Green (18 page)

And for putting up such a poor effort to get me into bed

That I feel compelled to do this every year

And they should also print one for me that says:

Thank you for last year's card

Allow me to correct a misunderstanding

I have never wanted to be your friend

A while back I wanted to sleep with you

And then you turned out to be the kind of person who sends

Friendship Christmas cards with cheesy rhyming couplets

Are you unable to understand the meanings of the following words

platitude

vomit

But supposing you want to have sex with me

You have my number

Enough Beischer and Mackay for now. It's time to change my luck. Will it be The Cars' ‘Let's Go' or Heart's ‘Magic Man'? They'd have to be the two best choices on the tape. If only Fleetwood Mac's ‘Second Hand News' wasn't called ‘Second Hand News'. It'd be just right otherwise, with that line that keeps coming up about doing my stuff in the tall grass. ‘Magic Man'—that's the one to go with. It has the edge when it comes to passion, in a slinky sort of way, it's got that storyline about sheer irresistibility and, most subtle of all, it's a chick song. Like Dusty Springfield in AJ's car, I'm swerving the cliché of guy rock, I'm looking sensitive, and surely geniune desirability is only one small step away. It's decided. ‘Magic Man' is to be my new (and first) fuck song, and that's all there is to it. It won't give me mongrel quality, but it's a start.

I can record tape-to-tape in the lounge room, so I find a blank ninety-minute cassette and set out to make forty-five minutes of fuck song. This is where I'll outdo Frank. I'll not only be ready when my chance comes, I won't have to try to cram it into three minutes.

I'll have a full three-quarters of an hour of hot, passionate Heart fuck song, and surely that's a timeframe that's considerate to all concerned. I can see it like a movie sequence, time slipping into something more comfortable, the song playing and playing, the physical attraction inevitable, all-powerful. Fans circling above, curtains billowing, majestic halls. Probably not doves—that'd be overkill.

Actually, it'd be the Bonnie Tyler ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart' film clip. I'm going to have to be careful about that.

I'm taping the song for the fourth time when my father comes in.

‘Oh, Philby, you're in here. I thought something must have become stuck.'

‘I thought you were working.'

‘Well, yes, but I'm not deaf. I thought there was a problem.'

‘I'm just doing a tape.'

‘Really?'

‘It's a film soundtrack thing. An experiment. For a film idea I had.'

‘Oh. And you have that song going over and over?'

‘Yes.'

‘What's it about?'

‘It's just a song. It's got the right sound.'

‘No, what's the film about?'

‘What's the film about?' He's expecting an answer. He's expecting it to be about something. Doves, fans, curtains, irresistible physical impulses involving me and a person yet to be located? What am I supposed to say? ‘Well, the music's a big part of it. The film's more a montage. There's not really much narrative, so it's hard to put into words what it's about. It's a montage of images, with the meaning inferred by their, um, artful juxtaposition.'

‘Quite passionate, though,' he says, ignoring my ugly over-faking and noticing more Heart than I'd like him to. ‘You know, in that lock-up-your-daughters kind of way. He sounds like he's that kind of fellow.'

‘What?'

‘The magic man. “Sorry, mother, but he's got magic in his hands and that's all there is to it. I was powerless to resist,” and so on. Listen.' He stops us talking, for the length of an entire chorus and some of a verse. Yep, there's passion. Just like there was supposed to be. ‘When I was your age there was a particular Glenn Miller number that I . . . um . . . doesn't matter. It's to do with girls. It would have been handy to be able to make a tape like that though. The song only went for about three minutes. Anyway, now I know what you're doing I'll leave you to it.'

He goes back to his study, whistling ‘In the Mood'. There are some things about your parents that you don't need to know. Did he take his shoes off before starting his Glenn Miller record, I wonder? No, I don't wonder. I don't wonder at all. Did he take his tie off?

