Things did not go well in Baltimore. Not in the way things don’t go well in The Wire, but in the way they do in most lives. No gunfire, nothing dramatic. They start with a negotiated amount of hope, but work themselves into a decrescendo even while you’re watching and trying to talk the room somewhere better.
I am on my way to New York, and to Frank Green. He is waiting for me in his suite at the Hotel D with Otter, his personal trainer, masseur and now manservant. Frank has added a loading to Otter’s salary that allows him to call him that, and has had business cards printed. Otter has a name his parents gave him too. It’s Neil McGlone, but he’s apparently been Otter since the body hair kicked in at the age of twelve. So, Otter’s name at least is not Frank’s doing.
Frank Green can afford people in a way that is far from attractive. He can’t buy back time though, and Frank staring down the barrel of fifty feels like the opening sequence to all those Bond movies when the rifled gun draws a bead on the silhouetted agent. Frank needs to run a marathon before his fiftieth birthday. ‘Need’ is his word, and New York is the marathon.
Frank is the co-inventor of the Green-Tarnowski Ring, an arthroscopically implantable device that replaces torn knee-joint menisci. ‘Mate, it’s like the real thing, but better,’ he once said to me. ‘Better ’cause I don’t make shit out of the real thing.’ It’s manufactured from some kind of polymer, and custom-sculpted for each knee following scans. Frank explained it to me when it was at the prototype stage but, after years of his hare-brained schemes, the words merged into a background hum and I started thinking of dinner, or the novel I wasn’t reading, or unanswered emails.
An article in the business pages not so long ago killed the last residue of the hum and, before I could stop myself, I’d worked out that he’s made more than thirteen million out of it so far.
By all accounts—Frank and Wikipedia anyway—Roman Tarnowski continues to lead a low-key life in Gdansk, but low was never Frank’s key. Frank as a millionaire could only live like a billionaire. Donald Trump but without the idiosyncratic hair. Frank has more than ten thousand followers on Twitter, and sports stars tweeting up a storm on his behalf. The footballers call him ‘Bro’ and a bunch of female hockey players once got together for a photo and called themselves the GTR Girls. It’s on his consulting room wall. One of them even named her son Roman, partly after Tarnowksi and partly because she’s a third-generation addict of Days of Our Lives. Frank’s still waiting for any of them to name their offspring after him.
Meanwhile, hovering in such close proximity to professional sport and with genuine star performers for Twitter buddies, he’s forgotten that his sporting career peaked with the egg-and-spoon race at his eighth birthday party, and he now sees himself as a contender. But when did Frank ever fail to see himself as that?
On Amtrak the wifi is free and fast, so there’s a skype call to home scheduled. In the corner of the screen I sit like an ugly old grey postage stamp of my former self. Like someone brought in from the street with a low-level crime to confess. I’m a morning-after shot, but the night before should have amounted to much more.
Wendy has kept the girls up past eight so that we can talk. Charlotte keeps reaching for the keyboard, Chelsea keeps reaching for her nostril. One or both of them calls out ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ from time to time, as if they’ve just noticed me, or as if the Gollum on screen has surprised them by speaking in my voice. Wendy keeps directing them to the camera, which Chelsea eventually touches, leaving behind something solid enough to block most of the picture.
‘Are you at least sleeping?’ Wendy says when I give her a ten-second summary of Baltimore. ‘There’s not a lot of that around here.’
‘I was up at five to get to the train.’ I notice her elbow moving. It’s all I can see. ‘So, no.’
‘You should get some sleep. Tonight I mean. Don’t let Frank . . .’
With that the screen pixellates and shudders. Her arm grows three more elbows and then they’re all gone. The connection’s dropped out. I keep clicking and clicking, trying to get through, but after five minutes I know the window’s closed at home and Wendy’s into the protracted bedtime routine.
Don’t let Frank. I’ve had thirty years of hearing that on and off, and it’s rarely been misplaced.
Frank took a three-bedroom suite at the Hotel D because he could, and because he believes they send better water to the taps in the expensive rooms. Frank thinks rich people live in a parallel universe that can look quite like ours if you don’t know better. His preference when travelling is to fly first class himself and let his kids run amok in economy, but this time his eldest daughter is about to sit year twelve exams, so the family are home and the suite is an indulgence for its own sake.
He sent me pictures of it. The curtains hang in plump gold folds held back by gold ropes, and one corner of the lounge room has a white baby grand piano. There’s a jacuzzi for five. I told him a sheikh had probably died in there, overtaxed by a bevy of hookers while on sabbatical from the harsh constraints of life at home.
