Holier Than Thou (5 page)
‘Well done, you two,’ Kristo said kindly.
‘A lesser pair would’ve crumbled,’ added Tessa.
We could hear Johanna remonstrating with someone a few clusters down. I sank my teeth into my manoush. It was fragrant with bready, herby goodness. Johanna’s voice seemed to be getting closer.
‘What’s she on about?’ I asked with my mouth full.
‘I dunno,’ said Tessa. ‘Some fuckin’ thing.’
Nick pretended to take cover under his desk, but came out again in time for Johanna to burst upon us with a clap of thunder, like the evil fairy from
Sleeping Beauty
.
‘You two know that stats are due today? I’ve sent emails. Last day of the month; they get collected by Area today. Yours are both below target . . . Nick, yours are pretty much non-existent. I want to see you both on the computer right now!’
‘What, at the same time?’ asked Nick belligerently, making reference to the ratio of one (ancient freeze-prone) computer between four full-time staff members.
‘If you’re unable to meet the basic requirements of your job within the hours and using the resources that everyone else does, we’ll have to address that at performance review,’ Johanna tossed back. That old chestnut . . . always the threat of performance review. Usually effective.
‘Give them a break, Jo,’ Tessa intervened. ‘They’ve just done a sterling job on a tough assignment.’
But Johanna had already made her way to the next cluster of cubicles to peck Hannah and Gareth, unless they had been smart enough to make themselves scarce.
‘I’ll make a plunger,’ said Kristo.
‘Please!’ I perked up a bit at the thought of coffee.
‘They’re good kids, aren’t they?’ Tessa said to Kristo putting her palm to my cheek, and then to Nick’s.
‘They sure are.’
Sometimes I wished Kristo and Tessa were my parents. Is that weird?
Kristo poured us both a coffee, and we took them downstairs to the alcove above the driveway where we sat on our up-turned milk crates and chatted about the futility of existence.
‘I’m not doing my stats today.’ I tried to summon821ed to s the energy to rant, but failed. All I could rustle up was dejection. ‘I’m just . . . not. I have file notes I haven’t done from last week. I have new clients I haven’t even contacted yet.You know?’
‘Me too,’ Nick grunted, with a cigarette in his mouth, fumbling in all his pockets for his lighter.
‘I’m not fucking doing them,
capisce
?’
‘Them’s fightin’ words.’ Nick grinned and lit his cigarette.
Who the hell was I kidding. The server would be overloaded with everyone madly trying to enter their stats. I’d stay back at the end of the day and put in everything I could in an hour. It wouldn’t be a true reflection of the work I’d done, but I’d have to submit something.
‘I’ll stay back and do them after five,’ I said meekly.
‘I’ll stay with you,’ said Nick, dragging a great lungful of his beloved carcinogens. ‘But just for moral support. I’m not doing mine . . . And she can fucking fire me if she wants. If she wants to lose another RN.’
There had been a spate of nursing resignations in the previous six months, as Johanna managed to piss all of them off to the
enth
degree. Now Nick and Gareth were the only nurses on the team. Surely, surely Johanna would see that we couldn’t run the place without nurses. Surely.
Nick’s cigarette smoke was curling and licking all over me.
‘Must you?’ I fanned myself and glared.
‘Sorry,’ he said, and put his cigarette-holding hand down near the ground. As if that made a difference. Why do they do that, smokers? Have they actually deluded themselves that their habit is any less stinky and dangerous if the cigarette is a few inches lower to the ground? Cigarette smoke
fills
a space. Expands to fill it.
Nick and I caught the six o’clock train from Befftown Station. By the time it approached Dulwich Hill, it was fully dark outside. I fumbled with my bag and stepped over Nick’s legs which were up on the opposite seat.
‘Bye Nicholarse.’
‘Bye Hollier-than-thou.’
‘Enjoy your weekend. Happy clowning. Hope you don’t fall to your death.’
‘Thanks, love. Sure you don’t want to get that beer? Or hard liquor?’
‘I better get home to Timbo.’
‘Ah. Yes. Captain Tim. Ciao, bella.’
I put my iPod in for the ten-minute walk home, and listened to a couple of dance anthems from the summer that we had all moved into Lara’s house while her family was away in Europe. Seemed like a long time ago. I was desperate foustdesperar a beer, even while my hands were shaky and my stomach queasy from all the coffee I had drunk in the afternoon.
The ABC news was just beginning as I pushed open the door to the flat and found Tim sprawled on the couch in his sweaty gym gear, beer in hand.
‘Hey, woman . . . ’ He didn’t get up. ‘How was your day?’
The screams of old Mrs Luu and the sobs of her daughter rang in my ears.
‘Real. How was yours?’
‘Good . . . the prez went well; Stefan was happy . . . I got out of there on time and went straight to the gym.’ He stretched a bit, and made a pained sound.
‘Oh baby,’ I sat on his lap and rubbed a hand up and down his upper arm. ‘Do your guns hurt?’
He smiled and looked me in the eyes. ‘Yeah, my guns hurt.’
I kissed his bicep and then his lips, but the kiss somehow came to an early conclusion and Tim’s eyes wandered back to the TV screen.
I got up to get a beer.
‘Can you get me another one?’ wheedled Tim, holding up his empty.
