MAKING NOTHING HAPPEN

In 1974, at age nineteen, I achieved three things in one day, or thought so. I quit swimming, started as a junior writer in a Brisbane ad agency, and decided to become a poet.

I’d just read a book claiming poets were the brightest and most creative of any vocation; and if they didn’t catch TB, drink themselves to death, or drown (like Shelley while sailing, or Hart Crane jumping off a ship), mostly stayed above ground long enough for me. There was also attraction in the seeming economy of effort: a few lines here, a few there, the odd page — making it the exact antidote to all those interminable kilometres of my swimming career, except that neither paid.

Not that I was totally ignorant of poetry’s technical challenges. In fact, the old rules of rhyme, rhythm, and metre seemed to have been abandoned for various schools of free verse, some based on obscure theories of breath, others on colloquial speech patterns; they could seem more pathology than art form. These new styles had names: some comically pejorative, such as ‘Martian’ and ‘chopped prose’; others accommodating, like the transatlantic ‘New Poetry’; yet another had the stiffly romantic label ‘Black Mountain Projectivism’. Poetry was shedding centuries of aural strictures towards an ideal of artless purity of diction. And ‘artless’ seemed to mean not an absence of art, but technical prowess of such an order as to be apparent to only the most forensically gifted reader. Yet release from formalism had also made verse not simpler to write but trickier, its readership not wider but reduced, its critiquing contentious.

I’d read poetry in and out of school hours right through my Ming days, even when I wagged. Particularly when I wagged. For escapism, it rivalled my relief when I daydreamed of towns Ashley and I had once passed through and liked. Even when I was so bamboozled by modern poetry’s lack of punctuation, tricks of syntax, and general spareness that my mind drifted off, I still held the page in front of me like a cerebral tanning machine whose rays I’d prepaid to keep shining. I bought books and books of it — the brighter the cover, the more promising the contents; Picador had the best jacket-design department.

I also liked to read about poets — what they got up to above the ink, though the purists frowned on this bio-voyeurism and I agreed. (It was refreshing to be frowned on by smart, earnest people. Under Talbot I’d often felt myself frowned on by an opportunist despot.) I was intrigued, for instance, to read that my favourite poet, Wallace Stevens, had a fistfight with Hemingway, though this was a mismatch in age and athleticism: portly insurance executive Stevens against action man Hemingway — it went how you’d expect. There was another story of James Wright and Theodore Roethke getting drunk watching Floyd Patterson fight for the World Heavyweight title in Seattle, which had made me suddenly realise that you never read about Australian authors liking sport. Or writing about it.

In fact, I was intrigued to find sport mostly written out of Australian life. At the time, it was common to hear about local fiction outgrowing the bush cliche for urban settings, but sport stayed safely on the shelf, not in the shelves. Yet sometimes I too had thought this omission justified because sport could seem a kind of distraction from life’s ‘real’ challenges. Then again, if you picked up an American novel, you might very soon be reading about a pro woman golfer and a former gridiron player in The Great Gatsby, or wrestlers and basketballers in Updike, and I suspected sport was at least an inevitable suburban speed-bump in the journey of so many western lives, and therefore deserving of the odd fictional guernsey.

But poetry seemed immune from such criticism; it could thumb its nose not only at sport, but also at many other concerns of the worldly self, a dereliction recalling W.H. Auden’s famous line, ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. (In the really — really — long run, however, it was obvious that everything else made nothing happen too. And maybe this was Auden’s point: that poetry didn’t pretend, while anthems and speeches did.) And whatever had or hadn’t been made to happen to Auden himself, you could see by the epic folds and sags of his face that the process had been long and momentous.

While staying at Bobo’s parents’ place briefly the following year, I opened the volume Shabbytown Calendar by the Australian poet Thomas Shapcott, and was shocked to find his piece ‘Epitaph for the Eldest Son’ citing a family tragedy suffered by our former ‘housekeeper’ (aka Ashley’s then girlfriend Mrs O’Rogan). Shapcott and Mrs O’Rogan were from the same town, and the poem’s subject was a just-married (though unnamed) stock-car racer who’d died from a twisted bowel after a crash: this was Mrs O’Rogan’s new son-in-law, because I’d recalled Ashley confiding these exact same circumstances in me, six years prior in Brisbane, and I’d never seen her since. Shapcott’s portrait of him wasn’t flattering: a sulky, pampered shocker of a young man. And at that moment I’d also felt a personal flush of accusation, as if Shapcott was rebuking all sportspeople — yet another sport-hating Australian writer! But although I was disappointed to hear such a negative rendering of someone so close to a woman I’d liked, it piqued my weakness for biography; I felt a sharp visceral connection with this supposedly pale and muddling vocation. It was also a novel sensation of poem-as-reportage, though Shapcott’s six-year copy deadline wouldn’t have cut it in the tabloids.