‘That’s my rule now,’ he said in the email back. ‘Only stay in places where Middle Eastern billionaires have been rogered to death by hookers. You can have the second-best bedroom. That’s where some junior prince gave it to the bus boy till his eyes popped out.’
Frank is, to use the kindest available language of a long-ago Arts student girlfriend of mine, unreconstructed. When she put the word to him, he said, ‘And what’s wrong with that? I’m not the prototype, baby. I’m the finished article. There’s no reconstructing required.’
Next thing I know, I’m waking up stiff in my seat at Penn Station.
I take the 1 train to West 79th and come up on the wrong side of the street. It’s Broadway, with all the yellow cabs and the clamour. No city is more remade in film than New York, even though the New York we end up seeing has more than likely been remade in Toronto or somewhere else.
I once met a producer who told me he used five minutes of stock exteriors and shot every other part of his New York movie in and around a disused aircraft hanger in New Jersey. Maybe they’re all like that. It could be a disused aircraft hanger in Albania if it wasn’t for the airfares.
New York has been destroyed sixty-three times in film since 1933. The most recent year not to see a new feature film showcasing the destruction of New York was 2003.
But the real thing is indestructible and I’ve been here six times and still feel like a trespasser who hasn’t built up enough cool. Not even nerd cool. Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer had that and I was nineteen when I saw it in him. He could get most things wrong and turn certainties into gaping unanswered questions, and yet still never doubt his entitlement to claim New York.
Frank has heard me for years—heard me forever—on the subject of New York, and to him it’s forty-two kilometres, twenty-six miles, a finish line, a need to exert his continuing claim to his lapsed and feckless youth.
When I think of youth now, I know I’m watching it from a distance. I would do that, I think, with or without having committed it to film quite so often. Wendy says it gives me my best chance to make attractive twenty-year-old girls take their tops off, though that only happened once and I have Roger Ebert’s word that it wasn’t gratuitous. That short, Red Letter Day, was entered in but not nominated for the Academy Awards. I travelled to four festivals with the twenty-year-old girl and was never in the room then when her top came off. I’m an uncle figure to her still, not even a big brother.
She’s in LA, and I’m sad enough to want the world to notice every time she pings me on Facebook. Which is twice now. She’s auditioning, and she just might make it. Any time I see her CV, Red Letter Day is a line or two further down and soon it will drop off the end.
I took another look at youth with Heart Line. Youth in the past, since youth in the present perplexes me and I can’t see myself changing that until I need to, when Chelsea and Charlotte are about to face it.
It could be said that the feature I want to make is no more than a variation on the same theme, though it began as a neighbour’s story from the war years, when Macarthur was in Brisbane. Noel left school at lunchtime one day for a medical appointment on Wickham Terrace—he walked there, since his school was nearby and at fourteen his parents had decided he was old enough to go alone—and he found Betty Grable eating a sandwich at the Old Windmill, with Macarthur’s wife and a military escort.
Her first line to him was, ‘Ain’t you ever seen a sandwich before?’ but she said it with a smile. He couldn’t guess how long he’d been gawking, since he’d often seen her this close in the movies and she’d never seen him. She’d broken the fourth wall, though Noel didn’t know it at the time.
The group was waiting for a guide, who never turned up. Noel was early for his appointment, since it had always been drummed into him that early was far better than late. He’d studied the history of the Old Windmill at primary school, so he offered to pass on what he knew.
He called her Miss Grable, so she called him Mister Clancy. When he made a joke because it crossed his mind and he figured he had nothing to lose, she laughed. And every lunchtime that week, Betty Grable turned up at the same spot in Macarthur’s car and Noel lied about having a follow-up medical appointment so that he could meet her.
She swore him to secrecy, and he couldn’t have imagined a better secret. She told him she was between pictures with Victor Mature, and the President had asked her to lift the boys’ spirits. No one outside the military was to know about the trip until she was safely back home.
On the Friday she said, ‘I’m leaving tomorrow, for parts unspecified. Look after yourself, young man.’ As Noel tells it, she paused then and drew back on her cigarette before adding, ‘If it all goes wrong, tell me you’ll head south.’
It was the winter of 1942 and the Japanese were getting closer to Port Moresby. The next Monday Noel went back to the park, sifting through leaves until he found a cigarette butt with Betty Grable’s exact lipstick on it, and he kept it forever in an old cough-lozenge tin.
That’s the closing frame of ‘Lunch with Betty Grable’, a shot of the actual tin in Noel’s own old hand. Or it will be, if the film gets made. There are people to meet in New York about that.
