Zigzag Street Page 4

  One weekend, when they hadn’t been going out long, a group of us went to Jeff’s family’s house at the coast and Tim and Chris woke us several times each night with the sounds of short bursts of vigorous mattress bouncing and one of them (we still don’t know which) braying like a mule. Delirious maybe, intriguing certainly, but, in terms of duration at least, way short of rumpy-pumpy. Each morning they would get up late and look smug, knowing that we had heard it all but would say nothing.

  There were six of us that weekend. Six plates, six of everything. Except couples, there were three couples.

  Some days I’d really be better with Sammy the Snake. It’s not quite the same, but no-one gets hurt and the disappointments are bearable.

  After they go I lie on my bed. I have had too much wine. Some nights this conversation goes on all around me. What am I going to do?

  8

  Small manageable tasks, and no more than one or two at a time. That’s what I’m going to do. I shall become the master of the small and manageable. Even if that might be a Jeff Ross idea.

  Thursday night I go to Toowong Village. I park in the usual area in the basement carpark and I ride the escalators with my small number of tasks in mind. I buy a Whipper Snipper.

  The boy in K Mart who helps with my purchase tells me he has just read an article that called Brisbane the Whipper Snipper capital of the world, and he offers this to me as though he is acknowledging my interest in a piece of the action.

  Why? I ask him.

  Why what? he says slowly.

  Why is Brisbane the Whipper Snipper capital of the world?

  Oh, because people buy more Whipper Snippers here, or at least have more. People have more Whipper Snippers.

  I can see he is not a very analytical person and I take the bottom of the range $55 plastic model that requires limited assembly and comes with a free Home Improvements cap. On the way to the car I stop for a burger at the food court. This was never one of Anna’s preferred options. She viewed the food court with disdain. When I’m halfway through the burger I begin to understand her feelings (at least about the food court), but I decide to use this as a test of my ability to commit and I finish the burger.

  We used to live in a rented two-bedroom flat near here. We were saving for a deposit on a house and we were just about there. So I can’t help shopping at Toowong. It’s what I’m used to, even if it’s no longer quite the closest shopping centre to where I live.

  I buy the groceries, and I buy a flea killing agent to be added to Greg’s food. This seems like a deceptively simple way to deal with the problem.

  It is. I get home and he doesn’t eat the food. He looks down at it, the meal he eats every night, but now with three drops of flea killer mixed in, and he turns back to me with a look that clearly indicates he is unimpressed. I have insulted his intelligence and he would like his dinner now. It’s all too clear I won’t win. I throw the food in the bin and give him more, this time without the unwelcome poison. He eats it right away. Ten thousand fleas rustle happily in his fur, unaware that this is only round one.

  I go through the mail. Despite the inviting wad of apparent correspondence (and the obvious loser hope that maybe she’ll write) there is no actual mail at all. Only limitless junk opportunities for changing my life for the better. Arthritis treatments, carpet cleaning, wedding and engagement rings (thanks a lot), wheel alignment, mattresses (with free mattress protector), pizzas, pizzas, pizzas and the poor man’s porn of underwear ads.

  Why did my grandmother never get herself a No Junk Mail sticker? Did she like this stuff? I think my life is better than that. I still hate junk mail.

  On the other hand, you can never have too many pizza vouchers.

  9

  Friday the US dollar drops. The joint venture partner bails out.

  I manage to restrain myself from jumping up and down punching the air until I close my door.

  I whip the computer’s butt at Sammy the Snake. I should ask for an upgrade on my games package. I’m ready for something more sophisticated.

  On the bus going home people around me are talking about weekends, and I realise we’re about to have one and I haven’t thought this through. Friday night and nothing to do. And then Saturday.

  There’s a message on the answering machine. Jeff saying, We’re going to the coast. See you Sunday for tennis.

  How did I ever end up with the answering machine in the Division of Common Property? I hate the answering machine. It gives me only false hope and discontent.

