Behind the Moon (9 page)

Saturday Night Phobia

All her emotions tangled like sleave silk as dreams of home kept stirring sleep till dawn.

From her gauze-curtained window, at heaven’s edge, alone, forlorn, she’d watch dusk follow dusk.

While the moon hare and the sun crow whirled round, she mourned all victims in the Sorrow League.

Nguyen Du,
The Tale of Kieu

By the time he was halfway through his university course, Gibbo was convinced that weekends should never have been invented. Or if that was impossible, then mankind would have been better off sticking to the six-day working week. Saturdays were a humiliation, a taunt by malicious higher beings—both terrestrial and celestial—who delighted in demonstrating to him on a weekly basis his social ineptitude and consequent isolation.

Friday nights were all right. Just. He was so buggered by the end of the university week that it was as much as he could do to drag himself home through traffic jams and road rage, bolt down the dinner his mum had prepared for him, thrust his clothes into the washing machine and flop onto the bed to read in his Y-front underwear. Anything served his purpose; he did not differentiate between Tom Clancy or Thomas Mann,
Tom
Jones
or Thomas the Tank Engine.

Out the back of the flame-brick house, in the dun-grey fibro extension that now served as the TV room, he could hear his father exclaiming angrily at Friday night football on the television. If Gibbo had a Groundhog Day in his life, Friday night footy was it. Friday nights hummed with the muted buzz of barracking crowds, his father’s pugnacious critique of the game punctuated by the occasional ‘Yes!’ and the more frequent disbelieving demand, ‘Did you see that? I mean, come on!’ To which his mother would reply irritably, ‘What now, Bob? Can’t you see I’m reading?’ as she flicked through the pages of
Woman’s Day
.

Little changed over the years, except these days her lips pursed into a disapproving prune more frequently as features on new knitting patterns gave way to chatty, sycophantic articles about the Royals, and these were in turn superseded by celebrity scandals that pierced her consciousness in high-pitched, girlish, twenty-something exclamations. HOW PRINCESS ANNE ESCAPES THE LONELY NIGHTS! WOW! AMAZING DIET—NEW SLIM FERGIE DROPS 16KG! WOW! MADONNA’S UNCENSORED KINKY SEX ROMPS WITH LOTS OF SUPERSTARS! WOW! WOW! WOW!

‘You’re an English teacher. Don’t know how you can stand to read that garbage,’ Bob Gibson would grouch predictably, but Gillian noticed that he listened attentively enough to the short snippets of gossip she read out to him.

‘It’s a bloody disgrace,’ he pronounced, and she flicked him a look of annoyance because she was reading him gossip so that they would have something to talk about, not so that he could pass judgement on her and the whole world of celebrities. Then he raised his voice and said, ‘Just as it’s a dis-
grace
to this household that your son coops himself up in his room with a book on the weekends. Can’t get a bloody date and no wonder. Not even interested in the footy.’

His father’s voice had a stentorian quality that sent it pulsing down the short hallway to Gibbo’s bedroom at the front of the house. He slammed the bedroom door shut and willed himself to refuse the lash of hurt and the balm of self-pity, but they came anyway.

He had been four years old when his father started chucking all kinds of balls at him: footballs, cricket balls, volleyballs, tennis balls. ‘You’re a little tiger, aren’tcha,’ Bob insisted over the next ten years. He’d nodded, swallowed phlegm and sniffed back tears as an asteroid of a football punched into his chest; as his ear was smacked by the red blur of a cricket ball; as the volleyball cracked his brand-new wristwatch and hammered the metal strap into his flesh; as his father’s tennis ball stung his nose and bounced to the far corner of a rundown asphalt court. ‘Ace. Forty–love. Game, set and match.’

By the time he was fourteen, even Bob gave way to the inevitable. ‘Bloody girl,’ he snorted as he stored the sporting equipment away in the attic with forbidding finality. How was he going to get to know his son without the aid of a ball shuttling effortlessly between them, knitting them together in blokey camaraderie? Delete the language of scores, tries, wickets, LBWs, and run-outs, omit the lengthy debates about top five batsmen and top five spin or fast bowlers of all time and how were you going to lob serious man-to-man topics into the conversation? Without sport, how did you touch on subjects like sex, drugs and career choices? How could you paddle your way around these potentially emotional boulders without the smooth-flowing current of great sporting moments? You couldn’t. You were shipwrecked conversationally and then there was a whole lot of awkwardness between you and your son. Love him as much as you did, he didn’t seem a proper man, a real Aussie.