Frank sent me a text with the room number, telling me to go straight there. The hotel has a doorman with a cap and epaulettes that have the look of an admiral’s costume from a musical. I make my way across the lobby with my hand in my pocket, searching for a key card I don’t yet have, just to avoid explaining myself. The carpet is thick and the wheels of my suitcase are silent on it. The lobby seems to pride itself on its silence.
It’s Otter who opens the door to the suite. He has a leather cap on and, with his black handlebar moustache, my first thought is it’s a Village People pastiche. Before I can ask if Frank’s the motorbike cop lead singer, he appears from one of the bedrooms. If the Village People had a whippet in the line-up, Frank would be it. Actually, he’s leaner than a whippet or, if not leaner, perhaps his leanness is more emphasised. He looks like a whippet staring through a window at a sandwich.
Not that Frank’s entitled to sandwiches. Otter has him on six meals a day, and meal two is underway. It’s a smoothie made with bok choy, choy sum, rice milk and protein powder. Once it’s in the glass, it looks like a pond the council would want to check for mosquito larvae.
Frank drinks a mouthful and the peristaltic wave bumps his Adam’s apple forward like a boat. He has trimmed down to become an anatomy lesson of his former self.
‘I’m ready,’ he says, his grin full of lawn clippings. ‘I’m going to ace it.’
He takes a photo of his glass of pond scum and posts it on Twitter.
His race number—five digits, in the mid-thirty thousands—is sitting on a pile of paperwork on a table that looks as if it was looted from Versailles. The table lamp has a muted olde-gold lampshade and a pair of whimsical porcelain lovers as its base. She’s looking coyly over her shoulder at him, he’s lounging as if reciting verse. Or trying to conceal the pain of a gallstone.
The curtains—the ones from the picture—look even heavier in real life, with more brocade and plumper rope ties. Each curtain looks like it would amount to approximately my bodyweight in chintz. The dining table seats six and each of its metalwork legs is an arc of opposed c-scrolls—a shape that means the diner has no intuitive sense of where the leg might be, and its hard edges could take a piece out of a shin. The white baby grand is almost invisible against all the gilt and the curly curly furniture.
Just as I’m thinking that the room is one big rococo vomit, Frank says, ‘Cool place, hey?’
‘You know me,’ I tell him. ‘I always leaned towards chinoiserie.’ Once again I can’t crap on his misfired exuberance, but nor can I stop myself sniping at it as I pass.
‘You should check out Otter’s room.’ He points to a nearby door. ‘It’s all pagodas and shit. Totally willow pattern.’ Thirty years of sniping and I’ve yet to hit the mark.
Frank’s already at the door before I can stop him, and flinging it open to reveal a folding screen with an island pagoda and bridges, a bedside table with a black-and-gold faux-lacquerware jug and a pair of leather chaps on the bed, next to a codpiece and something that looks like a tail. With straps.
‘You need to finish your smoothie,’ Otter says. ‘It’s time for your poultices.’
Right on cue, a microwave pings in the kitchen. Frank pulls down his shorts.
‘Do you have to make that response look so pavlovian?’ I’ve taken a step back before I realise the shorts are as far as he’s taking it.
‘You should see what I do when the kettle boils.’ He jiggles his eyebrows up and down. We did Pavlov together in a lazy Psych elective in ’81.
Otter fetches a fold-up massage table from his room and locks its legs into place. Franks dives onto it and dunks his face into the hole in a way that suggests he’s well practised at it. Otter fetches a pair of steaming poultices from the kitchen on a plate. I feel as if I’m trespassing on a ritual.
There’s a salty smell, with a citrus tang. I was expecting menthol, or something herbal. There were poultices in my childhood before the logic of medicine came along and supplanted folk remedies.
‘Hey is that . . .’ I stop myself, because it can’t be.
Otter slaps the poultices on, one on each cheek.
‘You got it,’ Frank says to the carpet through the face hole. He lifts one arm to give me a thumbs up. ‘Lemon-lime fusion.’
‘You’re using Staminade poultices? Wouldn’t it be better to drink the Staminade and use the smoothie as a poultice?’
Frank laughs. ‘Otter’s always getting confused between the mouth side of things and the arse side of things.’
I’m not even sure what that means. ‘So if I ever make him lunch, I should expect him to sit on it?’
Otter looks on stony-faced. ‘You won’t need to make me lunch.’ He touches Frank’s thigh with the tips of his fingers. ‘I’m going to rinse out the blender. I don’t want to see a millimetre of movement from you.’
Frank grips the legs of the table as the heat works its way through to his skin. Otter swings the kitchen door firmly shut behind him, but the thick carpets slows it and it shuts with a sigh and a delicate click instead of the thump he meant it to make.
