What the? The expression ‘lost the plot’ is suddenly meaningful to me in a way it never has been before.
Is there even such a thing as Lady Grey tea? I thought it was Earl Grey tea. What next? Young Master Grey tea? Ralph Grey tea? Earl Grey’s Crossbred Dachshund tea? To be served in the boudoir with a selection of breakfast delicacies? Jesus. Can’t people just have a piece of toast or two before the paragraph actually starts? Do we have to live through their poncy breakfasts? The Davis household at breakfast time must be even worse than I imagined, all fine china with little fingers extended.
Except Cat’s mother’s in hospital at the moment, so maybe I should go easy on how they’re handling breakfast. Besides, at my place there are nights when we serve up packet tacos as if they’re a Central American festival, until the whole clumsy house of cards built by Jorge the Liar folds in on itself.
What’s got into Cat? She must have read my email before I saw her at Indooroopilly and she didn’t seem to have any issue with me then. After that she goes home and I cop this tirade. And this unfollowable piece-of-crap paragraph. But why should I be surprised? She was a mess at Indooroopilly. She could hardly have been stranger. Her mother was in a coma, or just drowsy, or sick with appendicitis, and, as her story was ducking and weaving, Cat seemed to be manoeuvring as if she was setting up to headbutt Luke. And then she was gone. Maybe it’s not appendicitis that her mother’s got. Maybe it’s something much worse and Cat couldn’t talk about it. Maybe her mother’s mad on custard, all superheroed up and tinkling the ivories in some locked ward across town.
My mother, on the other hand, varies between melancholy and indignation, with a little self-loathing thrown in from time to time to keep me on my toes.
Jorge Rivera, poor war-damaged master of salsa, has been unmasked as Enzo de Pasquale, taco klutz and fruit packer from the Rocklea markets, son or grandson of Italian migrants to North Queensland. The closest he’s been to war is the occasional turn he’s had on my PlayStation 2. So, no more of that hot Latin dancing for my mother at the moment.
‘I trusted him…’ The words come as though out of a grinder, forced under pressure, her jaw clenched. She’s on the sofa this morning, glaring at the river, a mug of unfinished coffee and a dishevelled newspaper nearby. ‘Why are they all…’ Then she lets her fists go loose, shakes her head. ‘Some. It can’t be all. It can’t be all men.’ She stares outside, saying nothing, then flares again. ‘But why are they such liars? Cheats and liars and hopeless bloody disappointments.’ Then back to the staring. Is she counting to ten? She looks my way. ‘Don’t mind me,’ she says, with a new fierce-eyed personality that’s all about false calm. ‘I’m just ventilating.’ Ventilating. The word could not have been more carefully, deliberately chosen if it had been lowered in by forceps. ‘It’s therapeutic. It’s necessary. At least it’s honest…’ The tone of her voice is again on the rise. ‘Which is more than you can say for…’ She stops, purses her lips, breathes like a weightlifter.
My mother, right in front of me, is ransacking every dubious self-help book she owns for crisis-coping strategies, and coming across as if our next good option is probably a complicated exorcism.
‘I feel kind of bad, making all that happen the other night, but –’
‘Bad? Bad?’ she says, as if I’m crazy to suggest it. ‘I’ve been living a lie and you brought it out into the open. Painful, but necessary. The way you and Betty ran your good-cop bad-cop routine…’ She gives a smile, but it’s not entirely real. ‘It was just what I needed. Though I’m not sure who was the good cop and who was the bad cop. I think you might have been the bad cop. That’s the only “bad” thing going on. From your point of view anyway. Jorge was a liar. I needed to see it for myself.’
She shrugs, as if it suddenly matters less. I know it doesn’t. ‘Your pH is up a touch,’ Luke says indignantly as soon as his head surfaces for the first time. ‘Who looks after this pool?’
‘How can you tell it’s up?’
‘It’s a feel thing,’ he says, like a jaded star who has been asked the question far too many times. ‘Trust me, it’s up. Not by too much, though.’
I fling the old tennis ball at the water, and it skids off and into his left hand. He throws it back. He’s been working with his father, servicing pools at other blocks of units in the area. His father’s now off doing some quotes.
‘Your mother,’ he says, as the ball slaps into his hand again. ‘She’s not too good today.’
‘No. It’s a rollercoaster ride up there on the sixth floor. Well, it would be if there were some high bits.’
‘You had to do it, though.’ He takes a look at the ball, tries to smooth down some of the wet fluff. ‘You knew he was a fake, so you had to let her know.’
‘Well, yeah. But I kind of liked it. There was this evil moment of triumph. He’d been irritating me for a while so –’
‘You had to let her know.’
He hurls the ball flat against the water, it bounces high, hits my thumb and I just miss the catch on my second grab.
‘Yeah, I guess. I prefer life when she’s not feeling like shit, though.’
‘Sure. And this is all about your life, isn’t it? Not really about her. I hope she’s aware it’s having this negative impact on you.’ He laughs, but the splash of the ball in front of his face stops him, or at least interrupts him. His head snaps back instinctively, but he catches the ball cleanly in front of his nose. The water settles. ‘So, how about Cat Davis at Indooroopilly yesterday?’