But manumission from Australian masculinity brought many rewards for Gibbo, disinterest from Bob and freedom from Friday night football being two of the most immediate effects. No longer did he have to sit on the sagging sofa, wedged between his growling father and purse-mouthed mother, staring miserably at the ascending flight of wooden ducks on the cork-lined wall above the TV as thick-necked players dodged and wove their tribal dance on the convex screen.

The unexpected restitution of his Friday nights was a wonderful gift while he was still in school and had no expectations of a social life. In his university years, however, Friday nights acquired the rime of dreary depression because there was nothing to look forward to in the coming wasteland of his weekend.

Gibbo would have liked to sleep in on Saturday mornings, to be unconscious for as much of the day as possible. But even without the benefit of his army years, his father was an early-to-bed, early-to-rise kind of man. No son of his was going to laze in bed like a bludger as long as he had any say in the matter. Yet Saturday mornings were actually made bearable by the structure of household chores. Gibbo washed the car, swept the driveway free of rusty liquidambar leaves, cleaned out the gutters, trimmed errant tree branches, spread manure in the azalea and camellia beds. In the garden, fragile basil and mint seedlings—the tiny buds not even half the size of his thumbnail when he tucked them into the soil—bloomed into thick-leafed fragrance and bled the nostalgic smell of an imaginary home into his earthstained fingers.

He was meticulous, careful. On Saturdays he fixed leaking taps and creaking doors, wound out the metal measuring tape, drilled, screwed, hammered and generally felt reasonably competent as a human being, even as a man. Lumbering around the house with various tools of wood and iron clutched in his massive fists, he felt in harmony with his limbs. He felt in control of his life. There was nothing around the house he could not fix.

But he was too efficient, and the chores petered out as morning slid away into sleepy noon, leaving him with nothing to do and too much time to think. The slowly creeping afternoon sapped his self-assurance and his sense of being at home in his body. By the time streetlights rubbed their eyes and blinked awake in the early evening, he was bloated with self-hatred. He resented the tonnage of his body. His rotund trunk and limbs, the fleshiness of his arms, the thick meat of his thighs, seemed a Sisyphean burden he was too weary to roll through life. He gripped a fistful of flank and wished he had a sculptor’s knife to carve it down to the bone. He would watch his flesh fall off in slippery glistening slices as the blood flowed free.

Yet it was even more than that, for fat men in history had overcome their weight with their wit. A fat man could be funny and, therefore, popular. Anything could be forgiven a funny man, even murder; witness the literary and filmic success of the convicted murderer Chopper Read.

Gibbo’s problem was his tongue, that swollen muscle lodged like a lump of unbaked dough in the tepid oven of his mouth. His tongue would not obey his thoughts. He knew he was not unintelligent. He was, in fact, quite well-read, thanks to his English-teacher mother and a combined arts/engineering degree at the university. In his head he could hold scintillating conversations with people he’d just met. He could use words as his foil to fence with the world. The essence of Gibbo, he felt, the person who was really Nigel Gibson, was erudite and unflappable inside the carcass of his body. But the essence of Gibbo was entombed within all that flesh and could not fight his way free. He willed his tongue to obey the increasingly frustrated orders of the inner Nigel Gibson, but his heart drummed loudly and furiously and caused his vocal chords to quake, his tongue to trip and stutter. Fear was like a butcher’s hand around his abdomen, squeezing his heart like a sausage until it exploded through his lungs or shot up his oesophagus to lodge in his mouth. Blood thumped like a timpani in his brain.

So in the company of others, especially those of his own age, he was fat and dull, a social dead weight. The kind of person people tried to edge away from as quickly as possible at parties. The kind of person whose eyes jittered in desperate panic and flickered around the room seeking eye contact with someone with a social conscience who would come and rescue him. He depended on the kindness of strangers and was always let down.