‘What are you doing with Staminade poultices? That’s insane.’ With Otter gone there’s no reason to hold back. ‘Poultices are crazy unless your buttocks are full of pus, and they’re not even last century’s way of dealing with it. But a Staminade poultice? It’s an affront to that weekend sports medicine workshop I did to keep up my registration. There’s no such thing.’
‘Google it.’
I do. The only reference is on Frank’s race preparation blog, and it’s illustrated by a picture of his poulticed buttocks taken from the foot of the massage table.
‘It’s the electrolytes,’ he says, gritting his teeth as his arse burns. ‘It’s chock-full of cations.’
‘Yeah, and probably anions too. But traditionally they get where they need to go via the mouth.’
‘It’s working. It’s going to work. I can feels the electrolytes surging in. And you know how my glutes seize up.’
‘No I don’t. We’ve had no cause to discuss your glutes.’
‘Well, they . . .’
‘I think your glutes are between you, your poultices and your manservant. And your fans in the blogosphere, obviously. I might have suggested a few stretches rather than Otter’s scorched arse policy, but ...’
Otter walks back in with a bottle of scented oil. ‘Top off, Doctor,’ he says. ‘Rub-down time.’
*
I spend the afternoon thinking about film financiers and watching my phone not ring, and I make another partially successful attempt at skyping home in the evening. Frank sits in a gold robe and ugg boots watching me eat Chinese takeaway and drink a beer, as if I’m a 3D movie of a better but sub-athletic life.
Otter spends an hour manscaping extensively in his bathroom, and then goes out smelling of musk and sandalwood and carrying a large bag. He tells me Frank needs total quiet tonight, as if I have a party planned right after my last mouthful of General Tso’s chicken.
The clock in my room says it’s 5.06am when Otter crashes back into the apartment and trips on the carpet, landing with a thud. His footsteps make a clink-clink-clink sound as he stumbles to his room.
My alarm’s set for six for the next semi-pointless skype home, but I can’t sleep after Otter’s arrival. When I open my door, it looks as if something’s taken two lines of bites out of the carpet. Otter has come home in spurs.
I shut the door and sit on my bed checking email until exactly six. If I skype early it’ll be in the middle of something. I get through on the third try. Charlotte refuses to sing Humpty Dumpty when Wendy asks her to. Chelsea just keeps saying ‘massive poo’ over and over until Wendy confirms that there was indeed a massive poo.
It’s only when the call ends that I hear Otter’s voice somewhere else in the apartment saying, ‘Higher. They’ve got to be higher up the wall.’
There’s a thump, the sound of tearing plastic, a lid doing ever-smaller circles on a tiled floor.
As soon as I step out of my room I know I’ve made a mistake. The door of the nearest bathroom is open and Frank is lying on his back wearing only a fleece jumper, with his bare legs well up the wall and Otter standing like a snake charmer, manipulating the tube in Frank’s anus and squirting a bag of fluid down it.
Frank catches my eye and says, ‘G’day,’ as if we meet this way regularly. Coffee? Beer? Enema? He notices me staring at the tube and gives a knowing kind of nod. ‘All the big runners do this—they just don’t talk about it.’
‘All of them, or just all the ones trained by Otter?’
Otter has bloodshot eyes and wet hair. He’s wearing the hotel robe and slippers. No spurs. Both of his heels are red and chafed. He’s saying nothing.
‘You could reword the business card maybe,’ I say to Frank. ‘Manservant, masseur, enemateur.’
Frank looks up at Otter. ‘I told you there was a word for it. Get Philby to spell it for you.’
Otter keeps pretending I’m not there and says, ‘We’re just about loaded, Doctor. Now, keep yourself pursed as I come out of you.’
*
The race starts at 10.10 on Staten Island and the rules are clear—it’s competitors only, no hangers on. Not an easy prospect for Otter who is used to hanging from Frank’s gills most of the time. And his enema tube some of the time, as it’s turned out.
Otter checks Frank and his kit as if he’s off to his first day at school. Race number bib, start village colour and corral number confirmation, timing chip for his shoe, prototype Frank-conceived Otter-designed rip-off tracksuit, based on techniques pioneered by Buck’s Fizz for Eurovision in ’81 (patent pending).
Frank pulls at one of the velcro tabs, flashes some thigh and says, ‘We’re sharing the IP on this one, Otter and me. Reckon there could be quite a market for it.’
‘That reminds me,’ Otter says. ‘They reserve the right to DQ anyone who urinates anywhere other than in the supplied toilets. Worth remembering.’
