Over breakfast on Saturday, Mum told us that a plastics manufacturer had begun fabricating the Venus shell and the giant inflatable pool.
‘I saw Vienna on the videowall at Westfield,’ I said. ‘She’s exceedingly fit.’
‘I think we chose the perfect Venus.’
‘You remember how I came up with a solution to your shell dilemma? Would I be able to help out at the event and see her in person?’
‘It’s possible,’ Mum said. ‘Let me think about it.’
Joy glowed in my heart for two minutes, before Mum pulled the plug and drained it away down the sink: ‘I forgot to mention Grant’s coming for lunch.’
‘Grant who?’
‘Grant Marsh, the fellow I’ve been seeing.’
‘I’m so not hanging around for that.’
‘Yes, you are,’ Venn said. ‘You can’t abandon me.’
‘It’s very important for me that you both meet him,’ Mum said.
Grant Marsh arrived at midday in a cloud of fragrance so obnoxiously musky it made Oscar run away. He was wearing a bright-pink Versace polo with a popped collar, and turquoise shorts that exposed calves knotted with varicose veins. A blue-bezelled Rolex Yacht-Master® on his wrist completed the picture. Even his hair looked purchased.
During lunch, Grant praised Mum’s baked salmon, the earrings he bought her at the markets and her golfing form. Having been starved of compliments by Dad for so long, she lapped it up. Grant pretended to be interested in my life for roughly thirty seconds before banging on about the Chinese economy and moving on to his love of the great outdoors.
‘Grant’s quite the athlete,’ Mum said. ‘He cycles to West Head and back every morning.’
‘That explains those magnificent calves,’ I said.
Mum glared at me and said, ‘I think we should all go for a lovely bushwalk this afternoon.’
‘Sorry, I can’t,’ Venn said. ‘I’m going to yoga with Jessie.’
‘I have to finish reading Frankenstein,’ I said, thinking on the spot. ‘And my book’s at Dad’s.’
According to Mr Field, even the most unlikeable characters in literature often possess some sort of redemptive quality. The most impressive thing Grant Marsh possessed was the Ferrari I saw parked in our drive as I was leaving. And the fact he owned one made him an even bigger twanger.
On the bus home, I read My One Redeeming Affliction. I was up to the part where the spinster Althea starts driving a wedge between Walter and his daughter Esther – who he’d banned from seeing William.
Althea Beauclare’s increasing presence at Fernleigh stuck in Esther’s craw. She’d never trusted the woman’s constant ebullience, nor considered her conspicuous acts of charity anything more than a ploy to inveigle her way into Walter’s life. Always the essence of kindness in front of him, Althea hectored the servants behind his back, reserving particular disdain for Dora Hinkley, the housekeeper.
Inevitably, Walter became engaged to Althea, and shortly after they’d made the announcement, Walter gave Mrs Hinkley a month’s notice. Dora had given twenty-one years of her life to the family, serving my grandmother Martha before Esther had been born. By yielding to Althea’s wish to replace Mrs Hinkley with her own housekeeper, Walter severed the most reliable tie to the memory of his children’s mother.
Esther recorded no details of the wedding in her diary, merely indicating the date with a sketch of a dark storm cloud. Immediately after the couple’s return from a month’s honeymoon in Tasmania, Althea set about redecorating Fernleigh. She employed a small army of carters to strip the living room of furniture. She removed all of the drapes and sold the Oriental fans, candelabra and vases to a dealer in one consignment. Esther pleaded with her father to intervene in the woman’s ruthless mission, but he abnegated all responsibility.
The final item to go was a gold-plated Russian samovar that had been passed down from Esther’s great-grandmother. Althea had promised to retain it, but on returning home from work late one evening, Esther noticed its absence from the sideboard and confronted her stepmother. Without even bothering to pretend to have an ounce of contrition, Althea stated that she’d donated it to the women of the Temperance Union for serving tea at their charity bazaar, to be auctioned at day’s end. ‘Instead of gathering dust,’ she said, ‘it will join the fight against the scourge of alcoholism currently plaguing this town!’
Esther hoped that a degree of forced civility might return now that Althea had removed every material trace of her mother’s grace and style. But one night, in a stolen moment of reminiscence after a second snifter of cognac, Walter made the irreversible mistake of telling Esther she looked exactly like her mother had at the same age – in the presence of his new wife. Over the ensuing months, Althea made a determined effort to find a suitable husband for her stepdaughter, inviting possible suitors to monthly recitals. Having already entered into a clandestine courtship with William, Esther deeply resented the intrusion and would rarely perform for them. Walter urged her cooperation, failing to understand that the root of the problem was his new wife’s jealousy – an all-consuming jealousy that would only be alleviated by Esther leaving Fernleigh forever.