Gibbo was the kind of person who then hovered around the food and drinks table, guzzling cheap beer, taking as long as possible to dip corn chips in plastic tubs of salsa, and who then spent half the night locked in the toilet so that he would not have to face his social failure. He was, in fact, the kind of person who no longer got invited to parties. The last party he’d been to was Tien’s twenty-first, and what he remembered most was that first slash of hurt that he had not been asked to make a speech when he was the oldest, the first friend she’d ever had in Australia. Since then, his Saturday nights had been desolate.

On the verge of turning twenty-one himself, Gibbo decided that it was time to take positive steps towards acquiring his first girlfriend. He had no idea how to go about it, so he looked at the personal ads in the local paper:

Lonely European widow, 79, slim, attractive and healthy, n/s, very active, financially independent. Seeking intelligent financially secure man for lasting, genuine, loving relationship 69–82yo.

Never married, black sense of humour, not much into pubs and clubs, seeking someone to make funeral plans with.

Compatibility? Could be you are aged 30–46 professional/ business. Free of ties. 37yo dusky sleek sporty features, happy and heart motivated. Let’s talk.

White charger/accompanying knight sought by romantic and passionate 24yo just back from Europe but with no bad habits or baggage or money.

Stunning classy nondancing transsexual with internet dating phobia seeks sane and stable Greek/Italian gentleman over 40.

He thought it might be easier to go to one of those group dinners where he could meet people. That way, even if he didn’t manage to hook up with a woman any time soon, he would be able to observe and learn the dating and mating habits of the average Aussie male.

He took a deep breath, rang the group dinner company and paid his fifty-dollar membership fee. A fortnight later, some chirpy-voiced secretary rang to tell him that a dinner had been organised for Saturday night at an Italian restaurant in Parramatta. The hostess would meet them at the bar at seven thirty and collect the special forty-five dollar three-course dinner fee. She advised him to wear a shirt and tie.

He was the first to arrive, even before the hostess. He felt a panic attack coming on because he was there too early, or perhaps he was at the wrong restaurant. He eased out the folded piece of notepaper on which he’d scribbled the instructions. It was creased and grubby from countless checking. The address and time were right.

He went to the bar and ordered a bourbon and coke. Waited. Ordered another. Eventually, the hostess turned up and made small talk. He panicked again and mumbled his excuses as he fled to his usual refuge: the toilet. When he came back, he was calmer and had a pleasant, friendly, ‘hey, how’s it goin’?’ smile pinned to his lips. Everyone had arrived by now. They shook hands and he saw, with a small jolt of surprise, that one of the women was Tien’s mother, Miss Ho. Linh, she’d asked him to call her the last time they met, at Tien’s twenty-first. He didn’t know whether Linh was equally surprised to see him there because his own insecurities were blooming so brilliantly in his head that he was beyond registering anybody else’s reactions by then. As the group was led to the table, Linh tugged on his arm and held him back.

‘Wha’?’ he said, his tongue thick and his head woozy from the drinks he’d had earlier on.

‘Gibbo, your fly is undone,’ Linh whispered. She stood in front of him and her hands swung behind her back to gesture at him to fix the problem while no-one was looking.

Embarrassment spiked. He tugged up the zipper of his black jeans quickly and snagged the flesh of his index finger. A bead of blood popped out and he automatically shoved his finger in his mouth to suck on it as he followed Linh to the table.

‘Hungry, are ya?’ one of the guys said.

Gibbo blushed and mumbled something about cutting his finger.

‘Gee, how’d you do that?’ A frizzy blonde who could have been a potential, but he rather thought he was more attracted to Asians even though her sun-speckled cleavage was hypnotic. His brain sloshed inside his skull.

He felt his whole face engulfed in flames as he stuttered and subsided into an incoherent mumble. Not that it mattered because some other guy was being funny so the centre of attention had shifted away from him. That was it. He’d lost his chance to be interesting. He ordered another bourbon and coke and remembered little else about the evening. Bruschetta came and went and he vaguely remembered picking it up and being unable to find his open mouth with any reasonable degree of accuracy. Bits of roma tomato and basil fell off and he tried and failed to scrape them back onto the soggy bread. Conversation ebbed and flowed around him but he felt cocooned in the Cone of Silence from
Get Smart
. He drank two glasses of a rather acidic red wine with his veal parmigiana, and dessert was a complete blank.