He takes Frank to the pick-up point and I settle for a leisurely walk to the Upper East Side and lunch at a diner unloved by Zagat where I don’t have to queue for a table.
It’s the Queensboro Bridge between the fifteen and sixteen mile marks that can break people’s spirits with its long climb, so the plan is for me to stake out a designated cheering zone around the seventeen-mile mark and Otter to wait near the energy gel station at eighteen miles. Queensboro Bridge takes your legs away and at eighteen miles you’re heading for the wall. Otter says if we can get him through that and send him into the turn-around in the Bronx in good shape, he’ll make it. Not in the time Frank thinks he will, but he’ll make it.
It’s a Sunday, so I’m telling myself it’s okay the film financing people haven’t called. I check my phone three times during lunch, in case I’ve turned it to silent.
The cheering zone’s near the corner of East 77th and First Avenue.
A volunteer comes up to me as soon as I arrive. The place is full of volunteers, and this one’s mid-thirties and wearing a loose over-sized volunteer T shirt and comfortable shoes.
She asks me for my runner’s start details, and when I read them from my phone she says, ‘Oh, exciting. You’re from way out of town. You’ll have to tell me where, precisely where, and you’ll have to make a sign. There’s time. Your friend won’t be here for at least thirty minutes.’ She glances at a clipboard on which she’s been checking off the starting groups as they come through. ‘So, where? Are you from? And is your friend from there too? Is it anywhere near Cape Town? I have an ear for accents. Let’s get you started on your sign.’
She shunts me across to a long trestle table behind the action where, in the guise of sign-making, children are finger-painting and spilling glitter and one solid guy in a check shirt and trucker’s cap has decided he’s a solo production line turning out ‘John 3:16’ signs for his many kids.
I’m handed a blue marker pen and that’s when I get stuck. What kind of sentiment can do justice to the moment—to close to thirty-two years and the moment? ‘Thanks for the free room’? ‘Thanks for not making me bunk in with Otter’? ‘You have more money and luck than you deserve’? ‘Go Frank?’ What do we have, now that fifty’s closing in?
I’m tempted to put ‘John 3:16, Frank to break three hours?’ and stand behind the kids, but instead I settle on one I know he’ll go for: ‘Faster with an empty rectum?’
As I make my way towards a space at the front, the volunteer closes in, same cheery welcoming smile as before.
‘Now, what have we got here?’ she says perkily, as she turns the sign around to read it. ‘You sure took your time . . . Oh. Oh dear. Is that . . . Does it have a different meaning in Australia? I think that’s a part of the anatomy. The intimate anatomy. I . . . We have a list of words that you can’t . . . Um, I might have to check something.’
She’s back in a minute with a race marshal who starts by telling me he’s an off-duty police officer. NYPD.
He takes one look at the sign, pulls it from my hand and says, ‘I don’t know what your plan is, pal, but this is a family day. This is not a day for you to grab yourself some attention with your allegedly comical sign about defaecation.’
People are turning round to see what’s going on. Every member of the John 3:16 family over eight is glaring at me.
‘One warning,’ he says, showing me one finger. ‘That’s all you get. Marcie here is now your official monitor and you can rely on me to keep checking in. Marcie, you got that two-way?’
Marcie holds up the radio. Like me, she’s staring somewhere else and waiting for the moment to pass.
Once he’s gone she says, ‘You know, I didn’t . . . He’s just having a bad day is all. And, rectum . . . it’s problematic. This is live to air, you know, on a family network.’
I stand there chastened. We fight to make small talk. Frank closes in on fifty by running a classic marathon, I do it by getting in trouble for writing ‘rectum’ on a sign. I want to tell Marcie families have rectums too, but she’s not the type to appreciate it. At least, through her two-way, we have a pretty clear idea of when to expect Frank. She calls base to track his progress across the timing mats and then we see him, an hour behind his own projections and ten minutes behind Otter’s. His face is bright red and the tracksuit is gone, but he’s still moving forward.
‘Okay,’ Marcie says, ‘I’ll cheer with you as long as it’s just, like “Go Frank” and there’s none of that other business.’ She gives me a look that says she wants to trust me.
‘No rectums.’ I put my hand on my heart. ‘Actually, could we shout out “We’re rooting for Frank?” I know he’d appreciate that.’
‘Well, sure,’ she says. ‘There’s nothing wrong with rooting for someone.’
Nothing at all. Only in Australia does it mean sex, here it’s innocent support.
We both put everything into our ‘We’re rooting for Frank’ and his head jerks our way. He sees us both bellowing it and he laughs until he blows his nose. He loses his rhythm and several other runners pass him. He stops and points to Marcie and gives me a baffled look. She happily yells, ‘We’re rooting for you, Frank,’ and points to the two of us.
