Green (38 page)

‘You're probably aware that I'm on some committees,' Zel's saying, like a woman whose abundant leisure time is known to be spent importantly. ‘There's a fundraiser on Friday for the Little Kings' Movement for the Handicapped. I took a few tickets weeks ago and Ron's still resting up after his dental work. So I thought, the four of us . . .'

‘Like, you and me . . .' Sophie's trying to come to grips with the suggestion . . . ‘and him and him?'

‘Count 'em, babe,' Frank says. ‘That'd be four.'

‘But it won't just be the four of us. There'll be lots of people. You can bring guests if you'd like. We can get more tickets. It's a boat cruise. A late afternoon and early evening cruise up the river to look at the bats. Quite novel. They take you up to the bat islands just as they're waking up, and you get to feed them. Apparently there are thousands of them, hundreds of thousands. It could be a bit of fun, I thought. And it's for a good cause, of course. Plus, wine and cheese.'

‘Um, sounds good.' It sounds ridiculous but she's looking right at me again and what else can I say? Another reason to wish things had stayed the way they were—she never once felt the need to look my way before she started sleeping with Frank. ‘I should probably check something though—it's not on the
Paradise
, is it?'

‘I don't think so. Why?'

‘No reason.'

‘Girl trouble,' Frank says. ‘He put a bit too much effort into entertaining the passengers last time, or so they say.'

‘Thanks, Frank.' I preferred him silent. ‘Sophie and I have to change, I think. Friday would be great thanks, Zel, but we should keep moving now. We've got to get a chicken out to that road.'

I walk past her to the back door, and cop another compliment on the way. I'm glad to get outside.

‘Okay,' Sophie says as she's unzipping me, ‘what happened on the
Paradise
?'

‘Oh, nothing. Weeks ago, when we were working on the bar there, one of the passengers got pretty sick and I helped out. Frank's got these wild ideas. You know Frank.'

We go through the changeover briskly, since I've made an issue of getting a chicken back out to the road. But it doesn't seem like much of a night for poetry, anyway. With Zel around, the atmosphere's different. Maybe it was different already. It doesn't feel the same for me, working here and knowing some of what's happening behind the scenes. I'm on edge now, all the time thinking that Frank will let something slip.

Zel leaves once we've changed. Some customers have turned up, enough that Frank goes, ‘Hey, is that line of people the thing they call a queue?' when we're tossing chicken breasts onto the hotplate. We sell a whole chicken, two half-chicken dinner deals and five burgers before the store is empty again. We even have to make two people wait for fries, since we can't fit enough in the oil at once.

‘Phew,' he says when it's just the two of us. ‘Wouldn't want it to get like that too often.'

‘I think we're safe enough.'

‘Yeah, back to normal now.'

‘Normal? Two words—bat cruise.'

He shrugs. ‘Buggered if I know. It wasn't my idea. She thinks you're a good guy. She thought the four of us could have a good night.'

‘Are you mad? What kind of a foursome . . .'

‘Hold on. There might be more. There might be Clinton, there might be Mowers people. Who knows? She said it's a work thing. She gets a bunch of tickets to events all the time, and takes work people. Her and Ron and a few other people. Different people each time. Share it around, you know? It's the corporate world. It's how it works. She's connected.'

‘It's a bat cruise. It's Friday night, and it's a charity bat cruise for sick kids.'

‘Yeah, right, this time it's a bat cruise, but it could be anything.'

‘You mean we could be going head-to-head for fanciest hat at some racecourse on Melbourne Cup day?'

‘Exactly, and with that head of yours I'd be worried.'

‘At least it's raising money for something, I suppose. And it's not darts in their downstairs bar.'

He laughs. ‘I've never seen that part of the house.'

He straightens up the tomato slices with his tongs and the laugh stays on as one of his bad-boy smirks, but I won't be provoked. He sets the tongs down and walks over to the hotplate and starts scraping.

I tidy up some fallen coleslaw and I tell him, ‘You make a hell of a mess when you cook things, you know.'

