Green (33 page)

‘Yeah.'

He's gone before I get to mention that his photos weren't developed. Maybe he's right. Maybe I should call her. I don't want the wrong version of the story getting round. I'll probably call later.

I should tell him about the photos. I'm sure he'd want to know. I give him twenty minutes to see the next patient, then I call the Mater back. The switchboard puts me through to Antenatal Clinic, but there's only a clerk there. He tells me the morning clinic finished well over an hour ago, and there isn't an afternoon clinic on Fridays. Frank must be somewhere else at the Mater, even though it was an Antenatal Clinic he missed. But I don't know where to try next. I'll talk to him later.

I plan my Jacinta conversation most of the afternoon, sitting at the table making notes about the directions it might take and what I might say. This time I'm leaving nothing to chance.

I revisit lunch from all kinds of bad angles. I blame my mother, I blame Frank, I blame Ann and Nancy Wilson and anyone else connected with Heart. Each for different things but, ultimately, I know where the buck stops. For a while, I wonder if it might have been better if I'd gone with the moderately sensual ‘Let's Go' by The Cars rather than the story of a man with an allure so compelling no girl's mother could understand it. But, let's face it, that's not the issue. The way things panned out, I might as well have picked Warren Zevon's ‘Excitable Boy' and sung along to the bit where he killed her and filled the cave with her bones.

My mother arrives home, making a lot of noise as she gets to the door.

‘It's okay,' I call out to her. ‘She's gone. I'm back doing obstetrics.'

‘Oh, right,' she says as she comes along the hall. ‘I wasn't going to ask.' She stands in the doorway to the kitchen, holding shopping bags and looking around, as if hoping to catch some lingering interesting sign of the visit before it fades away forever.

‘You can ask. And the answer is I don't think she's for me. You know how, sometimes, you just know that? So, I'm moving on. There'll be other possibilities.'

‘What? What other possibilities?' she says with a speed that gets the words out before her usual tone of measured curiosity manages to catch up with them. ‘None of my business. Sorry.'

‘That's fine. It was a general observation. Not specific.'

She looks at me, trying to work out how fine it really is. ‘If you want to talk about this, or anything we could. We could talk, couldn't we?'

‘I'm sure we could. If there was anything to talk about. Are you after salacious details or do you just think I need therapy because lunch didn't work out?'

‘Oh, nothing like that. It's just . . . well, you bought party pies. You probably got your hopes up. Or maybe not.'

‘Well, it's all irrelevant now, whether I did or I didn't. She's not for me. Back to obstetrics, I think.'

And she navigates herself so cautiously through her well-intentioned concern that I don't even have the go at her that I was planning to about opening my photos. My photos. Does anyone open anyone else's mail around here? Definitely not. That's definitely a rule. Even if there might be photos of their roses in there.

So the photos stay in my room, and we don't discuss them. She's making dinner by the time I tell her I'm about to use the phone in the study. I explain that I've got to talk through a lot of uni things with Frank—lecture notes and case studies—and I need to do it with everything spread out in front of me. I take my conversation outline and a large irrelevant pile of paper in there, and I shut the door.

Just go with the plan, I tell myself. The necessary outcome's simple, and it's not like lunchtime. Damage control, that's all.

It still takes a lot of pacing before I pick up the phone, and it gets put down again twice before I dial one digit. Do it. Just do it.

I call. It rings. Three times, four.

‘Hello.' A female voice, and familiar.

‘Hi, Jacinta?'

‘Yes.' The voice toughens up already.

‘It's Phil.'

‘Yes.'

‘I just wanted to have a chance to explain a few things. About today.'

‘I'd really rather not do this.'

‘No, it wasn't the way it seemed. Things got a bit jumbled. Some of them came out all wrong.' New tactic: start peripheral, move towards the point. ‘I was fighting off a migraine. I get them sometimes, and they affect my speech and I can say odd things. About relationships. That aren't true. They're just a jumble. And they affect my vision—the migraines—so that made me shave very badly and made me quite clumsy with the ice and it might have made me seem a bit strange. Did I seem a bit strange?'

‘Have you still got the migraine?'