‘How did you get someone to . . .’ he says to me, and then stops to suck in a couple of big breaths. ‘Tell me later. Nice work though.’
He laughs again, picks up a cup of water, and shuffles off along First Avenue.
‘Well,’ Marcie says, as we watch him head north and then lose him in the crowd of runners following him. ‘I believe we lifted his spirits. Good job. And I think the marshal said I could give you your sign back now.’
She puts it to me as though I’ll be glad to hear it, and might now happily wander the streets of Manhattan waving a sign with a rectal query on it.
‘I might leave it,’ I tell her. ‘Who knows who might find it useful?’
I text Otter to let him know Frank’s on his way and I head down 77th Street looking for a bar.
I find a place that’s dimly lit and largely ignored by the spill-over marathon crowd, I get myself a beer and set my phone on the counter in front of me. All the TVs mounted on the walls are showing the race. I check my emails. I take a look at the Brisbane Times and Courier-Mail websites.
From time to time the colour and movement catches my eye and I find myself looking up at the nearest screen. The winners have long finished but the race has hours to run and will go live to air locally for a while yet. The commentators keep finding things to say, new angles, recent finishers with stories to tell from life or the day.
I happen to be watching when Frank leaves the park for the straight run along Central Park South. This is spectator central, and Jackson Browne is now playing on the stage at Columbus Circle. The TV network has someone on the ground who’s scrunching his face up and shouting into his microphone as a crowd of thousands cheers the flagging runners.
That’s when Frank cramps, on TV and in front of maybe five thousand spectators and Jackson Browne, who is in the middle of Lawyers in Love. Frank’s left gluteus maximus has clenched hard as a rock, but he stumbles on. The show of pain and suffering lifts the cheering to another level.
And then the second glute goes. All of a sudden Frank, while closing in on the twenty-six mile mark, is in agonising bilateral spasm and skittering down the street like a giddy hatstand.
That’s when we move from the wide shot to the close-up. And then split screen. The story of the race is all Frank now, three shots of him, a triptych of anguish.
‘We’d better get an expert opinion on what we’re witnessing,’ one of the commentators says. There’s a clunking, shuffling sound as someone gets miked up. ‘I’m joined by physical therapist Doctor Lucius Tennenbaum. Doctor Tennenbaum, can you tell us what we’re seeing here?’
‘In a word, Anthony,’ a new voice says, ‘what we’re seeing is courage. Here’s one of our athletes with a disability looking at a remarkable time considering the severity of . . . ah . . . what appears to be his disability. I can’t confirm this but it looks to me very much as though he has a spastic diplegia ’ He says it slowly and with authority—‘one of the more common presentations of cerebral palsy. This man faces resistance from his own body with every step he takes, and today he put his name down to take an awful lot of them. I’d say we could be looking at a category winner once we confirm his classification.’
‘And I’d say we’re looking at a hero,’ Anthony throws in as Frank makes the turn back into the park with all the grace of a pair of compasses.
The screen switches back to a single shot of Frank in close-up, from a scooter in a low gear.
Anthony clears his throat. ‘From his number, we know that he’s Australian Frank Green, a pioneer orthopaedic surgeon and co-inventor of the Green-Tarnowski Ring. And so great is his focus on fostering and indeed trumpeting his substantial abilities that in any of the bios we can find online there’s no mention of his disability at all.’
‘This is a point he would make in his work every day, I’m sure,’ Doctor Tennenbaum adds. ‘It’s all about the triumph of ability over disability, persevering against the odds and maximising what we’ve got. What we’re witnessing is what Doctor Green has to overcome just to get out of bed in the morning, and when he makes it out of bed he’s improving the lives of others. A great man. A truly great man. It’s people like Doctor Green who show us what’s possible. This is what the New York Marathon is all about.’
We cut to a shot from above. The crowd is wild for Frank, pushing in against the race barriers as he lurches slowly past them. Then we’re back with the scooter shot, agony on Frank’s face, his jaw clenched.
We’ve seen dozens of other runners passing him since he seized up, but that’s changing now. Runners are refusing to pass. They’re banking up behind him, dozens of them, setting their pace to his and clapping as they run, cheering him on. Frank lifts his hand to wave.
And then he tumbles out of shot. The scooter brakes, the picture staggers. In another shot, we see Frank trip mid-wave and nosedive face first into the ground. He’s out cold.
My phone rings. It’s my mother. She’s watching online. ‘Frank’s down, Philby,’ she shrieks. ‘He’s down. What a wonderful effort. I didn’t even know he had a disability.’
