Good Oil (11 page)
I just got back from a thoroughly enjoyable evening in the company of Amelia, whose cult following is gaining momentum. If I were less of a prick, I might feel a bit guilty about the way I’ve been torturing her this week. But I think we all learned something. I took her for pizza after work and let her drink Big Girl drinks. I know, I know, but if I don’t lead her astray who will?
Somehow I ended up telling Amelia about Michaela. I really must have forgotten that she is a youngster and should be treated as such. Being the gentleman I am, I walked her home. When we got to her house, she peeked through the front curtains before letting herself in. That’s what reminded me of Sophie from the BFG.
I really like talking to her. I like how she turns everything over and over in her mind, and that she doesn’t censor herself. Being with her is easy. I seem to laugh.
Apparently I owe her a letter. A short piece entitled
What I Hate
. I caught the last bus home and have poured myself a (generous) nightcap. I’m just going to sit here for a while. I’ll write the letter tomorrow.
1 a.m.
If she were even just two years older, she’d be leading The Field.
1.30 a.m.
But she ain’t.
2 a.m.
I’m going to let the Jeremy thing drop. She’s only a little ’un. Didn’t know any better. Plus she might start to fight back.
April 26
It’s cold in the mornings and evenings, but warm during the day. Harder to get out of bed in the morning. Do you know, I may have slightly reduced my nightcapping? Maybe Rohan moving away has something to do with it. I still see Mick and Suze often, but not as much as last year. We have been somewhat diminished by Ro’s absence. Plus, we sort of relied on his car a lot of the time. Mick and Suze live in the same suburb so it’s easier for them to see each other.
I haven’t totally written myself off for about two weeks now. It’s strange. I was thinking this morning that without my constant stumbling about, headaches, crankiness and general misery over Michaela, would I even recognise myself? Would I be boring? Shit, maybe I should write myself off tonight. Tomorrow is Saturday. I’m working all day, as are most of the others. Afterwards, we’ll go to the pub. Ed and I will watch Fox Sports, play pool against Bianca and Donna, drink beer and then be four hours older. Same old. Rohan had the right idea. How long can you stay in one place for? My life just reminds me of Michaela. I think I need to get the fuck out of here. I need to see a new streetscape. I need to have a routine that isn’t five years old. I need to have my own place to live and to forge a path that belongs to me.
I’m resenting the fuck out of both my parents lately, and neither of them are bad people. I just don’t want to be the son-living-under-their-roof anymore. I don’t want to be told to come out of my bedroom and talk to Uncle Jeff, or whoever they’ve got over on any given day. Or my Dad knocking on my bedroom door. ’
Bout time you gave that lawn a bit of a mow, son.
I’m not denying that the lawn needs to be mowed or that it’s fair I do some jobs around the house. I just hate it when he tells me what to do; I’m an adult for God’s sake!
If I had my own place it’s likely that I would still choose to see Mum and Dad often – I love them. But it needs to be on different terms than the ones that exist while I am living here. The end of this year can’t come soon enough. Bring on the next phase! Again, I am jealous of Rohan. He chose a course that would clearly lead to a job after uni; he got one, and now he gets to have his own flat in Newcastle. What am I going to do with a degree in sociology? Even if I could afford to, I don’t want to do postgrad. I need a break from study. Whatever will become of me?
April 28
I’ll write my letter to Amelia now. Here goes.
Dear Youngster,
What I hate could fill a book, and maybe one day it will. Here is a concise version.
1) Oh-Brad. I have no idea what he looks like, but in my mind he is tall, broad-shouldered, cut, tanned and handsome. Also, I imagine that he is finishing some degree that will lead to an extremely well-paid job. Every day of his life he has unfettered access to the woman I love. But the worst thing is I know Michaela well enough to know that, surely, she wouldn’t have lied and lied and then thrown me over if she didn’t love this guy. I won’t even say ‘dumped me for Brad’ because if she never broke up with him then she and I were never really together.
2) Stuart Green. Stuart Green represents all that is unjust in the universe. The world is there for him to plunder, as far as he is concerned. This attitude rakes in the spoils. I used to think that behind his eyes lay an expanse of soulless nothingness. But in the last year I’ve changed my mind. Behind his eyes lie gusts of well-disguised malevolence. He’s set a new low with the Kathy thing.
3) I occupy a strange kind of life-stage purgatory at the moment. I’m well into my twenty-second year but I live with my mummy and daddy, in my childhood bedroom. The good folks at Centrelink won’t consider me ‘independent’ until I am twenty-five. Please God, let me be well out of here by then. Anyway, youngster, it’s a particularly powerless existence that I eke out at 16 Acacia Terrace and it’s making my relationship with my parents crapper than what it should be. Watch this space. Which brings me to my next point.