‘I've always got you there to clean it up for me, so why not? Anyway, I think that coleslaw's yours. You were stressing out with the dinner deals.'

‘Yeah, maybe. It's splitting the chickens exactly in two. It's quite a responsibility.'

‘I'm sure you're up to it.'

‘Yeah. Just one thing about the Couvelaire uterus . . .'

‘Yeah?' This time he's smiling because he knows I can never let go. He knows I don't work well with ‘agree to disagree'.

‘I'm not saying don't bring it up in the exam. It's just a question of how, and when. It's about the physical appearance of the uterus, remember?'

‘How it's, like, purple because of haemorrhage infiltrating the muscle, yeah. I'm across that.'

‘So if you can't see the uterus . . . What I'm saying is that it's an operative finding, because you can see the uterus then. It's not a clinical diagnosis because you can't see it from the outside. So if you've got a patient in the exam and you're dealing with a haemorrhage scenario, it's not a diagnosis you can make.'

‘Righto. Well, I don't think I'd make it as a diagnosis, anyway. I think I'd be talking through the haemorrhage, looking at immediate management, and clinical features and investigations that'd help tell me what was going on. Then, I might mention it in the context of more extreme outcomes. That's when it'd come up, as the icing on the cake.'

‘Which sounds fine. But earlier on it was sounding like it was the whole cake.'

‘No, no. It was never that. But I might have said it a lot. And that might have been influenced by the fact that I did like the sound of it. I've got to admit that.'

‘And I might have overreacted to that a bit. But you do have a history there. Remember how, in your surgery exam last year, you were determined to bring up Fournier's idiopathic gangrene of scrotum?'

‘Yeah, all right. But that was last year. And it was a bet. I had five bucks on that. People change, you know. I'm a much more mature person now.'

 

 

 

16

 

 

 

H
ow
dull
must a town be when a twilight bat cruise is a highlight? Possible exception: Gotham City.

‘A bat cruise, Philby?' my mother said when I told her. ‘What on earth's a bat cruise?'

Why are you going on the bat cruise? That would have been another very reasonable question. Why when, only recently, it looked as though you might be getting a life? Friday night, ambling up the river on a decommissioned ferry to watch smelly winged rodents eat soft fruit. It makes dancing with girls look like a complete waste of time, doesn't it?

Agreeing to go was simply the least dramatic way to deal with it when it came up. I would have made a mess of any attempt to invent a prior arrangement. I was already packing a year's worth of lying into Wednesday night, and I couldn't have managed any more.

It used to be that a girlfriend I invented by accident was all I had to remember, then two that I'm ‘juggling' (though I faked one and fumbled the other). Now that Frank's on with Zel my best lies are how I deal with most conversations. And that's not me. I'm not good at it. But the truth's not mine to go telling. Really, it isn't. But I feel like I have to do something. For Ron, for Sophie. It's almost like I have to hold the truth at bay and work to change it before they know. Somehow that's my job.

And on Friday that means it's up to me to make the bat cruise as normal as I can. To treat everyone the way I used to, pretend to a passing interest in bats if it's really necessary, hold back on the lying where possible and hope the evening ends with nothing gone wrong. Has Zel lined this up as a smokescreen? If she was having an affair with Frank, the last thing she'd do would be take him on a boat with Sophie and possibly Clinton.

I catch a bus into town, and my sense of unease grows at North Quay as I skulk past the
Paradise
. I hide on the bat-cruise side of one of the pillars holding up the freeway and I wait for the others. It's twilight. The
Paradise
won't be leaving for a while yet. Tonight their soundcheck music is Steely Dan, but that's not what I'll be listening to. I'm the guy who scores bats tonight, and can never set foot on the
Paradise
for the rest of his days.

Zel and Sophie arrive first. ‘Before I forget,' Zel says, as more passengers start clustering, ‘Ron says hello.'

‘How's he going?'

‘Oh, a little bit sorry for himself, but . . .' She's distracted by something over near the boat. ‘Someone I recognise. Don't go too far, you two.' She leaves us for a clump of people near the gangplank. They see her coming, and there's air-kissing all round.