 

*

 

What I decide to wonder about, once I shake that thought, is the prospect of meeting a girl on the
Paradise
. And I don't mean a dull regular girl pretending to be Spanish. I mean one who might be worthy of my now very extended mix of Heart's ‘Magic Man'.

I can see her when it plays for the first time—her acknowledgment of the good taste it shows, and perhaps a hint of arousal. It's an unseasonably warm afternoon for May—but they happen, it's not impossible—and she takes the initiative. She's amazed I'm single, pleased but not completely surprised that of all the women on the
Paradise
I ended up with her. She calls me ‘irresistible' when the song plays a second time, and she laughs at herself for saying it. For saying something so corny, and/or so self-evident. When it plays a third time, she kicks her shoes onto the floor and makes her move. During the first chorus of the fourth she stands, takes my hand and says, ‘Maybe we'd be more comfortable in another room'. By about the twelfth time through it turns out that, as well as being irresistible, I'm the best she's ever had.

Okay, there are a few outstanding technical issues to deal with before that's reality. I could start by getting some new sheets, and taking down the ‘Catweazle' poster and a couple of the planes.

What am I thinking? This room is comprehensively bad, and I've never made a move to change that. It's like I've decided that, however many poker holes the Messerschmitts near the ceiling have suffered, the Battle of the Bedroom is already lost. Life will be conducted outside these walls, this place is beyond saving. And the bullfighter poster featuring the matador in his ‘suit of lights', with my name the middle one of the three below and the only one that's faded? Should I keep that, to help us recall the few early tender moments we shared cruising under Victoria Bridge on the memorable night of Viva Espa–a?

What would my mother think if I put ‘new sheets, non-steam engine, etc.' top of my next birthday-present list? She'd know, wouldn't she? I need to pick a girl who has already moved out of home, then find some way of making it seem normal when I pull the tape out of my pocket at her place.

Pick a girl. I've been hanging around Frank too long—Frank, who doesn't see that I live in a world that exists in a crack somewhere between his chick auditions and the lazy twenty bucks in Nev's back pocket. A contemplative, bullworking world with a 1:72 scale war on the ceiling and a 1:1 scale real-life diorama of nothing in most of the rest of the room.

How can I go to America when I can't even change my sheets?

I told Sophie about the UCLA offer, and she said, ‘So that's where you're going, then?'

I wanted to stop her right there and go, ‘Soph, in life, nothing's that straightforward.' I did tell her the positions were for people with an interest in emergency medicine, and I wasn't sure that was me.

It didn't stop her.

‘But the medicine's not really what it's about,' she said. ‘You want to go, don't you? It's LA. You want to go to America. I know New York might be your first choice, but LA's even better from the movie point of view, isn't it? Even if that's not what you'd be doing in work time. That's the reason you're going, isn't it? And you wouldn't be working all the time.'

‘But . . . but emergency medicine in LA,' I wanted to say to her. ‘Don't you watch TV? It won't be like the Mater. It won't even be like the Royal.'

But I didn't say that. I agreed with her, because there seemed to be no alternative. But I told her there were a few things to straighten out first. It wasn't just a matter of sending a cheque to the Regents of the University of California and turning up at the airport at the end of November. There was the visa application, the price of the ticket, a lot of things I didn't have time to think about right now. I didn't mention that the ticket would probably be seen as an educational expense, and that parental support was therefore likely to be substantial.

The whole US thing was easier earlier in the year, when it was just talk. I assumed they'd reject me, or not reply. And five times out of six I was right, but the scariest one of all said they'd take me for a thirty-five US-dollar processing fee.

I want to go, don't I? I want to go to America. Why can't I even think that in a confident voice?

 

 

 

8

 

 

 

Some Wednesdays we finish early, but this Wednesday is Frank's first twenty-four-hour shift in Labour Ward, so he stays on at the Mater when I go home and try to convince myself to study. By four-thirty, I'm reading the newspaper on the back patio.