4) As soon as I finish uni, I’m moving out. If needs be I’ll increase my hours at Land of Broken Dreams to cover my rent. Somewhere affordable but not at the ends of the earth. Who knows what is in store for me on the ‘career’ front but at some point in my twenties the chorus of prompts to buy property from my father, my uncle and various other players will reach a crescendo. ‘I bought this house when I was your age’, ‘Renting is dead money’ etc. etc. See Youngster, I regard rent payments as the price of independence, not dead money. Do they really think it’s fair to compare Dad buying our three-bedroom house in the seventies for $24 000 to the task of buying a three-bedroom house in any decent suburb today for a minimum of $600 000? And with a HECS debt to boot. I get anxious just thinking about it. All this you have to look forward to, Youngster.
5) I covet my neighbour’s oxen. I’m not all happy for people who have their lives sorted out and go about living them, who have money, independence, intelligence, influence and hot, hot girlfriends. My mate Rohan rang the other day and said he is putting down a deposit on a house in Merewether, which is a suburb in Newcastle. He’s only been working for two months. ‘How’d you come up with the deposit?’ I couldn’t help but ask, knowing the answer. ‘My Dad.’ Right. Of course. Good for you, Ro. Disgusting aren’t I? I’m not going to give you anymore examples because I don’t want you to think the less of me. Bottom line is – I can’t run my own race. I’m constantly checking what’s happening in the other lanes.
6) I’m young; I’m (at least kind of) healthy; there is a roof over my head, food on the table, heat in the house; I have friends; I have access to a tertiary education; I live in a safe city with clean beaches – and I’m miserable most of the time. I spend most of my time massaging my temples or fuming about a range of grievances. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to wrap it up now so I can watch the patch of sunlight on my bedroom wall fade as the sun slowly sets, casting the room in darkness.
Chris
T
HE
B
EETHOVEN
D
ANCE
When Lizey and I were much littler lasses, say nine and five, Dad instituted a Quiet Time policy after dinner. When we had finished eating and Mum (always Mum) had cleared the table, Lizey and I were sent over to the couch to ‘read, play and digest quietly’. Television was ‘
streng verboten
’. We could do whatever we liked, as long as we kept quiet and kept to the other side of the living room. Mum and Dad remained at the table. Dad would pour them each another glass of wine, light both their after-dinner cigarettes and put on some classical music. He and Mum would read or talk quietly while Lizey and I watched the clock. The music Dad chose then – and often still chooses now – was almost invariably booming, intense and cheerless. Particular selections of Beethoven, Liszt and Chopin were on high rotation. Occasionally he would put on some Sibelius, which was much less stressful, and seemed to herald his being in a better mood. Mum preferred piano pieces to Dad’s booming orchestral selections – she liked Granados, Rodrigo, Mompou. But these never seemed to feature in Quiet Time. She listened to them when she was cooking and cleaning in the kitchen. Alone.
Lizey was the more mischievous of the two of us, had a shorter attention span and was also a keen dancer. I was Easily Led. These factors combined to result in one of our favourite Quiet Time games – the Beethoven Dance. The Beethoven Dance had its genesis when Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was on high rotation, although the game was by no means confined to Beethoven alone. The furious pace, earnestness and intensity of the second movement – and Dad’s heartfelt enjoyment of it – begged for some mild mockery.
The Beethoven Dance was choreographed by Lizey and relied on both movement and facial expression, as noise of any kind was forbidden. In exaggerated fashion, we would march in circles in time with the music, our faces masks of maniacal concentration, turning with a flourish this way and that. As the music increased in pace and intensity, we would break the ranks of the marching circles and break into a gallop on imaginary horses. We’d gallop around the room in a figure of eight, keeping in time with the music, of course, and occasionally encouraging the horses with imaginary riding crops.
Lizey made up little extra moves for us to alternate, matching the musical flourishes. When the final notes of the piece sounded we fell ‘dead’ to the floor, laughing hysterically but, as per QT requirements, silently. At least 80 per cent of the Beethoven Dance’s purpose was to raise a response from Dad. He usually feigned unawareness and studied his newspaper/script/
New Yorker
with great concentration and his specs perched low on his nose. But as the finale approached, a hint of a smile could sometimes be seen playing around the edges of his mouth and there would perhaps be a faint shake of his head.