‘He doesn’t. Other than being Frank.’
All talk in the bar has stopped.
‘Sixty yards,’ Anthony the commentator says, as a team of people in red medical T shirts move in on Frank. ‘That’s all he’s got left. But can Doctor Frank Green make it? No one would think ill of him if this was it, if he found twenty-six miraculous miles in those legs, but no marathon.’
Frank’s arms are moving. He’s face down and swimming freestyle on the concrete, his locked legs stiff behind him. The medical staff are talking but he doesn’t seem to hear them.
Then a crowd barrier falls over, and spectators start leaping over it and running his way. They’re all women. And all in matching T shirts. The commentators are clueless, but the T shirt artwork says it all. It’s the GT Ring. They’re the GTR Girls. They’re real, and they’re here—a squad of hockey players and basketballers and older women who fell in the street—and they pick Frank up like a fallen warrior and carry him forward. They break into a jog while Frank, oblivious to all, swims backstroke as he crosses the finish line on their shoulders.
‘It might only be sixty yards, but this interference could tragically cost him a category victory . . .’ Anthony’s saying as I run from the bar.
I run all the way to Madison, then I take a left to avoid the marathon crowd. At the lights on 68th Street, I get my mother back on the phone.
‘Can you see him at the finish line? Is he getting help?’
‘They didn’t stop, Philby,’ she says. ‘Straight past Tavern on the Green and off through the crowd.’
I keep her on the phone and run again when the lights change. I turn right at 58th to go south of the park.
‘Last seen heading in the direction of the West 66th Street entrance,’ she tells me when I can check again. ‘The coverage has moved on. There’s a one-legged Puerto Rican grannie who’s nearly at Jackson Browne. Go Philby. It’s up to you now.’
I’m on Ninth Avenue, closing in on West 66th Street and looking for a GTR-shirted mob when my phone rings again. It’s the film people I’d been hoping to meet. I take a look down West 65th in the direction of the park. No GTR Girls, no Frank, no sign of a place they’d be likely to have taken him.
I let the call go to voicemail. The message comes through when I get to the corner of West 66th.
‘Oh, hi Phil,’ a voice says when I pick it up. ‘Leo here, one of the team from Arcadius.’
He’s speaking almost unbearably slowly. Or maybe that’s just how I’m hearing it. There’s no sign of the GTR Girls on a quick scan of West 66th, or Frank, or anything other than a regular New York street with standard marathon madness going on down at the far end. That’s the last sighting of them, so it’s where I’ve got to start. I feel like I’ve stumbled into a missing persons TV show but, instead of the victim being a cute four-year-old child, it’s a cramped multi-millionaire being carried by at least a dozen identically dressed women with polymer in their knees. Poppy Montgomery would have solved it in a minute, and she’d already be back at the precinct signing off on the paperwork.
The message goes on. ‘We haven’t had a chance to look closely at the script yet ’ film code for we haven’t looked at it at all—‘but we’re interested in the concept. Just a couple of questions . . .’
There’s a bakery on the corner. No GTR Girls. Then a hair salon, a real estate agent and the American Folk Art Museum.
‘We were wondering about moving it to Louisiana,’ Leo says, in his unmodulated rhinitic drone. ‘They’re giving great tax breaks at the moment.’ There’s muffled noise in the background. ‘Oh, yeah, two more questions. Does it have to be lunch?’ There’s a pause while he checks something and while my hopes develop a familiar nauseating sag. ‘And does it have to be Betty Grable?’
I keep moving, telling myself the message is not the wall, not that sapping nineteenth mile that comes after the bridge climb. Every film ever made has this call and gets through it, and every film not made ends with it. The sickening thud of a non-comprehending response, and then silence.
Ahead there’s a building under repair, a vein clinic, a children’s gym and a faade that looks like Hampton Court Palace.
Then a yelping, whooping sound comes as someone opens the door to a bar called Paddy Malone’s.
When I get there I can see, even through the smoky glass, that the place is overrun by GTR Girls.
They’re shoulder to shoulder, toasting and cheering and yet, through it all, I can hear Otter at the bar saying loudly, ‘No, kale will not do—it needs to be choy sum’.
Frank’s in a booth with an ice pack on his forehead and face. His head is swelling, he’s gravel rashed and his nose is probably broken. He’s grinning. He still has all of his chemically whitened teeth. Two of the GTR Girls are massaging his bare red feet. Another is holding a moist sugar cube on a teaspoon over the tealight candle on the table.
‘I’m sure this is barely legal,’ she’s saying to him.
