Green (11 page)

I should've known he'd deal with
Bright Lights, Big City
the way he did. In first term this year we all started talking about the elective we have to do in December and January, between fifth year and sixth year. The faculty's intention is that we travel, and experience something we mightn't see here. I think it was in that context that I said something about really wanting to get out of Brisbane. Frank agreed. The next day he told me we could borrow his brother's panel van, since his brother had done his licence for the moment, and that we should go to the coast. Which wasn't exactly what I meant.

We drove north in the week between psych and surgery, Frank with his board shorts and his bare feet and his bad-boy attitude, singing along to his brother's Dusty Springfield tapes. ‘Chick-pulling tapes,' he called them. ‘AJ's too smart to have a stack of guy music in the van.' I was never too sure what ‘guy music' meant, but I did admit I hadn't been expecting Dusty Springfield.

Inspired by our chick-pulling potential, Frank made up ‘rules of the van', most of which were needlessly ambitious and relied on the prospect of a sexual encounter before coming into play. The relationship man may, or may not, have been single at the time.

In the hour and a half it took to reach the Sunshine Coast, I'd picked up most of the words to ‘Son of a Preacher Man' and I thought I'd probably be having sex that night, or within the next couple of days at the outside. If Frank took up with a weird religion, or Amway, he'd be trouble.

We agreed the van was sacrosanct. Rule One: No rooting in the van. If you score, you score on the beach.

So how close did we get? All we scored was the meat tray at a seriously tough Caloundra pub. It wasn't even particularly near the beach.

We won the meat tray, and started playing pool with some locals. Which was fine while we were losing but then we hit a patch of form and, at the exact moment I was working out that winning mightn't be a good idea, Frank addressed one of our opponent's girlfriends as ‘babe'. Things didn't go well from there.

‘Frank's no good with names,' I had to tell them. ‘And he's not used to this kind of luck with pool either. I'd be very surprised if that blue went down. Very surprised.'

And at that even Frank noticed their unnecessarily firm grip on the cues, and the way one of them had moved to cover the door. And I talked amiably about nothing much, and then about sport, and he duly fucked up the shot. Our form fell away in a rush, he left the girls alone and the door was open for us when they sunk the black.

‘At least we've got something to eat,' Frank said in the car park, when he found the bright side. ‘And you talked them out of hitting us. That was good.'

Then we had an argument about our meat and what to do with it, which became an argument about potato salad—and what the white ingredient might be—followed by one about who should have brought cooking utensils, and finally one about matches for the barbecue.

‘Why couldn't you have been a boy scout?' Frank said, the bright side now long gone. ‘You're just the kind of person who should have been a boy scout. I should be able to hand you two sticks, and there should be nothing but friction between us and tea.'

We went to a takeaway place, and we asked the guy how much fish and chips he'd give us as a swap for the meat tray. We lay in the van that night, the wind picked up, the rain came in from the sea, we rooted nothing and the last thing Frank said was ‘Do you want to go home in the morning?' and the last thing I said was ‘Yep'.

So that's not what I mean by ‘away'. I've been looking at the possibility of doing my elective in New York. Naturally, I've thought about it enough that it now goes like this:

 

You are on your way again to Ron Todd's World of Chickens, but you have a plan. A plan that means you are now only months away from the real world. Give or take ten thousand miles. It's all a question of perspective. There's distance to travel, and the rest of the year to endure. A year of ward rounds and exams, of fried fillets of chicken breast with a choice of five sauces. A year in which female company has proven elusive and in which you know—inside, you know—that you have missed the John Bostock Medal for Psychiatry by the narrowest of margins.

 

Okay, hyperbole with the last bit, since half of the people in the year haven't even started psychiatry. But I still think I know.

 

*

 

There's a line in
Bright Lights, Big City
about the central character meeting Amanda and coming to New York and beginning to feel that he was no longer on the outside looking in. That, perhaps, is the bit I get most.