I revisited this vicarious ‘off page’ experience as recently as 2017 when I spotted the major (though being poetry — not famous) contemporary poet Anthony Lawrence at my local beach; he was standing at the edge of revegetated dunes and jotting notes against a post, when I happened to be passing on my regular bike ride. (I’d seen his photo many times and knew he’d recently moved to my town from Tasmania.) When, after a few months, one of his recent works was shortlisted for a prize and published in a magazine I subscribe to, I wondered if he’d been working on this very poem as he stood there taking notes. Its subject matter certainly seemed rooted in those dunes. Once again, I felt privileged to have been witness to that creative process, even at such a whimsical tangent. Grateful too, that this thread of awe had stayed with me all these years.

When a film crew was commissioned to shoot pre-Munich backgrounders on the Olympic swimming team back in 1972, Bobo and I were asked what activity we’d like to be filmed doing, to show how we spent our free time — as if we had any. They liked it when Bobo nominated surfing, because it meant he and I donned board shorts and paddled out to a Northern Beaches reef on a dark and filthy day to catch waves — Bobo standing up and working the shoulder all the way in, me standing up and instantly coming off to swim the rest of the way, hands brushing the odd rock to make me buck and freak in the black water. Three times we had to repeat this before they were able to get footage — inch-age, really — of me staying up. The cameramen weren’t quite as impressed when I then asked to be filmed browsing poetry shelves in an inner-city bookstore. But they were good about it, even giving me money to buy a volume by T.S. Eliot, though this turned out to be kids’ verse about old possums and cats. Bobo stayed well outside the store and almost fell over laughing as the crew squeezed through the shelves with me.

Bobo died in a single-occupant car crash at thirty-eight. He was driving a small hatch fast and recklessly and under the influence and hit something big; nobody else was injured. People have since said that they saw all this coming, or that he was ‘lucky to have lasted that long’. I’d never seen it coming, though his teen years and early adulthood had been full of what perceptive adults might have called ‘red flags’ — mainly it was his love of fun and not knowing when to stop.

Even when, a few months before that crash, a mutual friend pointed out to me a flattened chainmesh fence at a local T-junction as ‘Bobo’s handiwork’, I still thought, That’s Bobo for you, and imagined this sort of behaviour continuing into old age.

Bobo.

I had little contact with him for his last decade or so, but we lived in the same town and bumped into each other socially. Unlike me, he’d kept competing, as an ironman. Even at the national level, he was still beating most of the field, some of his opponents up to fifteen years his junior. He’d had substance-abuse issues in the past, well documented in the papers, but I assumed that to stay so fit he was keeping them under control. He dropped in at my workplace unexpectedly six years before he died and asked for a loan of ten dollars. Stuffing my bluey into his jeans pocket, he quipped cheekily that he would use it to buy a bottle of cough mixture, and I wondered if he was kidding. Once again, I thought, That’s Bobo.

When I bumped into him outside a pool a year or two after that, he excused himself and said he was in a hurry because he’d left himself only an hour to train. Asking what kind of set he hoped to get done in that short time, I was flabbergasted when he quipped, ‘Ten fours on five,’ before slipping through the turnstiles. Of course, ten fours on five was old Ming shorthand for ‘ten 400-metre freestyle swims, leaving every five minutes’. I was shocked he could still do such a set, because it differed so little from something Ming might have barked at us on the afternoon of our farcical film shoot. And such a compact set! — executed without warm-up, drills, or warm-down. It made perfect sense for the time-strapped: you could easily be in and out of the pool in under an hour. ‘Ten fours on five,’ I marvelled — a four-syllable fitness plan you just added water to. I left in such awe and envy of his having kept alive this visceral link with our Ming days that I started back training myself. It took me most of that summer of almost daily effort, but I eventually did my ten fours on five. It — along with similar variants — was still my exercise staple a decade later.

