’s got some vision. I don’t know how things are going at the World—I think they could be better—but he had an idea and he’s seeing it through. I think I identify with that.’

  ‘Yeah? Which bit?’

  ‘I’ve got this idea for a franchise. I’d probably make some money from medicine first and then kick it off. It’s a food thing. I thought of it the other night at the World. It’s called “Eat of the Beast”. I’m thinking it’s a simple one-price-only all-you-can-eat meat restaurant.’

  ‘A meat restaurant?’

  ‘Yeah, total meat.’

  ‘Even the salads?’

  ‘Meat. Different cuts of meat. Salad cuts. It’s a new concept. Thin cuts, marinated. The pastrami salad, for instance.’

  ‘Which contains?’

  ‘Pastrami.’ Pause for effect. ‘See what I mean? Simple. I reckon one day all those vegos are going to get wise. And when they come running for meat, I wouldn’t mind at all if they came running for me.’ He pauses again, nods this time. This one’s a different kind of pause, like a pioneer cresting a hill in a covered wagon and pausing to take in the view. ‘There’d be fondue,’ he adds as an afterthought. ‘Stacks of fondue. People’d go for that. Spike it, cook it, eat it. Nothing but meat and sauce.’

  ‘Hey, Frank,’ Vanessa shouts from under the house. ‘I think I’m done.’

  ‘Good on you, Ness,’ Frank says when she comes out. ‘Allow me to fetch you a tall, cold Diet Coke.’

  She’s wearing an old tie-dye T-shirt, baggy army shorts and a belt with battery-operated car signals—something that, I think, she won on an afternoon kids’ TV show. Frank brings her the Diet Coke and swings his leg back over the Fonz, and Vanessa flops do
wn onto a folding chair.

  ‘Hey, Dad’s pretty buggered after those Chinese elms yesterday,’ she says, her right indicator flicking on and off.

  ‘Yeah. It must be tiring, standing around giving all those instructions.’ Frank’s not much into tree talk.

  She laughs. ‘He’s the expert. That’s his job. It takes a lot of concentration.’

  ‘Try being sixty foot up a tree with a chainsaw hanging from your belt.’

  ‘Hey, that’s only ’cause you’ve got what it takes, you know. That job’s a privilege. You know what Dad says.’ She puts on a serious look. ‘You’re a beaut young climber, Frankie. It’s a bloody tragedy to waste a skill like that.’

  ‘Well, we’re all just going to have to live with it, aren’t we?’

  ‘No need for climbing when you’re a surgeon,’ she says. ‘Unless you’re a tree surgeon.’

  Frank laughs. ‘True enough.’

  Big Artie hoped so much that Frank would be part of the family business that he even got him a personalised Green Loppers T-shirt, something formerly reserved for full-time employees. Frank had put in five years work on holidays and weekends by then. For the last two years he’s been trying to stop, since he says it’s not worth the hassle. All he has to do is climb one tree and Artie dreams about retirement. Plus, the way Frank sees it, he’s not a flash payer. Which he admits is good business, but not if you’re the employee.

  Vanessa goes inside to get another Diet Coke. ‘They should make even taller glasses,’ she says.

  ‘Another business that I don’t think is going so well,’ Frank says when she’s gone. ‘Green Loppers.’

  ‘But does your father really think you’d stop doing medicine now to go into it?’

  ‘No . . . I don’t know. It’d be fine if he had a climber. I think if he had a climber we’d find that a lot of these weekend jobs could be done on weekdays. You only need one climber, really, if you’ve got the back-up. A couple of blokes cutting stuff on the ground and feeding it into the shredder and looking after ropes and shit. And one boss, who knows exactly how a tree’ll fall. That’s what the old man’s good at. But the others? Nev. Nev’s older than Dad and weedier than you, and he’s famous for one thing and it’s not tree lopping. Have I told you about this? I don’t think so. There was this big philosophical bind he got into. There was one time when he paid twenty bucks for a blowie on Brunswick Street and then he found out he’d got it from a trannie.’ He stops, raises his eyebrows in a how-about-that kind of way.