‘
Girls
,’ Mum would say, hiding her own smile in a sip of wine.
Tonight is Thursday and one of the two weeknights that I don’t work. Dad is home for at least the next month. Jess has been in bed since 7 p.m. Mum, Dad and I have finished dinner. It’s approaching eight-thirty. I push my chair back and adjourn to the couch. In our little house, the dining room is also the living room and the TV room. And of course the smoking room. Quiet Time having long since fallen by the wayside, I settle down to watch
Grey’s Anatomy
.
‘Amelia,’ says my father. ‘Can’t we have some nice music instead?’
I glare at him. ‘If I could record
Grey’s
and watch it later, after the smokers have retired for the evening, I would. But seeing as we don’t have that facility I have to watch it live.’
Our VCR/DVD player packed it in over a year ago and a new one has not been purchased. He doesn’t have a comeback for that, but tells me to keep the sound down low. My back is turned to both of them as the opening credits conclude. I hear the hateful sound of him tapping a cigarette out of the pack, of Mum taking it, then of him tapping out another for himself. I brace for the click and flare of the cigarette lighter. When the acrid smoke wafts over to my nostrils, I sink my mouth and nose below my T-shirt collar. It doesn’t help. I concentrate on hearing the dialogue on TV over Mum and Dad’s voices.
At the first ad break I turn to give Dad one of my best glares. Glaring is the sole form of protest I dare to make about the smoke. As I wrote in my letter to Chris, Dad’s anger is to be feared and me ‘whingeing’ about the smoking is a sure-fire way to incur it.
The first time I ever stared down its barrel was seven years ago, when I was eight. I hung no-smoking signs all around the house, like I told Chris. Then I pilfered all the cigarettes and lighters in the house (including two cartons of stashed away duty-free Winstons) and threw them into a skip in the back lane.
Come 6 p.m. Dad was angry. Angry, craving nicotine and in no mood to find his crusading eight-year-old daughter cute. He does shout – but it’s not the volume that is so terrifying. He somehow manages to strike a tone that decimates any opposition, that saps your ability to fight back. The verbal equivalent of those dinosaurs from
Jurassic Park
that spit paralysing goo into the faces of their prey. Once you’re immobilised you know you are powerless and that sucks. Strange too, what makes him angry and what doesn’t.
Last time Lizey was home for uni holidays, she borrowed the family car and backed it into a pylon in a car park. Hard. She drove straight home and in faltering tones told Dad what had happened. She was really shitting herself about what he would say. He calmly inspected the scratched paintwork, the smashed tail-lights and the huge dent in the back panels.
Lizey burst into tears and blubbered apologies.
‘Now, darling,’ he said, with a brief clap on her shoulder. ‘These things happen. You’ll know to be extra careful in future.’
And that was the end of the matter.
My glare in the
Grey’s Anatomy
commercial break doesn’t manage to catch either Mum’s or Dad’s eye. My father exhales smoke as he talks about the playwright of the play he is directing at the Brooke Street Theatre.
‘—he comes to almost every rehearsal and watches me like a hawk. Interrupts the actors if he thinks they’ve stressed the wrong word or failed to stress the word he intended. Doesn’t seem to understand that once the play is written and printed, his job is done and mine begins.’
‘Oh dear,’ Mum murmurs, nodding slowly as she pulls in another lungful of smoke.
‘In the third act, I’m trying to increase the pace as rapidly as possibly, which is in large part achieved through the dialogue. If I follow every last comma and apostrophe he’s put in there, it interferes with the pace. So I tell the actors that increasing the pace and the energy between them takes priority over following the punctuation and italics that this man has obsessively put in. Parts of his script seem to confound what I
think
he’s trying to achieve. Anyway, he’s up in arms about the dialogue being lost. The dialogue is everything! Well of course it is to him, but I have to make the whole thing work on a stage.’
‘Of course you do,’ Mum says.
‘
Good
dialogue is everything.
Effective
dialogue is everything. Not dialogue
per se
.’
‘Quite right.’
‘After rehearsal last night I had a couple of drinks with the cast in the foyer. He’s looking even more Troubled than usual and he corners me and says, “Look, Robert, I can’t help but wonder, what do you really think of the script?” “Well Peter,” I replied, “it
strains
for a crystallising moment.”’
‘Oh
darling
!’ Mum shakes her head, ashing her cigarette. ‘Well, what a whinger! I’m being hounded by a twenty-six-year-old with a
lot
to learn about theatre when I have a job to do. He’s holding me back; he’s putting the actors off and we open in a fortnight.’