That was all a bit intense, and got me worried about what would happen if things progressed between Mum and Grant Marsh. She’d asked me not to mention anything to Dad, which effectively tripled the mental burden of knowing.
My arrival at T H E E Y R I E was badly timed. Dad was blending a protein smoothie, which meant he had a date with Sergio.
‘Back early?’ he said. ‘Great. You can join me for a workout.’
‘I was thinking more a surf. Haven’t been for ages.’
‘I’ll drive you down after.’
I reluctantly got changed, grabbed a towel and swallowed the last three human growth pills that Nads had given me.
‘How’s your mother?’ Dad said in the lift down.
‘She’s good.’
‘She’s not seeing somebody, is she?’
‘That’s such a random question.’
Dad saluted Frank at his desk and resumed the enquiry as we stepped outside. ‘I’ve been mulling over something Don Partridge said the other day. Apparently Maxine told him that your mother looked happier than she has in a long time.’
‘Surely that’s a positive?’
‘She’s seeing someone, isn’t she?’
‘You’d have to ask her.’
‘I knew it! I had a feeling in my gut. No more questions, that wouldn’t be fair.’ But halfway down William Street and, mysteriously, right outside a prestige car dealership he said, ‘Have you met the new Lothario?’
‘Today at lunch. He’s a complete and utter tool, and funnily enough he drives one of those,’ I said, pointing at a Ferrari.
‘You don’t have to tell me anything else. I’ll find out soon enough.’ Three more steps. ‘Bugger it. What’s his name?’
‘Grant Marsh.’
‘Good God above! How could your mother do that to me?’
Sergio instantly sensed Dad’s agitation when we arrived and asked where it was coming from. Without hesitation Dad told him about the home invader. ‘Eight years I trusted him with my financial affairs. Now the bastard’s managing his own personal affair with my wife.’
Sergio massaged Dad’s shoulders. ‘You’re holding tension across your back, hips and buttocks. You must channel your anger into reps.’
Dad positioned himself into the squat machine and followed Sergio’s advice until the grunting became so loud it prompted an announcement from the receptionist.
>IN CONSIDERATION OF OUR OTHER VALUED MEMBERS AND GUESTS, WOULD THE PERSON WHO’S GRUNTING PLEASE STOP IMMEDIATELY.<
Sergio removed four of the plates and said, ‘Lincoln, you have chicken legs. Get on the machine.’ The first set was a breeze so he doubled the load. The second was a struggle. ‘Deeper, deeper,’ he said, until my knees touched my chest. ‘Feel the burn.’
I felt more than the burn. I felt something rupture at the base of my spine and groaned louder than Dad. ‘ARRRRGH!’
‘Good,’ Sergio said. But it wasn’t good at all. It was extremely bad. I got out of the machine and was unable to straighten my body. ‘You need assistance?’ he said.
Afraid that he’d try to unfold me himself, I said I was okay.
‘Then we move on to leg extension.’
The initial sharpness of the pain was replaced by a pinching knot that crept up to the base of my skull. The veins in my temples throbbed to the beat of the dance music belting from the speakers. I didn’t want watermelon quads like Sergio, but endured the pain of completing the workout to prevent him from investigating the source of my pain.
‘Ready for that surf now?’ Dad said as we fetched our bags.
‘I wouldn’t be able to zip up my wettie,’ I said as we passed a bodybuilder whose excessive application of tiger balm punched right through his oniony body odour. My vision blurred and I walked straight into the glass door.
‘I’m calling Dr Nixon, my new GP,’ Dad said.
‘Don’t!’ I said, a little too emphatically. ‘I just need a good lie-down.’
Dad went to the beach without me. After a long nap, still in my sweaty clothing, I peeled it off and stepped into the shower. Normally I made minimal contact with the nub, but the incident demanded closer inspection. It was extremely tender to touch and even more swollen than before. Holding a hand mirror, I stood with my back to the full-length mirror and for the first time in weeks saw the thing in its entirety. Instantly the scales of denial fell from my eyes, and I was more shocked and repulsed than I can convey in words.
