You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead (29 page)

The house itself was set atop a cliff, a soaring Vesuvius. We had expected a winding, crumbling staircase, cut into the earth, bracketed by a wooden barrier. It was difficult to understand why Bob was still so fat given that he had to climb Mount Everest every day.

Bob pointed again.

‘Get in,' he said.

It was a small, roofless cage, about waist high, big enough for three or four children to play inside comfortably. We looked to Bob for further instructions, helpless tourists.

‘It's a fucking inclinator!' he snapped, losing patience. ‘And it takes us up to the house. Now get
in
.'

Tim picked up Bob Ellis the dog and we obediently stepped into the cage. Bob squeezed his considerable frame in front of us, causing an already uncomfortable arrangement to become borderline unbearable. We were like the cast of
The
Magic Roundabout
stuck in a wheelie bin. Bob pressed a button and we jolted forward aggressively. The impact was such that I flew backwards and accidentally pressed the emergency stop lever. We shuddered to an immediate halt.

‘What happened?' said Bob.

I felt his temper rising. I gestured wordlessly at the controls.

Bob started up the machine again. Again, I was flung back and managed to inadvertently bring everything to a stop.

Ellis was apoplectic. At this point it looked as though we would all die here, in this inclinator, sadly stuck down the bottom of a hill. Tim had his face buried in the dog's fur.

‘When I push this button,' Bob explained, as though speaking to a pair of deaf children, ‘we will move forward. If you are able to . . .
try not to turn the fucking thing off again
.'

The inclinator itself, when it got going, moved at a pace best described as ‘leisurely'. We were essentially in a motorised wheelchair on an angle. Two men, a dog, and a chastened superfan. When we finally reached the summit—thank christ, thank christ—Bob Ellis the dog leaped from Tim's arms, impatient to explore. We watched her fondly and mutely for a moment as she sniffed the grass. Which did then seem an opportune moment for her to splay her back legs out and propel herself across Bob's lawn, rubbing her itchy backside with what appeared to be an enormous amount of care.

This went on for a very long time. Bob Ellis the man watching Bob Ellis the dog cheerily wiping her rectum all over his otherwise impeccable lawn.

Bob turned to us. He looked angry. To be fair, he always looked angry. But at this point he looked slightly angrier than normal.

‘Is your dog a
fool
?' he asked with relish, not waiting to hear the answer, just stomping indoors and announcing to his wife that the guests were here, was the kettle on and could we all just have a nice cup of tea.

Tim whispered urgently for Bob Ellis the dog to perhaps abandon her ablutions and act normal, or something along those lines. She trotted over obediently, tail wagging, looking up at us to see what fun we had to offer.

As we stood together, wondering what other ways we could fuck up this weekend, we looked out at the vista. It was a startlingly gorgeous view. Glimmering water, distant green islands. The hum of speedboats being commandeered by their playboy owners drizzled upwards. Foliage sighed in that thick, erotic, coastal way. It felt as though we looked down on all the world, and all the world was a sunny playground for the well-heeled set.

‘Probably the best view in the country,' Ellis said importantly, reappearing by our sides, not looking at it, just squinting at us to ascertain our reactions. I felt sick with anxiety, not wanting to say the wrong thing. We had already dented his car and broken his inclinator. Then our dog had run her anus all over his lawn.

Bob's thundery rages were of biblical proportions. I wasn't sure I would cope if he suddenly unleashed one on me.

We ate well, a vegetable curry and poppadoms and rice, everybody politely murmuring over the fact that Annie had gone out of her way to make vegan food. Ellis was distracted, or seemed to be, and ate in great gulps, shovelling curry into his mouth. He spilled raita across the table.

‘You can rest after lunch,' he said. ‘And later we'll go to the movies.'

Everything had a surreal edge. I was unable to relax, wanting to say something so impressive and astute that Bob would look up from his food with admiring eyes. It was impossible to get a word in most of the time, so we mostly sat and listened.

Bob and Annie's daughter, Jenny, we were told, was elsewhere in the house, mourning the recent death of a friend. ‘You probably won't see her,' Annie whispered to us, but I did, running into her later that afternoon in the kitchen. Jenny and I were the same age. She looked at me with open curiosity as the dog sat at my feet.