‘Yes but why put him offside? Why be incendiary? Especially to a man who is touted to become the finest playwright of his generation.’
‘I don’t care what he’s touted as. He needs to let me do my job.’
‘Hmmmmm.’
Mum’s disapproval is perfunctory, kind of like Dad’s disapproval of the Beethoven Dance. You can tell she likes that he won’t suck up to anyone. Even though if he had been nicer to the right people over the years he might have scored a cushy residency at a Sydney theatre, instead of travelling all over the shop, living production to production.
‘Would you like another cigarette, darling?’
‘Yes, thanks.’
That’s
it
. I stand up, punch the off button on the television and stalk out of the room. It was a crap episode anyway.
‘Looks like Amelia got miffed and flounced out of the room,’ I hear Dad smirk to Mum. That’s one of his favourite phrases. I give him plenty of opportunity to use it.
Upstairs in my little bedroom I sit on my bed, leaning back against the thin plaster wall that separates my room from Jess’s. My clothes and hair smell of smoke. I am still fuming. So to speak. It’s interesting how fuming, or anger in general, is such a physical process, like a wave washing up on a beach and then receding.
There’s wisdom in not pissing certain people off
. It’s plain that neither of my parents really subscribes to that theory. Further to this wisdom, I think, cosying up to the right people can get you places that ‘being yourself’ will never get you.
Or being
myself
anyway. Take Woolies, for example. The ruler of that particular roost is Bianca. She rules socially and also practically, because she is the most senior Service Supervisor. There is a core group of minions that surround her – Jeremy Horan, Street-cred Donna, and a couple of others. They are all in my year or thereabouts. They all adhere to a certain code of flattery, submission, smoke-break etiquette and varying degrees of flirtation.
Being a supervisor, Bianca gets to decide who has to work on the registers and who gets to come off them during quiet times, ostensibly to collect trolleys and put away stray stock, but really to entertain her. Obviously, she favours her minions in this process and they get to spend a lot of time off the registers. They also get to spend a lot of time at Bianca’s parental manor, putting a large dent in her father’s wine cellar. Chris, Ed and Kathy are also ‘in’, but they exist
alongside
Bianca rather than below her, because they are a similar age.
I occupy a certain no-man’s-land at Woolies. I’m definitely not in with Bianca and her minions. I could argue that I’m of such pure spirit that I refuse to cosy up. Perhaps closer to the truth is that I just don’t know
how
to. In truth, a part of me longs to be huddled with them out at the back dock to the exclusion of everyone else, smoking and laughing and then off to the pub after work. The only reason that I am not a complete reject at work is because of my friendship with Chris, which is, I suspect, completely mystifying for most people. They skate around me with wary smiles and take care not to be openly rude or dismissive, unsure of the amount of social capital I might be hoarding. Chris doesn’t cosy up to anyone, as such. He just turns on his charm to full voltage and people like him because he makes them laugh and feel good. He’s confident. Where did he get that? Can
I
get it?
I’m tired. Tomorrow is Friday. Netball practice at 7.20 a.m. Double history, double maths.Work after school from four till nine. I’ll leave the house at 6.20 a.m. in my sports gear, and get the bus(es) to school by seven-twenty.
It’s too cold to walk now it’s winter.
I pack my tote bag with my school tunic, white shirt, school jumper, brown school shoes and tights. Then I pack my work uniform: black combat trousers, black shoes, socks, red bow tie and name badge. I battle to close the zipper, then test the bag’s weight. Ouch.
I assemble and pack my school folders and textbooks in my backpack: chunky maths book, gargantuan history folder,
The Great War
, calculator, French and English exercise books, French dictionary,
Macbeth
. I struggle to close that zipper too, and end up having to take the history folder out. I’ll have to put the school bag on my back, the tote bag over one shoulder and carry the history folder in my arms. I must remember to put my bus pass in my trackie-pants pocket, so I don’t have to put everything down and fumble around in my backpack for my wallet when the bus comes.
I put my PJs on, clean my teeth, wash and moisturise my face. Then I pad into Jess’s room to lean over her sleeping form and listen for her breathing. I reposition Prize Teddy next to her. They have never spent a night apart. I kiss her warm little cheek, inhale the delicious sleeping toddler aroma and pad out again.
Back in my room, I pause in front of the mirror long enough to ascertain that I look the same today as I did yesterday. In bed, I open my bedside table drawer, get out Chris’s letter and run my eyes over his handwriting. I rub my feet together to warm them. Curling up in a ball I think:
Sun rises, sun sets, and still no Chris
.