Sometimes it feels like I live in such a shit town. It meets all reasonable definitions of a shit town. There are still men who put on hats to drive on these roads, our only celebrities are sports stars and newsreaders, and everyone you meet already knows your mother.

Okay, in my case some of the responsibility for the last one rests squarely with my mother, rather than Brisbane. My mother: uni lecturer, occasional political activist, rose fancier, theatre buff, person entirely unable to understand where her business ends and another person's begins. Fluent in one language, shambolic in several but difficult to silence. Monty Python fan and, like most Monty Python fans, unable to understand people who don't think every conversation can be improved by a quick reference to the Spanish Inquisition, and surprise. Etcetera. Nightmare. Worse when she's excited. Otherwise far too British. Too bloody bloody British.

But I can't blame it all on her. If the world was a human body, Brisbane would be the last sphincter things pass through on the way out. Nothing happens here. I want to be a film maker, but every week here is another week without narrative and that can't be a good start. I'm not even on the outside looking in. I'm somewhere further away, and the people on the outside looking in seem pretty close to the action to me.

 

*

 

I'm out being the chicken, and all that's still in my mind. There's not as much Elizabethan material tonight, since Ron's interest in exploring the chicken's Gene Kelly side seems to have done something to my confidence.

Tonight, the theme is mime. Marcel Marceau chicken. Chicken walking against the wind, chicken doing things with silly (invisible) hat. Chicken doing a Michael Jackson moonwalk would be good, but the feet are too big. That's the excuse. Chicken tripping up and falling to the pavement while failing to do a Michael Jackson moonwalk would be more embarrassment than I could handle.

It's changeover time, and Frank is moving his ‘biggest burger in one bite' challenge up a notch. He says he's mastered the Chicken Little junior burger, and he's on his way to the big time.

‘I've got a cut-down adult bun and two pec minor muscles, pickles and sauce,' he tells me. ‘It's a PB.'

‘Sure it is, if it goes in.'

‘How is it a personal best though,' Sophie says, ‘if it's not even an acknowledged product?'

‘Good point.' I don't know what kind of point it is, but this'll be more interesting if I go with it. ‘Would you call that competition standard, Frank?'

‘No, I never said that. It's more like heavy training.'

‘You've got two of the thin bits of chicken . . . ' Sophie won't let it go.

‘Pec minor muscles,' Frank says, trying to reclaim some ground using science. ‘I know. Like two Chicken Littles, rather than the fully adult-burger pec major. Give me a break. I'll get there. And I know it's not the total complement of salad items, but I'm working up to it. And you've got to admit, it's pretty bloody big.'

‘Yeah, okay. It's big,' Sophie says. ‘It's a feat, even if it's not the one the crowd was hoping for.' She looks at me, as if I'm to speak for the crowd.

‘I think it's all about creating a sense of anticipation. If he could just jam a whole burger in there right now, we wouldn't be calling this a challenge.'

‘So, do it Frank,' she says.

And he does. He takes a deep breath, opens his mouth wide and holds the modified burger up to it. His lips work their way along the bun, measuring it out and preparing to draw it in. His jaw moves forward, his eyes bulge, his hand pushes and the burger goes. There's some very noisy nose breathing as he pauses between the engulf and the swallow, then he rolls his eyes back and tilts his head and takes it down his throat like a crocodile in a death roll.

He puts one hand onto the bench to steady himself, and raises the other in triumph. We applaud.

‘Thank you,' he says. ‘Thank you. It was a bastard, but I couldn't let you down.'

Once the two of us are out the door and in the corridor, Sophie says, ‘How big a burger do you reckon we can get him to swallow? Do you reckon we can get him to black out?'

‘Hey, on the first bad sinus day, anything's possible.'

 

*

 

Zel tells Frank, ‘Just drizzle a little barbecue sauce across it,' and I don't like the way she says drizzle.

‘And a bit of mayo on the bun, spread with a knife?'

‘You remembered.' Said in way that I've seen described as cooing. Then she turns to me. ‘Philip, is he this attentive to all the customers?'