‘So this,' she said slowly, ‘is Bob Ellis the dog.'

I imagined what this moment must feel like from her perspective. I pictured waking up in my own parents' house and walking into another room to find a young woman standing and grinning at me in a friendly yet demented fashion.

‘This is my dog, Alan Hardy!!' she would exclaim with enthusiasm, before rolling up her sleeve to show me the tattoo she had designed inspired by my father's myriad acting roles.

Jenny and I stared at each other. I have rarely felt so foolish.

‘Well,' I said with forced cheer. ‘Better go see what Tim's up to.'

Bob insisted we go to the local cinema to see
Vicky Cristina
Barcelona
. He was seeing it for the ninth time. ‘It's a work of genius,' he kept repeating, ‘complete genius. Woody Allen is back in form.' I loved this about Bob; that he would enjoy something so much he wanted to share it with everybody he met, even strangers. Three years later he would take me to see
The Wharf Revue
. It would be my first visit and his fourteenth.

During the film, Bob cackled and sighed, muttered admiringly, and heckled. He kept looking over to us, ensuring that we were gaining as much enjoyment from it as he was, that we too were appreciating the nuances and craftsmanship. After the film we went for dinner at the local Chinese, and Ellis held court over the Lazy Susan, spilling wine and sweet and sour sauce across the paper tablecloth as he reiterated exactly why the movie worked and why we should be duly awed and why Julia Gillard was a cunt.We had gelato after the meal and strolled the deserted Palm Beach promenade. An empty Burger Rings packet danced past our feet and flung itself in a suicide mission against a rock. Ellis was too drunk to drive so Tim commandeered the Volvo back to the house.

That night we sat for hours, eating liqueur chocolates liqueurs and drinking port and listening to Bob rail about the state of the New South Wales Labor party, John Howard, the sorry demise of Kim Beazley. Pet subjects, and we had heard most of them before, but we sat and soaked it up anyway. It was like a free concert. Ellistock.

Tim eventually announced he was going to bed. It was 2 am. Bob reached for the port again. I wanted to stay and hear more, to have some one-on-one time with that wonderful mind. Tim nudged me.

‘You're probably tired too,' he said meaningfully.

Those knowing looks other women had given me when I proclaimed my devotion to Bob suddenly came sharply into focus. If Bob made a pass at me when we were alone I would have fallen apart. This was not how I saw his role in my life. I wanted to give him space and stay out of his way, just so he wouldn't be tempted in the first place. This was not a sexual relationship. This was an exchange of ideas.

In bed, I whispered with Tim.

‘He wouldn't have
done
anything. He was too pissed.'

‘You don't know that for sure. I saw him trying to look down your dress.'

‘He was probably just drunk and cross-eyed. He's not like that anymore. He's not like that with
me
.'

There had always been, I suppose, the question of sex.

‘Are you going to fuck him?' somebody had asked me once.

‘What,
Ellis
? Are you out of your mind?'

‘He might expect it.'

‘Don't be revolting.'

‘He does have an eye for the ladies, you know. And there you are, all young and juicy and adoring . . .'

‘It's not that kind of thing. Besides which, Ellis is past his philandering days. He said so in that letter he read out on the radio about not being able to get it up anymore.'

On my part, at least, the relationship was entirely innocent. I was in it purely for his cerebral cortex. The way Bob wrote split me open and connected to something valuable, something I had never possessed yet felt like I had lost. The older man/younger woman dynamic didn't titillate or interest me at all. If anything, it felt as though my sex got in the way of an average, healthy, garden-variety hero worship. If I were a young man, I told myself, nobody would care that I had Bob's picture up on my studio wall and would talk to it in the mornings before starting work.

The next day we took the dog for a stroll on the beach—Bob seemed to have forgiven her rather forward introduction of the previous afternoon—and went out for breakfast, where he spilled egg and coffee across the table and himself.