  Forty-six hours to kill before tennis. I think through my list of people I’d like to do something with tonight. People I would choose to favour with my company. People who are likely to take me on at short notice. I call Freddie and Gerry.

  Oh hi, Gerry says. Had a big week?

  About the usual. How about you?

  Oh, it’s been a wild week at the House of Romance, as always. Well, lots of fiction anyway.

  Sounds like my life.

  Oh, you poor glum boy. And what are you doing tonight? Shouldn’t you be out doing the girl thing?

  Probably, but maybe I’m not ready for the girl thing again yet. Or any thing.

  Yeah, who needs ’em? Well we can’t leave you at home lonely. We’re just having a barbecue on the deck but you’re welcome to join us. If that’s not too boring.

  It’s great. It sounds great. In fact, I can come right over and tell you all about what boring is, and you’ll see that that isn’t it.

  The sun is setting as I walk down the hill, a bottle of red wine in one hand, and a blue haze is settling over the brewery and Toowong and the west. Lights are coming on, and there’s traffic blocking Milton Road in the distance and moving slowly along Waterworks Road behind me. But not many cars in these small streets, crazy streets like Zigzag Street, made up of curious angles and unexplained decisions, streets that lose themselves in the contours. That end, and maybe somewhere else, begin again. Finding their way among old cottages in every state imaginable, some confidently renovated, some dealt with cruelly in the fifties and sixties, a few leaning as though they could fall with only a lapse in concentration.

  Gerry and Freddie, not unpredictably, live in an 1880s colonial with all the work done, right down to the authentic clawfoot bath.

  Freddie says, Hi, come right through, we’re out on the deck. I give him the bottle of wine and he says, Oh, nice, after pretending to read the label. Freddie knows fuck all about wine. We all know that.

  Richard brought us wine, he says as he leads me onto the deck.

  Gerry turns to me wearing an apron with an eclectic design involving a very matronly bosom and lederhosen.

  Oh ’88 Rouge Homme. You are being nice to us. You must have been very lonely.

  Freddie fetches a beer for himself and two glasses for us.

  Don’t take it personalty Richard, Gerry says, but Freddie won’t partake of your gift. He actually knows fuck all about wine, so he’s doing the decent thing and not wasting it by drinking it just out of politeness. All the more for us I say.

  Freddie takes this impassively. This is the kind of relationship I’ve never had. The kind where you can say something like that and it’s just fine. Anna knows fuck all about cricket, now that would have been okay to say, but wine and cricket are valued very differently. So even though I’m quite convinced Anna does know fuck all about wine, it could never have been said without significant response.

  I hope you don’t mind, Gerry says. I’ve taken the liberty of marinating the steaks without consulting you first.

  The sky darkens and Gerry proceeds to fill the air with the kind of barbecue smells that in my experience have only come from someone else’s barbecue. Tonight I’m on the right side of the fence. I’m not the loser at home next door, opening a little cardboard box and taking out my burger, shuffling the fries out of the paper bag. I’m on the barbecue side, and the food is almost as good as it smells, so I eat like a pig and Gerry takes it as a compliment.

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bsp; We drink the Rouge Homme, and he finds another bottle of red so we drink that too.

  You’ll be sorry, Freddie says, waggling his finger at Gerry. You’re forgetting your histamine problem.

  Fuck the histamine problem, Gerry says with a defiant wave of his right arm. Tonight I’m going to live.

  10

  In the morning, I too am visited by the histamine problem. Some mornings red wine is not my friend.

  I take a Teldane and drink water. Of course, it’s possible that the problem is quantity rather than histamine, but I don’t think that’s likely. I’m far too uncertain of the quantity I consumed to have any reason to think it’s a possibility.

  Greg comes in and sits on me, allowing several hundred fleas to transfer onto my clothing.

  When I get up I open the Whipper Snipper box and confront the task of limited assembly. I am not good with assembly of any kind. I am the limit when it comes to limited assembly. I am best with things you just plug in and switch on.