‘Sure. He's a professional.' I'm hitting Ron for nausea loading to my pay if I cop much more of this, dammit. ‘Frank was born with great people skills, but I think he did invent the Big Chicken Little with you in mind.'

‘Test drove the first one myself earlier,' he says, omitting to mention its ugly passage through his gullet.

She eats it in a way that's presumably supposed to resemble dainty, with a paper serviette in both hands and a dab at her lips after each mouthful. There's a gold trinkety rattle from her bracelets every time she does it, tiny horses and carriages and pineapples jangling into each other.

When a couple of students come in for burgers, I'm happy to take the work and leave Zel to Frank. The Todds, Sophie excepted, can be one of the downsides to working here. They turn up unannounced and need a lot of looking after. Sometimes Ron even tries to make a burger, but he treats it like celebrity day at McDonald's. He makes bad burgers slowly, he gets in the way and the whole time he's here he's hanging out for any opportunity to tell the customer he owns the place. ‘I'm Ron Todd,' he says, and so emphatically I think everyone's expecting the next bit to go, ‘and I'm an alcoholic'. But it's not his fault that everyone notices the big neon chicken and No one notices his small neon name.

Sophie comes in to change and Zel stays talking to Frank when we go out the back.

‘How's obstetrics?' she says from the toilet. ‘I didn't ask you that yet.'

‘It's fine. Not that we've done much so far.'

‘Would you do it, do you think? Would you go into that?'

‘Be an obstetrician, you mean? I don't think so. I've got no idea what I'm going to do, really. In medicine, at least. I keep hoping I'll work out how to be a film maker before I have to decide that.'

‘So you're that serious about it?'

‘Yeah. Have you seen how much video cameras cost? That's what I'm saving for. And I know it's not the same as film, but I think I could learn a lot from it. At least it'd be something to start with. And I've done some film work, so . . . '

‘Really? What have you done?'

‘Well, not much. I acted in a couple of alcohol-abuse films round about when I was finishing school. Educational films. I had a bit part in the first one and a bigger one in the second. It was the first time I ever got paid for anything.'

I don't tell her the obvious part. Those films are always ‘cool crowd gone wrong' versus ‘nerd made good', and I was never going to be one of the slick people who drank themselves stupid and fell from grace by throwing up tomato peel into the toilet. I was the nice guy who didn't drink and therefore, of course, got the girl. And that's just like life, isn't it?

‘So it's a bit of a comedown to go from film actor to chicken then,' Sophie's saying, and sounding as though she's genuinely sorry for me, like I'm a Hollywood Where Are They Now? story.

‘Yeah, it's not really like that, though. There's a few years in between. And I wasn't exactly co-starring with De Niro.'

She opens the door and hands me the costume. It's warm when I get into it. It always feels a little like sneaking into someone else's bed, putting on the chicken, particularly on a cool evening like this. And Sophie makes it smell like green apple shampoo. I always get a blast of green apple when I pull the head down, and I do wonder what kinds of smells I'm giving her in return.

Film actor. It sounds like a lot more than it is. I signed up with a casting agent after I did my two alcohol films, but all she was interested in was making fifty bucks out of the portfolio photos. But it looked easy. A film career looked there for the taking, for weeks at least.

‘It's not much of a place for film-makers,' I say to Sophie as she's zipping me up. ‘Brisbane, I mean. So I figure I've got to get out of here and see more of what's going on out there, in the rest of the world. We get an elective at the end of fifth year. So I've been having a look at a few places in America. New York, New York, mainly. It'd be good to try New York. I've been reading some books lately, like
Bright Lights, Big City
. I've read it a couple of times. Have you read it?'

‘No.'

‘It's about New York. It's about this guy's life in New York.'

‘Like a Simon and Garfunkel song. Did you see them at Lang Park last year? I went with Dad. Who would have preferred Neil Diamond, but you've got to take what's on offer. Not that he's New York. Well, I don't think he is. But
they
are.'