Sometimes I wondered if Bobo kept his sporting career alive to extend the endorphin roller-coaster of his youth in the binges of the competition arena and the penance of training; other times I thought it was to redeem himself the only way he knew — heroically. It seemed he’d never been allowed to quit the desperation treadmill that took him to the top in our teens, never able to suck the post-career sigh of relief I did when I felt myself devolve awkwardly back to mundane life — happy enough to be spat out a has-been, never to be a never-was.

A year or two before his car crash, Bobo tried to talk me into buying into a property speculation. He’d already done well enough with the help of his father and a colourful realty mentor whose famous mantra was ‘Never sell’; he just needed a bit more for this new one. As usual when Bobo was gunning for trust, he frowned, blinked, and pouted as he stammered his way through the details of his project. This was sincerity in extremis, his staccato blink-blink-pout-pout-frown-stutter pitch, and not too far from the palpable apprehension that could throw cold water on my attempts at a sales pitch.

Barely a month later, he asked me to write his story, and once again I refused. His was an interesting one, but fatiguing, because there was something almost inevitable in his circumstances. At his worst, Bobo could seem an aggregation of unstoppable drives, some of which were rarely denied due to his athleticism and pop-star looks. In the morning, he might resemble Rod Stewart; by lunch, James Reyne; and later, Jon English minus the raw bonhomie — and sometimes all three in one. (Bobo once insisted he was descended from Napoleon’s favourite general, who’d risen from a humble family of barrel makers (my surname actually meant barrel maker!). But when we went searching an encyclopaedia, I soon wondered if Bobo was down from Napoleon himself, because in the painting Napoleon on the Bridge at Arcole, on the page facing us, there was Bobo waving that standard.) I finally suggested he try someone with experience ghosting biographies. Although I was sympathetic, I wasn’t ready for the old roller-coaster that frequent contact could bring.

I didn’t stay long in the Brisbane ad agency. At nineteen, I was more than a decade younger than my workmates. They were a mix of cheerful and staid ex-sportsmen who didn’t write ads but had impressive titles like ‘account executive’ and wives and houses and waistlines, and I couldn’t wait to get out. Then there was the humiliation of being hauled across the coals by the owner after I absentmindedly let a film crew in without seeking permission for them to film a brief ‘update’ on my new post-swimming career. So when Bobo wrote one of his ‘Dear Mate’ letters to tell me his local pool was looking for coaches, I went down there, but not before Laurie Lawrence tried to talk me into a comeback. I’d trained briefly under Laurie before my final tour — this time as team captain, where one of my more thankless tasks was to confiscate the Vespa a drunk teammate had been drag-racing along a medieval Parisian alley.

When I bumped into Laurie in one of my ad-agency lunch hours, he said, ‘Why don’t you come to the swimming carnival at Redcliffe this weekend as a spectator — it might be interesting just to watch for once.’ I should have known what he was up to because Stephen Holland had been complaining about a lack of decent training partners under Laurie and was considering a move to the US. When it was time for Laurie to make his pitch at the carnival, he panted, ‘Doesn’t all this make you want to get back into it, Brad?’ Then, stretching his arms wide and high, he gushed that I’d only used half my potential. Apparently the unused half was as big as the world beyond those outstretched arms, but all I saw was Redcliffe, which reminded me of training camps. The effect was to make me feel like jumping the turnstile and running all the way home. I felt sorry that Laurie had to reduce himself to such chicanery to hang on to Holland, but that was his problem. Soon after, Holland left for America, and, on the news that week, Laurie announced he would take an indefinite break from coaching.

I stopped writing poetry when I realised I was out of my depth. I’d had the odd poem published, but those magazines were so small you wondered if you’d had competition. Besides, I’d read enough to know how scholarly and uncompromising career poets were. When you read them, you realised how much you didn’t know, and this was with them actually trying to hide their erudition. While I’d been pinballing between pool ends through my teens, they’d been reading Catullus and Ovid and gaining arts degrees.

When I went and stayed with Bobo after my encounter with Laurie, I was in the last throes of my supposed poetry career. We were now twenty. I had to hide everything I wrote because Bobo thought poetry ridiculous and kept trying to find my latest efforts; when he did, he’d read them aloud and laugh maniacally. His other friends didn’t make fools of themselves trying to write verse, but we two still seemed to have enormous fun. The one book he owned was How to Win Friends and Influence People, and only because it was compulsory reading at the realty firm he’d part-timed at through his teens and where he was now rentals manager in his first full-time year; it sat on the rear seat of his Alfa 1750 GTV all summer long and its jacket looked to have fused with the leather. I suspected his contempt for books echoed his occasional contempt for his mother, a former alcoholic who now spent much of the day curled in a chair, reading potboilers under a salt-sprayed window through endless tea. Bobo associated all reading with dysfunction. If he caught me with a book, he called it moping, and wouldn’t leave me in peace until we went to the beach. Sometimes I wondered what life would be like without books, because I found them so rewarding, if only to pace my day and make me feel clever. Without them, I suspected you might be compelled to go plunging from one activity to another, like Bobo, and I had nowhere near his energy. I counted reading as an activity.