‘No, I'm fine . . . yes, I have, just a bit. And it was a new razor, and they're sharp and they can slice through just about anything without you feeling it. When you're shaving. And the tape, that strange tape that we played, I don't know how it got into the machine. It's my brother's.'

‘Yeah? What's his name?'

‘Name?' It's the pause that does me in. That and the tragically tentative way I invent my brother Peter.

She hangs up.

I call back.

‘Okay, this time I'll tell you exactly what happened.'

Having gone with Plan A, the migraine, and less successfully with Plan B, my brother's tape, I move to another sheet of paper and Plan C, the jokey explanation of the photos, to explain how my mood was completely thrown exactly when I got to the door.

‘So there they were,' I tell her, ‘and my mother had opened them. And they weren't just any photos. My friend Frank—you met Frank, I think—has a problem with a surgery tutor, so he'd got me to take some photos in my room of him with a Tim Tam between his buttocks, and I was worried that my mother . . .'

‘Naked buttocks?'

‘Hard to get the Tim Tam in there otherwise.'

‘Don't call me again.'

She hangs up.

I call back. She's kidding, surely. Anyone can recognise a prank. At least I have to finish Plan C before giving up.

The phone rings and rings. This time a man answers. It's her father. His tone isn't friendly.

‘Are you the guy who stuck the biscuit up that other guy's arse?'

‘Me? No. He did it himself. I just took the photos.'

‘Listen, that's exactly the kind of thing I've heard about you. I know you've got a very disturbed personal life, and I'm sorry about your family background, but let me be clear. I don't know why you're calling my daughter but, put it this way, I've got your name, Phil Harris, I've got your number and I've got friends in Special Branch. So there's plenty of stuff a lot bigger and uglier than a biscuit that could find its way up your arse quick smart if I made one phone call. You won't be calling here again, will you?'

‘I think there's been a misunderstanding.'

‘You won't be calling here again, will you?'

‘But there was this cruel surgery tutor . . .'

‘Listen, mate, get help.'

‘I never had sex with my mother.'

There's a click, a loud click. He's hung up on me.

 

*

 

It's enough that someone in the family claims to have had their photo taken by Special Branch. My mother's political cred will not be enhanced if Special Branch is persuaded to insert plenty of stuff in my arse quick smart because I made a dick of myself with some guy's daughter.

My parents, spared the details, know me well enough to work out that it hasn't been one of my better days. During dinner, my father tries his hardest to stimulate a conversation about current events or obstetrics or the mysterious eternal appeal of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Afterwards he pours two glasses of one of his better brandies and says, ‘Fancy a film?
The Bridge on the River Kwai
, perhaps?'

He lopes off to the study, to the shelves of taped-from-TV videos he euphemistically refers to as a library. Soon the two of us are in the darkened lounge room in our recliner seats, sipping our brandies and watching Alec Guinness do his best work, my father murmuring ‘watch out, sir' and ‘chin up' as the mood takes him. This is not the evening I had planned.

The phone rings and my mother answers it. From her tone, I know it's Frank. My father hits the pause button, but I tell him to keep watching while I'm out of the room. I should be able to fill in any gaps by now.

‘So,' Frank says. ‘What are you doing?'

‘Drinking the good brandy and watching
The Bridge on the River Kwai
again.'

‘You fucked up the phone call as well then, hey?

‘Correct. You know the score. You don't get the good brandy and
The Bridge on the River Kwai
around here if you've had one of your better days.'

‘We should go out. We should have a drink now.'

‘I don't want to go out. And I
am
having a drink now.'

‘I'll pick you up at nine-thirty. The video should be finished then.'

‘Okay.'

 

*

 

‘Usual plan,' he says in the car. ‘The Underground. Cruise in at five-to-ten, beat the cover charge. Vince and Greg are meeting us there. There might be a few others, too.'

He's playing Springsteen tonight on the car stereo, early Springsteen,
Born to Run
. We went to the concert a few months ago, us and fifty thousand others in pounding rain at the end of a hot day. I've never been to anything quite like it—spectacle and steam and mud, with the Clarence Clemons sax solos soaring all the way to the low clouds. Until that night, I thought the best thing about Springsteen was the girl in the ‘Dancing in the Dark' film clip.