Sophie looks as if she's bored already. Her mood is set to be more lank than her hair. She's been trapped by these events before, I can tell.

I ask her if Clinton's coming and she says, ‘We're not joined at the hip, you know.'

‘So, I take it that's a No.'

‘Yeah, it's a No. And what about you? No Phoebe? No Jacinta? No back-up option?'

‘I didn't think of inviting them. Or anyone.'

‘Really?' Said in the way you'd say it to a liar, not to a friend.

‘It didn't seem like it was up to me to invite people. I know your mother said it was okay. But, look, I haven't been totally straight with you about Phoebe . . .'

‘Hey kids,' Frank calls out, coming up beside us. ‘Ship ahoy. Rum anybody?' He pulls a flask out of his sock. ‘They've got a monopoly on these boats. Better to bring your own. Now, are we getting aboard?'

He puts an arm around each of our shoulders, steering us across to Zel and the boat. I don't know how straight I was going to be about Phoebe. Or Jacinta, or the absolute lack of back-up options, or anything else. There are too many lies open here, and some of them need closing. I would have invented an end to Phoebe, probably one that happened weeks ago, but that I hadn't felt like talking about till now. It would have been mutual, one of those things. Perhaps she was moving interstate. Phoebe's been applying for jobs since she finished her journalism degree, and now she's got one with a paper in Sydney.

There's not a truthful bone in my body. Sophie, Phoebe's someone I made up in the heat of the moment. An imaginary girlfriend that I never even imagined well enough to lie about consistently. Let's forget there ever was a Phoebe. Because there wasn't. Jacinta on the other hand—not that it's safe to use an expression involving the word hand where Jacinta's involved—Jacinta and me? That was another one of those things. There was definitely a Jacinta. You see the boat moored just along the wharf from here? I can never ever go on board it again. For the rest of my life, and I'm only twenty-one. And that's because of the second-best time I ever had with Jacinta. Disastrous dates? Don't get me started.

When we go on board Frank takes me aside and says, ‘Had a few mouthfuls of the rum in the car park. So you take the keys, hey? You're driving back to my place.'

‘So this is your plan? This is how you deal with the four of us being together for an evening? This is how you deal with me being dragged onto a fucking bat cruise? I don't even get to drink?'

‘Yep. I play the fool, you play Mister Serious and keep me in line. That way we've each got a job that we're good at and No one makes a mistake with the ladies. If I'm pissed, we've all got another issue to deal with. See? So don't go easy on me. Be a complete prick if you want. I reckon you could cover that.'

‘One day, just one day, could we talk these things through before we do them?'

He sucks air down his oesophagus and lets out a big burp. ‘Excellent start, my friend,' he says. ‘All the personality of my grade-ten maths teacher.'

‘Thanks.'

Frank and plans. Oil and water. They don't mix.

‘Frank's nervous on boats,' I find myself telling the others as he roams the deck like a naughty chimp, clowning around and trying to bum lollies from kids—something that works for him, since he charms several of their mothers in a very temporary way.

Zel watches, but tries not to. I try to distract Sophie by asking open-ended questions about media studies. I manage to make it sound like a job interview. She gives me a look that says, ‘Is it any wonder your girlfriends move out of town?'

We chug up river, past the malt smells from the biscuit factory and towards the setting sun and the bat colonies. A man with a beard and khaki ranger-type clothes comes up to the small podium and blows into the microphone a couple of times. He welcomes us, and tells us he thinks we're ‘in for a good one tonight'. He starts giving us khaki ranger-type background information on the bats, and interrupts himself excitedly with a ‘Hey kids' to report the first sighting, a lone bat flapping through the indigo sky above. The adults on the boat ‘Ooh' and ‘Aah' to start manufacturing a mood, pointing so that the children don't miss it.

‘Is there something I'm not getting here?' I say to Sophie.

‘Looks like a bat to me.'

‘As in, the kind of things that fly over this city all the time, take bites out of your pawpaws, fry themselves on power lines and leave brown unremovable shit on your car?'