There’s a glass nearby with a green liquid in it that must be absinthe, and something crystalline crusted around its rim.
Frank’s absent-mindedly turning a torn sweaty sachet of Eno over and over in his hand. ‘Someone cooked it up for me once at a conference in Freo,’ he says, as if it’s charming and will make any sense to her. His head clunks back against the wall. ‘It was a chem prac, maybe. Measured something in a sample of . . . something.’
I call out, but he doesn’t hear me. I push my way through, grab the candle and check his pupils.
‘Fireflies,’ he says. ‘Look at ‘em.’
I start a quick MSQ, but he falters early. He can tell me his name, but then he gets vague.
I ask him who the Prime Minister is and he shouts, ‘I won, Philby, I won,’ and he punches the air, or in fact a reproduction 1930s whiskey poster mounted on the wall behind him.
I hold my finger up to test his vision. He swats at it, but misses.
‘I’m year rep,’ he says, as if someone’s just contradicted him. ‘All year.’
And that’s enough of the bar-room medicine.
‘Okay, ladies, I don’t mean to spoil the party, but I think we need to take some pictures of Frank’s brain.’ I might be playing Anthony LaPaglia as I say it, but it works. For a moment, the GTR Girls go quiet. ‘We need to rule out an intracranial haemorrhage.’
The bar tender instantly appears beside us, wanting to take charge. A New York argument breaks out about the best way to the closest ER and CT scanner. Otter fusses nearby with a hopeless brew of pulverised greens until I send him back to the hotel for the travel insurance documents.
Within a minute I’m in a cab with Frank. In five, we’re at the hospital. The resident in ER needs no convincing about the CT scan.
As Frank’s head slides into the big white donut of the CT machine, he starts singing the Violent Femmes’ Blister in the Sun.
The resident turns my way. ‘Is this abnormal behaviour?’ It’s a slow day and Frank’s a real concern, so he’s come along for the scan.
‘Only for the rest of us,’ I tell him. ‘From Frank I’d call it encouraging.’
The CT scanner takes one thin slice after another. The technician asks for quiet, and Frank says, ‘Only if you sing’. Which the technician does, in a strong bass voice, starting with Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.
The resident is flicking through screens on his phone. ‘Do much trephining in your practice?’ he says. He’s checking websites to see where he might drill the holes in Frank’s skull.
The pictures come through. From a cranial point of view, they are conspicuously normal. The resident puts his phone away. There will be no skull holes today.
‘He’s going to need a new nose,’ he says, pointing to that part of the scan.
‘It was never a good nose.’ I can see the fracture, and it’ll take some fixing. ‘He’s a chronic mouth-breather. Lives on breath mints.’
‘So, concussion,’ the resident says. ‘That’s a good outcome. We’ll keep him in and watch him till he’s reoriented. You’re next of kin?’
He thinks we’re a couple. ‘I’m the closest he’s got. In this country anyway.’ I almost mention Otter, but then realise he makes no sense anywhere outside Frank’s head.
By the time I meet Frank in the ward, he’s wearing a found beanie that he can’t account for and reading a pamphlet from a gospel church in Harlem. He has an IV line in and the white sheets are so starched they make a scraping noise when he moves.
‘We should have a barbecue,’ he says. ‘These people could sing at it. An official faculty barbecue but unofficially go around campus giving out flyers to all the hot chicks. Some of those girls in Arts are pretty game . . .’
I realise I should call my mother, and probably Frank’s family, to let them know that he’s going to be okay.
When I take out my phone there’s a text message from Leo. ‘Into the script. Digging it. Getting lunch, getting Betty. Charlize Theron as Betty? We’ll see more Macarthur in acts 2/3? If so, George Clooney? Could see it in Biloxi? MS also good for tax breaks right now. What would Aust govt offer? What’s your pound like to the dollar? Call when you can.’
There is no Macarthur in the film, no Macarthur at all, and there’s a long and crazy road ahead before this thing gets made but, for this second at least, they’re on the hook.
Charlize Theron, yes. Biloxi, well, will it get it made? I’ve told Noel to be ready for moves like that and he says he is, though I don’t know if you ever can be. We’ll work on Brisbane. I’ll work on Brisbane. I’ll keep it a live idea for as long as possible and beg anyone I can find for incentives. Macarthur, I’ll tell Leo, sounds really interesting and then I’ll quietly allow the idea to fade away.
‘And then I’m going to space,’ Frank says. ‘I’ve got a pamphlet somewhere.’ He reaches for a pocket that isn’t there. ‘It’s with Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic.’
And so, the next adventure begins.