His mother’s mother was an alcoholic too, bad enough to be institutionalised, so you needn’t have been a statistician to guess where Bobo’s temptations lay, particularly if he’d told you his mum had chased him around the house with a carving knife when he was four, all the while screaming he was possessed; and that he’d watched his dad struggle to stop her climbing out a window to join her long-dead grandfather who’d swooped from the night sky in some spectral carriage to squire her who knows where. (Not that I believed addiction was any more heritable than staring at the sun. But it seemed likely that the poorly nurtured would nurture poorly, and thereby perpetuate a dynasty of self-medication until diluted with happier histories.) When he’d told me these things and more through our teens — always with the caveat, ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this’ — I wondered which other elite athletes could have overcome such formative challenges. None, of course. And I couldn’t imagine his mum laying off the bottle while pregnant with her only child, adding a further, if unknown, degree of difficulty to his scorecard; on the other hand, I had never seen him physically injured or ill. He was in a league of his own for toughness, and one of my few swimming heroes along with Windeatt, Holland, and Max Tavasci — the swimmer who’d asked Ming for more. Karen Moras was my favourite female swimmer because her freestyle’s ruthless abuse of the pool was a sight like no other.

Bobo cured me of poetry. Writing it, anyway. One day stands out. We were in the pedestrian mall of his home town when he retreated a few sharp steps and pulled out a crumpled page evidently torn from one of my notebooks, before stiffening himself into a formal oratory pose to bray, ‘Hear Ye, Hear Ye.’ When he began reciting some excruciatingly familiar doggerel, I snatched unsuccessfully at the page before escaping down the nearest laneway. After a safe distance, I glanced back to see him still on the corner, gesturing after me in paroxysms of laughter for the benefit of a puzzled few. By this point in my life, I was aware my pretensions could make me look an idiot, and soon saw his excoriation as a kindness.

Bobo impressed me the first time I saw him compete. This was at the 1971 NSW championships where he sensationally won the boys’ fifteen-years 200-metre freestyle. Sensationally because he was a surf swimmer and surf swimmers were only meant to be pool part-timers, typically lacking the discipline to put up with diligent training and bombastic coaches. But on that day, Bobo was the heroic exception. I almost laughed out loud at the way he got around. While everyone else wore nothing but their best synthetic-fibre tracksuits (with a big ‘NSW’ across the back if they were really good), Bobo just wore baggy stretch-cotton bottoms and a white sloppy joe, its crewneck full of holes he’d burned in with acid or chlorine. His walk was fabulous and ridiculous. A tight string could have been connecting nose and toes: when his right foot shuffled forwards — it did shuffle — his head snapped down that way, and then likewise to the left, with enough supplementary throws and jerks to need a licence. That strut defined disdain better than any dictionary, and his eyes never left the ground to check where he was headed. But after the famous boil-over win, it was obvious to everyone that he couldn’t contain his new pride, because that head dropped even lower and swung like an axe.

About the time I signed off writing poetry, Bobo was signing on to something new in his life. We were twenty-one. Within the space of a few weeks, he doubled his normal number of nights on the town: from two to four, sometimes five. The one time I accompanied him for the entire night, I could see there was no stopping him: after a venue closed, if he saw an open car door he’d jump in, but only if it was headed for another nightclub or party.

I wasn’t working much around this time. Coaching in Bobo’s town was casual, and then only if an ocean swell hadn’t dumped sand on the lanes overnight. And the pool was far too cold to train in winter. Any other work I took was at the bottom of the skill rung: jobs where having a pulse was resume gold. And because that wouldn’t do for someone who’d recently retired a global leader in his field, it was important not to appear to be trying; my daily self-assessment roved a continuum from mild to acute embarrassment. But sometimes my defences failed me when I felt encouraged in my job searches to be judged a cut above the ordinary. While applying for a position at the steelworks, I peered through the grille of a dark booth where a swarthy, middle-aged interviewer recorded my details. On the comments side of his ledger, he scrawled ‘Good type’, and I walked home with a spring in my step.