‘Yeah, what was that about? The vague answers, the weird ducking around, making herself shorter.’
‘I didn’t get to say this at the time…’ He throws the ball hard. It skims the water and again I don’t take it cleanly. ‘Since I had to go. But I think she’s hot for you, man. She went all blotchy, just seeing you. I think she knows you don’t like tall chicks and she wants you bad. She’d shrink for you, or at least crouch a lot.’
‘I thought we were talking about my mother, and my selfish outlook on life.’ My throw goes wrong, and the ball bounces high and slowly, and plops into the water in front of him.
‘We were. And we’re agreed. You’re selfish, and you think your mother should snap out of it because she’s bringing the mood down. And now we’ve moved on, and it’s about Cat Davis. About Cat Davis wanting a big hot slice of the Joel.’
‘I think that’s highly unlikely.’ This needs to be squashed, and quickly. And I don’t know when I became ‘the Joel’. ‘That whole definite article thing – I’m not sure it’s how anyone’s thinking.’
‘She was going all dreamy-eyed and dizzy.’
‘She was neither of those, and you know it. She was strange and maybe even disturbed, and her mother could be quite sick.’ Or maybe she likes me. Surely not. That’s all Luke’s idea – Cat Davis dreamy-eyed and dizzy at the sight of the Joel. Okay, I’ve got to get over that thought pretty quickly, particularly the part that goes ‘the Joel’. ‘The way Cat treats me… it’s a veneer of politeness on top of a big slab of inexplicable hatred. That’s the extent of our relationship.’
‘I bet she emailed you last night.’ He’s giving me a knowing look, tossing the ball from hand to hand, and water’s spinning off it.
‘She had to email me last night, dickhead, and you know it.’
‘She just loves riding the tandem with her Joel.’
‘You’re insane. And that “tall chicks” thing is insane. Throw the ball.’ He doesn’t throw the ball, and we both know I’ll keep protesting. ‘I’d take ’em any height. I’d stand on a box if I had to. But not for the deeply disturbed Cat Davis. Could be drugs, Lukey. You’ve got to watch these kids.’
‘Sure.’ He throws the ball now, and this time I take it cleanly. ‘And it’s usually the ones you least expect. I’m tanked on calcium hypochlorite most of the time. Not that it offers a lot as a chemical.’
What would it be like, being in this pool with Cat Davis instead of Luke and a raggy old ball? A hot summer weekend day, late afternoon, the sun settling behind the buildings, the air still full of heat and the smell of cut grass, no one else around…
‘Hey, it kills bugs,’ I tell him, since this is about calcium hypochlorite. ‘It lets us all swim in safety and gives your skin that fresh flaky complexion. Something really is messing with the Cat Davis brain, though. I mean, last night’s tandem-story paragraph…’
‘Yeah?’
‘Did I miss the bit where Ashtoe said last night’s paragraph had to include a superhero cape, an upright piano and a yearning for custard?’
Luke laughs, quite a lot. ‘She’s working you hard. That’s some great team play, tossing you that. What are you going to do with it?’
He throws the ball. It sticks cleanly in my hand, and I don’t even move.
‘I’m going to have to take her down. No more Mister Nice Guy.’
‘What do you think’s happening with her mother?’
‘Thanks. Right. I’m being a bastard. Selfish when it comes to my own mother, thoughtless when it comes to hers. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? Her mother’s sick – she’s distracted. She was weird yesterday. Her story’s weirder because her mind was on her mother.’
‘Don’t weaken. You’re going to be nice when you email back, aren’t you? I can read it now, all sickly sweet…’
He goes to put two fingers in his mouth, and makes a gagging noise. So I throw the ball and it clips his knuckles and ricochets over his head. I think he bites his hand, but he pretends he hasn’t.
‘Shit no. It’s only appendicitis. Her mother’ll be fine. And we’ve got to get this story back on track. No mercy, Lukey, no mercy.’
The smell should give it away, but it doesn’t seem to. My mother’s too deep in the trough to recognise a low-grade intervention when it’s being put together around her. Betty and I have talked, and it’s time for baking.
I give her the signal when I’m back from the pool and she comes over with plates of newly made macaroons and melting moments. Today she’s keeping it strictly old-school Anglo – not a hint of Central America.
I’m the facilitator and tea-maker. Hot beverages and an atmosphere of painless spontaneity – that’s my brief.
‘Such a nice afternoon for it,’ Betty says. ‘For a bit of baking. For a couple of old favourites.’
I make the tea in a pot and take it into the lounge room on a tray with milk and sugar and cups. Everyday cups, or it’ll look too much like a fuss is being made.
‘That Luke’s a nice boy,’ Betty says, since we quickly work out that the conversation has found itself with nowhere to go.
My mother says, ‘Hmmm,’ and then realises it’s not exactly an endorsement and follows up with, ‘Oh, yes, very nice. He and Joel have been friends since the day they met.’