We said relieved goodbyes and made a vague date to go and see a movie in a few weeks' time. In retrospect, the ensuing mix-up was entirely generational—I had said yes, presuming that we would confirm closer to the date.

It was still difficult to quell that frisson I felt when receiving texts from Ellis. There he was, a name in my phone, right between Blue and Booky.

Oh, just a text from Bob Ellis
, I would tell people casually.
I think we're going to the movies together
.

Friends had enjoyed a brief period of cracking wise when I first got the hound—I didn't know your dog could text, etcetera. I had allowed them their levity. There was something about receiving a text or an email from someone you admired. For a brief moment you were catapulted up into their peer group, conversing with the gods. I had felt this way when I was introduced to Patti Smith backstage at the Big Day Out.

‘How are you?' she had asked, politely.

‘Food,' I replied, having clearly been confused as to whether I had wanted to say ‘fine' or ‘good' and settling instead for an interesting combination of the two. Patti Smith had walked away. The gods had closed the door.

The next I heard of our movie date was when Ellis called me. He was standing in front of the cinema, he said, and had travelled all the way from Palm Beach for the occasion we had specifically agreed on. Where the fuck was I?

Everything froze.

‘I thought you were going to text and confirm,' I said feebly.

He hung up. He was furious.

‘Bob Ellis just hung up on me,' I told my friend Lindsay.

‘I didn't know your dog could use the phone,' said Lindsay, tediously.

Man and dog became so commonplace people stopped making jokes. Bob Ellis was my dog, who I loved more than life itself. Bob Ellis was a writer. They were simply now two unconnected things that shared the same name.

Bob and I didn't see each other for a while after that, me tentatively keeping my distance as he cursed me as a flighty youth to anybody who would listen. A gentle peace was eventually reached and yet months later when I was unable to help him launch his book he was almost apoplectic with rage all over again. ‘I suppose I shall have to ask Tony Abbott instead,' he bellowed, and he did. The book was launched roughly twenty-four hours after Abbott had taken over the Liberal leadership and the eyes of the nation were trained upon Gleebooks. In hindsight I had done Bob a favour.

I insisted on his being on the bill at the inaugural Men of Letters event I was co-organising, amongst more commercially well-known types like Matt Preston and Tim Rogers and Eddie Perfect. He was obviously uncomfortable, pacing in the foyer before the show, complaining about sharing the stage with ‘fucking comedians'. I sent Gabi to placate him, but he was growing tetchy and impossible. He insisted he wanted to leave, he should never have come. Gabi returned to me with a worried look.

‘I got him a glass of red,' she said. ‘But he seems fairly pissed off.'

‘He's always pissed off,' I told her.‘That's why he's a genius.'

When it came time for him to speak he lumbered to the lectern, took a breath, and within moments had silenced the room. He spoke, from the heart, of his wife. He spoke of their many miscarriages, the trials and tribulations of their marriage, his mistakes, his regrets. It was a piece rubbed raw with honesty, and Bob delivered it in the patented ‘cadence of the King James Bible' that David Marr had once admiringly fashioned as his oratory signature.

He received a standing ovation. Everybody wept.

This
, I thought to myself.
This is why
.

I felt like my hoarse devotion of Ellis had culminated in that moment. I actually went around to various people at the event saying, ‘See? See?' I wanted to sing him from the rooftops.

He knew he had done well and looked like a prince backstage afterwards, accepting congratulations, beaming delightedly and passing opinion on everyone and everything in the room. When he saw me he swept me up in a big sweaty toxic embrace. All was forgiven. His eyes were glistening with proud tears.

‘That was brilliant, Bob. Thank you.'

He leaned into my ear.

‘If that's not worth a blowjob,' he whispered. ‘Nothing is.'

Our relationship seemed to level out after that. Perhaps now that sex had made its ugly presence felt it created the necessity of distance. He would send me a text once every few months, or I would see him at a book launch, and I would hug him and nod and smile and listen to his latest spray on Kevin Rudd. And then I would go home and read his novels and diaries and his articles on the ABC website and I would seamlessly re-enter that world of infatuation where he remained infallible, he remained distant, and would never, ever suffer the indignity of being human.