Fortuitously, the local TAFE college had just opened its art school to students who lacked a leaving certificate. It was only a one-year painting course, but completion qualified you to attend the Alexander Mackie College in Sydney. I’ll give it a year, I thought, because I liked Bobo’s home town and the hardy, cheerful people in it, and had always wanted to be a better painter, though with no great career aspirations, at least none with the intensity that had fired my swimming dreams. (I was convinced swimming had exhausted some finite level of striving in my system.) I enrolled, moved into a bedsit across the street from the TAFE, and mostly enjoyed myself, eventually making several new friends who, like me, just wanted to paint better pictures.

I did my best to avoid Bobo. I’d recently come across him at a party where he sat at a kitchen table with two other young sportsmen, the trio chopping into gritty grey lumps with razor blades, stopping sometimes to funnel the residuals into a plastic envelope. When Bobo looked up and saw me, he crowed, ‘We’ve just been down to the ships,’ as pleased with himself as a preschooler modelling playdough. If we crossed paths on the street, he never greeted me any way but exuberantly.

When Ashley phoned me not long before I moved out of Bobo’s, I mentioned my friend’s plight. After a brief gesture of sympathy for Bobo, and without missing a beat, he told me something I hadn’t known: that he’d taken the hallucinogen mescaline in New Guinea during the war. ‘And I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy,’ he added. I was still so deferential to him that I didn’t pursue the matter — not to mention the potential embarrassment. Here I was in the process of writing off a friend because of his habits, and now I had to imagine my sixty-five-year-old father as some wartime jungle acid-head. Later I wondered why he’d kept it a secret for so many years. Later still, I would learn that thirty years — the elapsed time between his war service and mescaline confession — was also the official embargo period for classified war secrets. The final phase of the Second World War was a hotbed of research into hallucinogens like mescaline as the great powers competed for ‘truth drugs’ towards more effective prisoner interrogation.

Mystery and obfuscation had always surrounded Ashley’s honourable discharge late in the war. It seemed every time we children asked, there was a slightly different answer, his most repeated evasion the comical ‘wounded in the privates’. My mother later dismissed this, but neither, it seemed, had she ever been told of the mescaline. Her insistence that Ashley had suffered a breakdown towards the end of the war, I felt, might be linked to the mescaline experience (‘wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy’). Yet she herself had always put it down to the shock of his first wife divorcing him. Maybe Ashley told her this as a red herring, or for sympathy; and maybe it flattered her. I’d long heard (though only from my mother) that Ashley had tried various ruses to get sent home from the war, and if an early honourable discharge was on offer for allowing yourself to become a living biochemistry experiment, he might have volunteered; he wasn’t to know the war would be over within months.

Was his military psychiatrist, Huxel Stuart, his assigned psychotropic guide, and the gift of Elbert Hubbard epigrams a kind of healing desiderata? Mescaline would have been hard to come by in the war beyond a military setting, not least in New Guinea. Both German and US military seem to have been well abreast of mescaline trials on humans since the 1920s. Ashley’s subsequent occasional references to his ‘TPI’ (totally and permanently incapacitated) war pension meant that something serious had been inflicted on him, though clearly not physically. Still, this was all speculation based on my father’s one mention of a wartime experience, and I had no way of finding out the truth; he would stay an enigma.

A few months later, my mother contacted me, which was a rare occurrence. One of the things she had to say was that Ashley had initiated an unexpected rapprochement with my older brother; the pair hadn’t exchanged a word in the decade since the divorce. Bully for them, I thought disingenuously, wondering if my rebuffing of Ashley’s frequent invitations to return to Queensland had something to do with it. More hints than invitations, these mostly took the form of postcards on which he scrawled enticing cliche holiday slogans, from the mostly beach locations he now favoured. In fact, I was relieved that he would now have someone else to practise his impresario urges on. When my mother then added that he’d also found employment for my brother via old cinema-industry contacts, my sense of release seemed complete.

One Sunday morning a month later, after I’d given no more thought to Ashley’s efforts with my brother, I was in a newsagent’s reaching down for the weekend stack when my hand recoiled as if a snake had passed under it. There was Ashley’s photo on the front page, with a story of how much money my swimming career had cost him. But I didn’t hang around to read much. I was worried I’d be recognised, and bolted. ‘Prick,’ I cursed when I got outside; any residual sympathy I had for him living alone now vanished.