Perhaps I’d locked the truth away in some compartment of my brain and fooled myself into thinking the nub would remain nothing more than an inconvenient bump. The thing is that I now have—
The hairy nub had changed slowly, up until today when I’d overexerted myself. ‘Hairy nub’ was a euphemism for something potentially hideous that I’d hoped would never come into being, but today it has.
The thing is that I have – I’m quite sure that I have . . .
a tail.
There, it’s out.
Last year its development had been almost imperceptible. This year its metamorphosis must have been accelerated by pressure, friction, injury and possibly the human growth boosters that Nads gave me. Steroids can shrink your nuts and make you grow boobs – why not develop a tail if you already have the raw materials? Nads told me the pills weren’t steroids but maybe they had their own side effects. I’d taken three before the gym today and something painfully decisive had happened during squats – the exertion must’ve popped the thing out into its ‘proper’ position.
The thing is a tail. TAIL TAIL TAIL.
Pas tous les singes ont des queues.
Not all monkeys have tails.
But some humans do.
The tail is covered in dark hair. It is vile. VILE is an anagram of EVIL. What if Nicole Parker’s hunch was correct? Maybe I am the beast?
I measured the tail with a piece of string. Base to tip it was thirty-three millimetres – thirty-three millimetres too long.
Stirred by my acknowledgement of the full extent of my heinous deformity, Homunculus advised its immediate removal. He wouldn’t allow me to see Dr Nixon or Finster or any other medical professional, so I agreed that self-excision was the only course of action.
I went into the kitchen, drew the titanium chef’s knife from its block and sharpened it.
>fwssht/fwssht\fwssht/fwssht<
Conviction was building with each pass across the diamond-dusted rod.
>fwssht\fwssht/fwssht<
‘The tail is a parasitic entity that needs to be eradicated,’ Homunculus said, blithely unaware of the irony that I most often felt the same about him.
>fwssht<
‘You need to kill it!’
After counting exactly a hundred passes, I pressed the knife’s keen edge against the base of the tail. The thing retracted like a small, frightened animal as I drew the blade five or six millimetres across it. A thin red line screamed murder. The prospect of extreme pain almost evaporated my reckless and misguided courage.
‘You’ll need a serrated knife to cut through the bone or cartilage or whatever’s in there,’ Homunculus said.
‘You can’t be serious? I’d sever my spinal cord and become paralysed – if I didn’t first bleed to death or get carted off to a psychiatric hospital.’
‘You’re weak.’
‘I don’t have the training, experience or equipment to remove the tail, and you know it.’ The logic of the statement shut him down momentarily. But as I was returning the knife to the kitchen he said, ‘At least you could tidy it up a bit – make it less visibly abhorrent.’
So I moved operations to Dad’s bathroom, shook up a can of Gillette® Foamy®, lathered the tail and shaved off the hair with his razor. Though infinitely less risky than a full tailectomy, I still managed to cut myself twice. Nonetheless, the sight of the hair-flecked raspberry-and-cream substance swirling down the sink bolstered my hope of an aesthetically acceptable result.
Using the double-mirror method again, I checked my handiwork and was mortified. The bald tail looked ten times worse than the hairy version, and the bleeding wasn’t helping. I used half a roll of toilet paper to staunch the flow and flushed the evidence. I dabbed the cuts with a vicious and hopefully effective antiseptic, accepting the sting as punishment for my vain stupidity. I rinsed and returned my father’s shaving equipment to the cabinet without changing the blade because there were no spares, further compounding my shame by choosing expedience over hygiene. Dad arrived home about ten minutes later.
Feeling ninety degrees less than average at dinner this evening, I had to fake a breezy mood to reassure Dad that I didn’t need to see a doctor. I went to bed pretty early but, afraid of staining my sheets and unable to lie on my back, I didn’t drop off till after 2 am. A bald man with glasses on the end of his nose appeared in a dream and began explaining the regions of a ceramic phrenology bust.
‘Here is amativeness,’ he said, pointing to the back of the skull. ‘The aptitude for demonstrating romantic love. Currently non-existent in your life, but something you may discover in the not-too-distant future.’
‘That’s impossible,’ I said. ‘Nobody will ever be able to love me the way I am.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with you, young fellow.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Dr Martin Eisler, Professor of Phrenology and Mesmerism, at your service.’ As he rotated the ceramic bust to show me his name on its chest, it slipped from the stand and shattered. The crash woke me at 3.15 am. Unable to discern between dream and reality, I reached behind me, hoping to find my problem had somehow vanished. But the bald, spiky, scabby, tender thing was still there.