I can't believe the mess I made of this afternoon.

‘The photos,' I tell him. ‘They came back today. No butt shots. Sorry.'

‘Bugger.'

‘We always thought that might happen.'

‘Yeah. Yeah, the more I thought about it . . . we should take it as a sign. I think you were right about how to handle this. The more I thought about the particular film genre I got the idea from, the more I realised it wasn't the butt pranks I had the affinity with anyway. It was the sorority pillow fights.'

‘I didn't realise we were working in that kind of paradigm.'

‘Well, you're always working in some kind of paradigm, aren't you? Why fight it? So, do you want to tell me some more about the phone call this afternoon?'

‘Not really. I've kind of gone off Jacinta, anyway.'

‘Surprise me. Elaborate.'

‘When it really came down to it, we fell out over politics.'

‘Politics.' He lets out a laugh that goes ‘hur hur hur hur', like an engine turning over, but stalling short of starting. ‘What did you say in that phone call?'

‘I think the only common ground we found was that, by the end—by which I mean the end of the third call, after the two hang-ups—she and her father and I were all of the understanding that I wouldn't be calling again. Her family tends to be quite right of centre, politically, and I think we had very different views on the role of Special Branch.'

‘God, you really go all the way when you talk things through, don't you? I thought you were kidding with the politics. But, whatever does it for you, I guess.'

‘Yes. So, moving on, a different topic . . . where were you this afternoon?'

‘What? What do you mean? At the Mater.'

‘Yeah, obviously, but not at Antenatal Clinic. I called. There was no Antenatal Clinic this afternoon. What were you doing?'

‘I don't know why they couldn't find me. That's where I was, down in Clinics.'

‘Doing what? Straightening up the piles of out-of-date copies of
National Geographic
?'

‘No, no. Work. Kind of. You know the way they've got the portable ultrasound up the back? Well, there was a patient who was being admitted after the clinic this morning and she'd gone home to get her stuff. She was being admitted through the clinic so that the registrar could take a look at things on ultrasound on the way in. She's got polyhydramnios for investigation. So I was there for that.'

‘Acute or chronic polyhydramnios?'

‘Um, acute.'

‘So she's got twins?'

‘Is she supposed to?'

‘Doesn't it almost always occur in association with twins? Acute polyhydramnios?'

‘Um, yeah. Maybe this wasn't quite so acute. I don't remember all the detail. I was mainly there to have a look at the ultrasound. I didn't see her when she came in this morning.'

‘Right. Sounds like you learned a lot.'

‘Yeah. Not as much as I thought at the time, maybe.' The idea seems to make him edgy, as if obstetrics might go the same way as surgery without more careful attention.

‘Look, we've still got weeks to get it together.'

We turn off the street and into the car park opposite the Underground. There's already a queue outside, waiting to be let in for nothing when it opens at ten. I can't see anyone I know.

‘Yeah,' he says. ‘Yeah. I've, um . . . hmmm. It's just there's pressure from home to do more lopping work. But I'll keep it to weekends as much as I can. Anyway, you totally crashed and burned with Jacinta, then?'

‘Yeah. We're calling it “fell out over politics,” remember?'

‘Yeah, sorry. I do that all the time. I think there's a possibility Sophie and Clinton might be falling out over politics at the moment.'

‘Really? I wouldn't be so sure.'

‘Should I go and ask her if she's up for some action, now that you're back on the market?'

‘No, don't.'

‘Well, you won't cut through the bullshit yourself.'

‘Okay, it's not happening, right? You keep bringing things back to Sophie, and it's not happening. And if it was, she wouldn't tell you. And if it was and she tried to tell you—which it isn't and she wouldn't—she wouldn't say it in a way that you'd understand. No one's quite as direct as you. And that's not a bad thing, it's just a thing. And there are times when it needs to be factored in. Some of us don't cut through bullshit. We navigate carefully around it, and that's how it is and you don't get it. So if she told you, she'd tell you in a way that meant you wouldn't or couldn't tell me.'