Chapel Hill State School, 1996. Luke had a very large hat. And that’s it for the day we met. No conversation there.
We ask open questions and then closed questions about my mother’s work in the coming week. She gets stuck when she realises tomorrow night is now blank in her diary. Betty asks me about school. I struggle to find some news and then tell her, inexplicably, that I’m having a really interesting time working on the stupid tandem story. We’re trying so hard that we even talk about the weather. My mother hasn’t noticed any. She takes another bite at her melting moment, then looks at it as though for the first time.
‘Time to put a name to the elephant dancing on the coffee table, perhaps?’ Betty says.
‘Would that name be Jorge?’ my mother says. ‘Or Enzo?’ She looks again at the broken half of the melting moment in her hand. ‘You know I like these, don’t you?’ she says. ‘Thank you.’ She looks at Betty, then at me. ‘You were right. I’m pretty sure you both had suspicions, and you were right.’
Would she have liked him as Enzo, the fruit packer? I can’t know and, for now at least, I can’t ask. If he hadn’t led with a lie, and then lived it in the half-arsed way he did, stumbling over mock-Spanish and bad food and all the rest – if they had met under different circumstances – would things be different now? But they didn’t, since his lie was already in the air when she walked into the church hall in Graceville, salsa-ready, manhungry. There he was, taking CDs out of boxes, setting up for the class – Jorge.
‘It’s depressing,’ she says. ‘That’s all. I can’t say it’s a complete shock, but…’
She starts talking, letting out some of what she’s held back for a day and a half. I don’t want to hear everything and she doesn’t want to tell it, but we all know she can’t keep every part of it stuck inside her. She talks, pours us all more tea, takes a second melting moment and then a third.
‘We had fun,’ she says. ‘I think he could be a nice guy. He was a nice guy. But who knows what he was when all the facts… aren’t facts after all.’
Beneath the made-up identity, the fear of discovery and all the effort he had to put in to faking it, what was Enzo and what was Jorge? What was just him scrambling to fill the untidy gap in between? He probably hates me for exposing him, but it was bound to happen some time and for my mother’s sake – and maybe his too – sooner was, I’m sure, better than later.
But I don’t have the answers. I don’t even have the questions. I’m the one who mentions the support group for new singles.
‘I know you’re a mentor most of the time, but maybe tonight’s meeting would be a good chance for you to get some of that support back.’
She’s about to resist, and then she doesn’t. She nods, says, ‘Hmm. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s a sign that the fortnightly meeting is tonight. Or maybe it’s not a sign and I should just go. But what would you do for dinner?’
‘I think there’s some leftover…’
‘Mexican,’ she says, stiffly. ‘Go on, say it. There’s some leftover Mexican in the fridge from Friday night.’ She stops, and manages something like a smile. ‘Don’t say Salvadorean, and please eat it all. That’s all I ask.’
She’s away at the counselling centre and the smell of reheated, mediocre Mexican is still in the air when I go to my computer and click on Cat’s email. Any thought that Cat might be anything but extremely annoying is dashed by re-reading her story paragraph.
Okay, so I’m a little embarrassed about the slight logical error with the whole ‘Mad Eyes’ thing, but I had bigger story issues in mind and what gives her the right to be so picky? What is she thinking, writing a paragraph like that? She’s standing in the way of the story, stopping me making progress.
‘She had never understood Christopher’s love of custard.’ The line hangs there as though it’s laden with meaning, as though she’s watched far too many enigmatic foreign films, but never actually understood them. How do I follow that?
Yes, thank you for that point about the ‘Mad Eyes’ name (clarified, see below). Thank you also for the gift of the witless, unfascinating Christopher, and his penchant for custard. Superb. May I reciprocate with a character gift of my own?
Nice work with the tea, too. Let me know the instant another member of the Grey family comes up with a beverage of their own. Paragraph follows…
J
Max ‘Mad Eyes’ Eislander – only the dead had seen his eyes like that. Only the dead and Heinz ‘Hands of Doom’ Heckler – renegade, master of disguise and Eislander’s nemesis. They had stood side by side in the Austrian secret service, taken on aliases together, but that had been years ago. Eislander had been Kristof then, and sometimes Christopher. But he had long since cast such masks aside. Heckler was damaged goods. He had turned to absinthe, had drowned his mother’s Cat in a vat of custard – though that had surely been a good thing, since the creature was quite disturbed – and had gone away hallucinating. The things he said were vicious, and made no sense at all. There was trouble brewing, and Eislander had already been sent once to deal with it. For Eislander, Heckler was ‘the one that got away’. But no more. The rush of the wind invigorated him, as did the firm pressure of a dozen thirty-round curved box magazines in his pockets. This was truly a day to kill. Heckler was out of control, worse than unpredictable, a warhead, a warhead with the timer set and running. And only Eislander could take him down.
PS – Not sure whether to go for ‘masks’ or ‘masques’, which perhaps could be more intriguing… await your thoughts, breath bated.
PPS – Is it possible your part of the story might be seen as a little, or possibly extremely, dull?