It was only when I began to browse Ashley’s scrapbooks for this memoir that I read the full article. (I was surprised he had the hide to paste it.) Several paragraphs below the whingeing about the money, he went on to say that it had been my older brother with all the talent and that I’d merely been a willing trainer. Of course, this claim was silly because my brothers hadn’t qualified for competition above inter-club level from their first swimming lessons, the fate of the vast majority of swimmers. Ashley had clearly been on a mission to ingratiate himself; he would again be kingmaker, launching my brother into a facsimile of his own cinema career, and inventing virtual sporting triumphs for him. My brother had routinely heard similar praise from my mother through his teens, except that she’d placed my younger brother at the top of our sibling talent stakes. (Much later, both brothers would laugh at these trite, partisan anointments.)

A few months after hearing from Ashley, my brother quit the cinema trade and the pair pulled up the drawbridges to resume their previous long silence.

Despite the new friendships I was making in my painting course, I felt more and more uncomfortable staying in the same town as Bobo; he hadn’t changed. I’d also begun to suffer from something I could only describe as a cloying hyper-empathy which was so far up itself it came out the other side as a free-floating guilt. My usual dread of conversational silences was now so bad that I’d dredge up any nonsense to restore flow, and this could lead to the airing of premium drivel.

New physical phenomena seemed to be moving in on my body too. Like the odd heart flutter. I thought these serious until several acquaintances said things like, ‘Oh yeah, I get them all the time.’ Or, ‘Lay off the coffee.’ I didn’t get them all the time — maybe one every few weeks, and only for a second or two. Then there were the head explosions, when I’d be lying in bed, and bang! — one of those twopenny bungers from my childhood had just gone off inside my head. With that first detonation, I wondered if I’d had a stroke and waited for the paralysis to set in, but it never came. By the fifth or sixth, because there was no pain, I put them down to some harmless tension reflex, perhaps an auditory version of the so-called ‘primal drop’ many people experience when nodding off; I later learned this was pretty much the case.

Those spectacular blasts were sometimes the highlight of my week. But one day when I was in the middle of a flu and had cut my thumb on a rusty saw, I thought I’d better get off to the doc for a tetanus shot. And while I was in the waiting room, I decided I should unload about the flutters, explosions, and occasional anxiety. But then I vetoed all of them because now I was on the inside of his surgery and any one of those symptoms might have suggested further investigation, and I suddenly needed proof this wouldn’t be happening.

Then he asked if there was anything else wrong, because I seemed a little edgy for a mild case of the flu and a cut. Once again, I gave him no rope but got around to some spiel about a famous hippie handbook I’d just read and thought he might be interested in, by the famous Harvard ‘flower-power’ professor Dr Timothy Leary. I might also have briefly mentioned the spiritualist Gurdjieff, since I’d been attending self-realisation courses in his name in an unlikely suburban bungalow a ten-minute drive north of me. My teacher had supposedly once sat at the feet of Gurdjieff’s assistant Ouspensky, though most of my evenings were taken up with mastering the steps of so-called ‘sacred dances’ with the frocked matrons who were my fellow initiates. That’s pretty much when the doc sucked on his pen for a few seconds and started to jot notes, looking up after a while to suggest I try a special weekend retreat he sometimes recommended for ‘uptight people’ like me, and gave me a number to ring.

I decided not to go, then to go, and not to go again, until those vacillations orbited wide enough to manifest me there, where all I learned about myself was that I could donate good money to people who disdained it infinitely less than I did. But at least I gained new tools to see why my past was what it was always going to have been, and why my future was best ignored, at least according to one fellow patron coming off an abusive relationship with a well-known action actor. She also had a toddler and read palms for pocket money. She read everyone’s: the dentist who walked out on his practice with a waiting room full of toothaches, the ‘director of luxury car sales’ who booked in routinely to clear his head of hyperbole, and garden-variety wrecks too.

Getting around to my palm, she suddenly squealed like she’d won the lottery, because it had a special little cross between the head and heart lines. Then she double squealed to find I had it on both hands: the double cross, supposedly foretelling high achievement. ‘I wish I’d known,’ I told her, ‘I could have saved myself a lot of effort.’ Then she said if it was any consolation, my life line showed I would suffer a major trauma late in life but make a strong recovery to live a near-vegetable existence for another decade or so. Strong recovery? Vegetable? I pondered.