  The first thing I learn from the sixteen-page instruction booklet is that the words of limited assembly are the words of danger. They make it clear that if I fuck up and lose digits the fault is entirely my own, and nothing to do with the inherent over-complexity of the instructions.

  I attend to the limited assembly in only an hour and a half and with only two parts to spare. As I always seem to be able to build machines with fewer parts than the manufacturers suggest are necessary, this does not concern me. I keep all my spares, and one day, who knows what I’ll be able to build? I have an abundance of grommets and cams and screws and moulded pieces of plastic left over from numerous acts of limited assembly, and in the Suggested Division of Common Property, they all became mine. Anna was good that way. Fair. I got a lot of the things you’d really want. If I looked across from my column where it said Parts, Spare—Assorted, hers probably said something really useless like Motor Vehicle or 57cm Colour Television. But I imagine that this was done with some feeling that, at the end of the relationship, I had a greater entitlement to the debris.

  So I stand in the lounge room and hold my green plastic Whipper Snipper like a bazooka and I blow away various household objects, all to the imagined soundtrack of Apocalypse Now.

  I am not suited to living alone. I think few people are. I think we need to feel that there is some external monitoring of our behaviour or we regress badly. Our self-care and social skills deteriorate, and our interpretation of the role of objects can become eccentric.

  I wonder if I should get in a tenant. Perhaps I should get in a tenant and charge no rent providing the tenant does a certain quota of renovating. This is quite a good plan. It only deteriorates when I think that the tenant might be a babe, a female uni student presently without a partner. I see her up on a ladder painting. I see her on the front verandah attending to the railings. But I care not whether she renovates. And within weeks I’m more fucked up than I’m feeling now and I’m back alone in the house frightening the furniture with my Whipper Snipper bazooka.

  So. The grass; the true purpose of this fine green plastic device. I shall take this sixteen perch jungle and make it pleasing to the eye.

  Of course, when I reach the back steps I realise I can do nothing without a huge extension cord. Using the most advantageous power point available I can Whipper Snip almost half the kitchen but I can’t even get close to the back door. I will have to go back to Toowong.

  In the interests of planning I decide to go down into the yard to have a close look at the situation and work out if there’s anything else I need.

  I hear a grunting from next door. An old person’s grunting suggesting considerable effort. Kevin Butt, my neighbour, has a crow bar under a tree stump and the look of a man about to do himself harm as he sweats and swears away under a battered Akubra while his arm muscles pull like old ropes and get nowhere.

  Hey Kevin, you want a hand? I hear a much younger person’s voice say. Regrettably, it’s mine. Why am I doing this?

  Oh, g’day young Richard, he says between deep, desperate breaths. I think it’s bloody got me beat, mate. Not like I bloody used to be.

  He’s clearly depressed by this thought, even though it’s taken till his mid-eighties for a tree stump to make him aware of his own mortality.

  So I tell him, No worries, and I jump the fence. I wonder who I’m kidding with all this. No worries. Jump the fence.

  And the first look at the stump tells me he may be as much as a couple of hours away from uprooting it.

  He passes me a spade and I dig. He takes a pick and has a go round the other side, but he doesn’t last long. He stops and stands with his hands on his hips, breathing heavily.

  I should be doing more, he says angrily. I’m no bloody good.

  This is great, a neighbourhood of negative self-talk. I should get Jeff over for group therapy.

  Come on, why do you have to be good at pulling up stumps? I ask him.

  Cause I bloody used to be.

  Well, I never have been and it doesn’t bother me. I’m sure there are plenty of things you’re still good at.

  Yeah. Some things maybe. Not much I reckon. Not now. Slide bloody guitar maybe. You want to hear some slide guitar? Some real bloody old-style country guitar?

  Sure.

  What am I saying? What is happening here? My back is killing me, I’m knee deep in a hole in Kevin Butt’s backyard on maybe the fourth time I’ve met him in my life and he’s running up his back stairs to fetch his guitar in order to inflict some real bloody old-style country on me.

