Zigzag Street
Authors: Nick Earls
The bestselling
Zigzag Street
was Nick Earls' first novel for adults. It won a Betty Trask Award in the UK in 1998, and is currently being developed into a feature film.
His other books include the novels
Bachelor Kisses
and
Perfect Skin
, the bestselling short story collection
Headgames
, and the successful young-adult novels
After January
and 48
Shades of Brown
.
His work has been published internationally in English and in translation, which led to him being a finalist in the Premier of Queensland's Awards for Export Achievement in 1999.
Bachelor Kisses
was one of
Who Weekly
's Books of the Year in 1998.
Nick Earls has an honours degree in Medicine from the University of Queensland, and lives in Brisbane. London's
Mirror
newspaper has called him âthe first Aussie to make me laugh out loud since Jason Donovan'.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian
Copyright Act 1968
), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Zigzag Street
ePub ISBN 9781742742922
Kindle ISBN 9781742742939
A Bantam book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney, NSW 2060
www.randomhouse.com.au
First published by Anchor in 1996
This Bantam edition published 2000
Copyright © Nick Earls 1996
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.
Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at
www.randomhouse.com.au/offices
| Â Â | This publication has been supported by the Queensland State Government through Arts Queensland |
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Earls, Nick, 1963-.
Zigzag street
ISBN 978 1 86325 286 7
I. Title
A823.3
Â
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I basically blew my university days in the pursuit of one girl.
It's only now, half a dozen years later, that the idea strikes me with some clarity. Despite what people said at the time. Despite the fact that at every moment of those several years it must have been obvious to everyone but me.
It was obvious. They told me. But I couldn't listen to them because I still had hope. Several years of an entirely pointless hope, when I should have been having the time of my life. Not that I had a bad time. In some respects, I had a great time. But it could have been better. If I hadn't blown it in the pursuit of one girl.
Of course, hindsight is no substitute for insight, and this is all pitifully retrospective.
I'm playing the album she gave me for my twenty-first. Sitting here on the bare boards of the verandah of this old house, studiously not renovating, listening to The Smiths'
The Queen is Dead
. Watching paint fail to apply itself to the verandah rails.
She gave me this album and a tie, a tie that even at the time was a bad tie, and is now long gone.
Listening to the album makes me think we had no chance anyway. She gave it to me, I'm sure, simply because she knew I liked it, not because of its abundance
of ironies, full as it is of loneliness and stricken unrequited love. She was neither cruel enough, nor ironic enough, for it to have been anything but a gift. It's only now that I realise that she lacked irony absolutely, and we were in fact totally incompatible. Throughout the mid-eighties that eluded me, but I can't imagine how.
Since my enthusiasm for renovation has temporarily slipped and it's approaching seven-thirty, I decide to eat. I decide takeaway, then straight back to work. I call Baan Thai at Milton and the guy recognises my voice and says,
Usual order for Hiller
?
He tells me fifteen minutes.
I stop for petrol on the way.
Usual order for Hiller. I still get the usual order for Hiller. Two things have changed. There is no Hiller, and the price has gone up fifty-five cents, but the usual order for Hiller is still the order of choice. It just lasts two nights now. Chicken satay (four sticks),
panang nua
, large rice. Previously fifteen ninety-five, but still a bargain at sixteen fifty.
I nudge the petrol up to the twenty dollar mark, and even this, even petrol, reeks of old crappy memories. The girl at uni, a month short of my twenty-first, my one and only chance.
The rash
We went to a movie. She asked me. And I thought maybe this isn't just us going as friends. Maybe this is a date. I got excited. I imagine I talked throughout the movie and probably annoyed her by trying to impress her. We had coffee afterwards and she talked about what we were going to do for my twenty-first.
We
. I remember that. I remember the enormous thumping erection triggered off simply by the notion of we. And I could see us together at my twenty-first, her standing next to me. I could see I was going to be a winner after all. And on the way back to her place after coffee, already into the sixth hour of this new phase of our relationship, we stopped for petrol. It
was winter, two am, cold. The petrol cap didn't come off easily. Something trivial like that. Something trivial that led her to make the vaguely funny emasculating remark that prompted me to take the pump, having finished filling up the car, and point it into my pocket like a pistol, to make a joke of completing the process of emasculation. Of course, at that very moment, the last gravitational penile dribble from the pump, or a twitch of my cold shaking hand (it matters little which), filled my pants with petrol. Really cold petrol, spreading out black across the front of my favourite faded black jeans and running down both legs. Stinking the car out, all the way back to her place. She laughed more than she needed to, and she didn't invite me in. She told me not to go near any naked flames. And when I got home and threw away the pants and saw my dick shrivelled up like a pale poisoned worm I thought, fine, you're no good to me anyway. Over the next few days I lost quite a bit of skin in that area, and I stayed in my room as much as I could wearing nothing from the waist down. It was only when I thought it wasn't getting better that I asked one of my housemates, a hospital intern, what I should do about it. And the story was out. Fuck confidentiality, when there's a story in it.
I think I was given the birthday present by a friend on her behalf.
The Queen is Dead
and a crappy tie, and there seemed to be some understanding that that was that. My one and only chance had passed, and we were better off as friends. âLet's still be friends', the card might even have said, as though this offered me something I could live with, some survivable compromise.
So here I am, filling the petrol tank of the same car, the same early-eighties Laser I've had since the mideighties, the car that has carried me through a range of foolhardy misadventures and artless attempts at seduction. Here I am, twenty-eight and trashed again. How does this happen? Sometimes with petrol, but what was it this time?
The guy at Baan Thai says,
So how is your wife? I haven't seen her in here for a while
.
No, she's in Melbourne, I tell him.
Oh, business?
I think I must just nod at this, nod and fix on some grin, because I can't bring myself to lie to him, or tell him the truth, hence limiting me to non-verbal options.
I can't believe how many people you end up having to tell when you've been trashed. There are several thousand more opportunities to revisit the instant of trashing than could possibly be anticipated, and most of the time I'd really rather not talk about it. But it comes up. It comes up and there's nothing that can be done to stop it. Bumping into anyone and going through the blandest of social enquiries seems to end up with me having to choose between spilling my guts again or lying. Melbourne, business, a pitiful half-truth. She trashed me. Melbourne, months ago, she trashed me.
We always ordered in her name out of habit, so the guy has no idea I'm not Hiller. And I just can't tell him now. I can't shout this over the top of the cluster of other people waiting for takeaway orders, because whatever I start shouting I'll inevitably end up shouting the trashing story. Then all their conversations about not much will go quiet, and they'll have me to talk about as soon as I've left. Poor bastard, he's so trashed he shouts about it even when he's picking up takeaway.
I pay for the usual order for Hiller and I go, enduring my own idiot grin all the way to the car.
At home I measure my meal into two almost exact portions, and put one into the fridge. It's great, this
panang nua
. Always great.
And Anna Hiller is the bane, and possibly love, of my life. That's how much this sucks.