My mother is working in the garden, being maddened by her roses in the way that some people are maddened by their misbehaving hair. Her roses make their own decisions, and wind and grow whichever way they like. My grandmother, who still lives in England, once said she would quite like to come to Australia, but she didn't want to leave her roses. And my mother called it ‘not much of a reason', but she's been working on her rose bed ever since. Today she's weeding with her tape recorder beside her, and singing one song from
Pirates of Penzance
over and over. I'm glad I made my ‘Magic Man' tape before this afternoon.

She stands up, still singing, and looks over the work she's done.

‘Better,' she says. ‘Better.' She hits her gloves together to loosen any dirt, and takes them off. ‘Enough,' she tells the tape recorder, and stops the music. She walks over to the patio and sits down facing me, folding her gloves over the arm of her chair. ‘I so prefer Chekhov. Chekhov never needed songs. But sometimes you've got to play to the popular tastes. You never lose money on G&S.'

‘I've never quite understood that.'

‘You and me both, Philby. It's a funny old world. A funny old world that loves a good tune. Look at all that Andrew Lloyd Webber nonsense. Give me Pinter any day, or Beckett or Tennessee Williams or David Williamson. The big moments in life don't come with a soundtrack, or people bursting forth into song. They creep up behind you and then, whack. That's what theatre should be.'

‘The bit that goes whack?'

‘Well, yes. It should draw you in and then surprise you, show you something you haven't seen before. Don't you think? Film too. I know why you want to do it, you know. It's just a question of getting the chance to, isn't it? And not being distracted from things like obstetrics in the meantime.'

‘Yes. Are you suggesting that chapter eighteen, ‘Bleeding in Early Pregnancy', is waiting for me on the coffee table in the lounge room and wondering what I'm doing out here?'

‘Well, it's hardly my place to do that, is it?'

When we're back inside, she starts to chop vegetables for dinner and I make another move on chapter eighteen, this time in front of the TV news and then ‘Perfect Match'.

I do like it when she fights G&S every step of the way but takes it on despite that and bides her time, waiting for Beckett or Chekhov. She earns her Chekhov by doing that, by staying part of the team when they're putting on things she doesn't particularly like. But the mood at home varies distinctly. The roses got no attention at all during rehearsals for
The Cherry Orchard
.

About two minutes after I've succumbed fully to my motivational lapse, put the book down and decided it's late enough in the day for me to devote my undivided attention to a ‘M*A*S*H' repeat, my father arrives home and says, ‘It's good to see you lounging around doing nothing for a change.'

‘He's been working,' my mother calls out from the kitchen, always in favour of credit being given where it's due, and sometimes even where it isn't. ‘He's been reading something about bleeding.'

‘Let's not get into that. Dinner's not far off.' My father's not good with bleeding. ‘I meant that it's good to see you having a bit of a break. You've been at World of Chickens quite a few evenings recently.'

‘Yes, but it's not intellectually taxing work. And I'm saving up for that video camera, remember.'

‘Don't worry, I remember.' He sits down and looks under the papers for the TV remote. ‘There's no hurry, is there? They'll still be around after the mid-year break. This is a repeat, isn't it? Isn't this the one where Hawkeye and Hotlips get trapped behind enemy lines?'

My father is philosophically opposed to repeats, which is why I have the remote tucked down the side of my seat. He has some issue with them, and the closest he can get to articulating it is, ‘Well, they've shown them already.'

‘Dinner soon, I suppose,' he says, giving up the search. ‘How's obstetrics treating you then?'

‘Like everything else. I've got Labour Ward this Friday, and that's a twenty-four hour shift starting at 8 a.m. Frank's on tonight, so we've swapped at the World and we're doing it tomorrow. And I've got a different job on Saturday night. Just a one-off thing, bar-tending on the
Paradise
. You know the
Paradise
? The barge with the palm trees that goes up and down the river at night with a lot of loud music and drinking?'