  He emerges above me, coming down the steps slowly and in time with his strumming. It’s like a ‘Mull of Kintyre’ nightmare, all this strolling and strumming and gazing off into the distance. Kevin Butt Unplugged. It’s not a pretty thought. And boy does he slide. It looks like a totally normal guitar, but in Kevin’s hands it slides like he’s playing it on ice. Slides way beyond reasonable, way beyond the confines of the tune. I think it may merely be Parkinson’s disease dressed up as style, but whatever it is it’s all his own.

  He tilts the Akubra back and struts around his yard in his sweaty singlet and baggy khaki pants, playing defiantly on. Strumming and plucking and extracting every last bit of wobble he possibly can.

  He turns and says, I’m self-taught, you know. Every bloody bit of this. Self-taught.

  And he tells me he’s partial to the music of the old country, and just as I’m wondering what old country Butts come from he slips effortlessly into a very long and heartfelt version of ‘The Rose of Tralee’.

  What do you think of that? he says, stopping to wipe his brow when he’s finished.

  It’s great, I tell him. Unique. You’ve got a very individual touch.

  I like to think so.

  And he plays it again, even more flamboyantly individual than before.

  These roots go forever. This tree was built to last.

  At lunchtime we sit on his steps and he gives me ham and tomato sandwiches.

  Went on the road in ’26, he says. I was sixteen then and I didn’t know too much. Did a lot of country dances. Pride of bloody Erin, that sort of thing. You know? And the Depression nearly bloody did me in. And the Japs of course, in Burma.

  Soon I’m back in the hole and Kev’s sitting on the bottom step, strumming softly. I wonder if he’s doing this deliberately. If it’s some perverse sport. Persecuting me with the relentless torture of the strumming. And when the hole is deep enough he’ll segue effortlessly into ‘Mull of Kintyre’ and that’ll be the end of me.

  I try to distract myself, and I think again of my student lodger. Even though there is probably an ethical problem with this (I suspect the Residential Tenancies Act does not condone the taking in of a lodger about whom the landlord has had previous sexual fantasies), I try to draw encouragement from the fact that I have been able to have any sexual idea about a woman I have yet to meet.

  Are those fleas? I hear Kevin saying, from somewhere far beyond this embryonic stirring.
>
  What?

  Fleas. It looks like you’ve got fleas on you. I think they’re abandoning ship now though. Now that you’re working up a good head of steam.

  Yeah, they’re probably from my grandmother’s cat.

  Oh, right. Have you stopped using the Martha Gardener?

  What?

  Martha Gardener. You know, bloody Wool Mix. It’s great for fleas. Gave your grandma that tip a while back.

  Oh, right. That explains it.

  Country music and helpful household hints. I can see we’re going to have a great relationship.

  I keep working. Mid-afternoon, the stump starts to move. Kevin gets excited, shouts encouragement. He puts the guitar down, picks up his crow bar and starts fiddling around again. I tell him to go easy, but he says we’re nearly there. In another hour, when I think Kevin is about to die, the stump comes up. We drop the crowbars and he sits on the ground with his back to the steps saying, You bloody beauty, several times, and I lie on the grass looking up at the clouds gathering, maybe for a storm. It’s now intensely humid and still hot and already the grass is making my back itch, but I can’t move.

  Kevin appears above me with a six pack of Fourex.

  A few big drops of rain fall, but the storm happens somewhere else.

  I can hear it at night, in bed, where I’m feeling the effects of three beers and the insane physical pain which I am trying to tell myself was the result of ‘good hard work’, because good hard work never did anyone any harm.

  So I lie there, sweating quietly in a night not cooled by rain. Woken on and off by distant thunder and the vague dissociated flicker of lightning and a thousand unkind hands gripping every part of my body in a way that is far from intimate.

  11

  On Sunday I walk like a man far older than Kevin Butt.

  Slowly, painfully, with feet far apart and a difficult stoop.