I took my beer out to the balcony, even though the eucalypt was in darkness. I waved to the Pakistani lady on her balcony directly opposite mine. She waved back and continued putting washing on the clothes horse. I took a swig of my beer and thought of the first few weeks of our tenancy. Whichever of us was home from work first, the sound of the other’s key turning in the lock would lead us to drop whatever we were doing and bound out to face the front door. Then we would stumble toward each other, dropping bags or wet washing, putting down beers, ripping off rubber washing-up gloves, tripping over the coffee table and embrace like . . . like lovers – we
were
lovers – and off to the bedroom. But nowwe tended to just come home from work, drink beer, watch TV (entwined) and grunt to one another.
Don’t read too much into it
, I told myself.
I’m sure you’ll do it on the weekend.
I went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed. I thought about Amy Luu, at her home alone, and of old Mrs Luu, on the acute (locked) side of the ward with all the ice-heads. Mrs Luu and her cracked glasses.
I hope she is sleeping. I hope she starts to eat and drink again soon.
I got out my phone and messaged Nick.
That was so fucked
He messaged back immediately.
Yeah
I wished I had gone with him for that beer. The walls in the flat were pressing in on me.
Rehearsals for
Kiss Me Kate
came on apace. We started with two lunchtime rehearsals, added two after-school rehearsals and then Saturday afternoons as well. When we got really close to opening, warned Craw, it would be Sunday as well, possibly all day.
Liam and I came and went together. When we arrived at Petersham station after dark, his mum, Ingrid, would be waiting for us in her car and they’d drop me home. It was fun. For whole minutes sometimes I would forget about the reaper.
My mum had switched to part-time work the year before because she didn’t like to leave my father alone at home for long stretches. Plus he needed to be taken to and from the hospital for his chemotherapy, radiotherapy, blood tests, CAT scans, MRIs, doctors appointments etc. Then she stopped working altogether and was home with Dad every day, although the chemo and radio had ceased. I wondered what passed between them on those long days. I wondered how frank they were with each other in conversation, when conversation was still possible. Often I would arrive home in the afternoon, turn my key softly in the lock and find them sitting next to each other on the sofa, the last of the afternoon sunshine dancing on the wall above them, as they sat with their arms linked and hands clasped, listening to some beautiful, mournful jazz pianist, and contemplating their imminent separation.
Ingrid was a social worker. At that point in my life, all I knew about what that meant was that she helped families with problems. Practically, it meant that when she asked me how my dad was, how my mum was, how Paddy was and how I was, she asked it very well. I felt a certain relief in the car with her and Liam, and gave quiet, honest answers to her questions.
Then one night-time drop-off, about halfway through the rehearsal period, she pulled up in my driveway, put the handbrake on and shot the gearstick up to Park. Then she turned around, twisted between the two front seats and hugged me tightly.
‘Holly,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’re such a strength to your mother.’
And then I knew we were fucked. My family. Imminently fucked that is, not theoretically fucked pending some far-away abstract deadline. Ingrid must have spoken to my mother or something, she wouldn’t have just hugged me out of the blue. She never hugged me.
Years later, when I was at university, she opened their front door to me one morning and gave me another hug-of-death, so I knew I was fucked even before Liam and Alix walked out of his bedroom.
I hooked my backpack over my shoulder and exited the car.
‘Night, Hols,’ said Liam quietly. ‘See you at the station tomoz.’
‘Night.’
‘Bye, Holly.’ Ingrid put her fist over her heart in salute. The salute of empathy you give to people who are . . . just rooted. I pulled the mail out of the mailbox and walked up the driveway. By the time I got to the door, my general sense of foreboding had been converted to adrenaline.
Our house was creaking and old and in need of, among other things, a new coat of paint. We were down to core Cdow0em"business. The yard was overgrown, the front verandah cluttered and unswept.
I shoved my key in the lock in a hurry, knowing that Ingrid would not drive off until I was safely inside the front door. Death hung everywhere in my peripheral vision. You couldn’t look straight at it. Mum stood in the kitchen stirring a boiler on the stove.
‘Hi,’ she said, tapping the wooden spoon on the boiler rim.
‘Hi, Ma.’ I put my bag down. ‘Where’s Paddy?’
‘Upstairs, supposed to be having a shower. Can you go and make sure he is?’
‘Yeah.’ I turned towards the stairs, and then turned back. ‘Anything for dinner?’
‘This is just a plain chicken broth for Dad . . . ’ ‘Can I ring for pizza?’
‘Yes! Yes, do that. And Hol . . . uh . . . ’
‘Mmm?’
‘Trisha came today.’
Trisha was the Community Nurse that visited my dad.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. And Dr Sue as well. And just to let you know before you go in to see Dad . . . they gave him an IV.’
‘An IV?’
‘Yes. It was just too difficult with all those tablets . . . He can’t swallow them, so I was trying to crush them up and put them in custard . . . and they just said it was time to lose the tablets.’
‘Time to lose the tablets,’ I repeated.
‘So now he gets the morphine intravenously at set times through the day and night. Trisha will come every morning to refill it.’
‘Right.’
I could see her eyes glistening as she strained the broth.
I climbed the stairs and found my ten-year-old brother, Paddy, fiddling with some Warhammer figures in his room.
‘Hi, Padster.’
‘Hi.’
‘You’re supposed to be in the shower...’
No answer.
‘ . . . not playing Ultimate Nerd. Come on, I’m going to ring for pizza.’
He looked at me. ‘Factory Special?’ he asked hopefully.
‘If you get in the shower now.’
He got up and went into the bathroom. I walked down the hallway and knocked gently at my parents’ bedroom.
‘Dad?’ I called in a low voice. Nothing. I pushed open the door and saw my dad in the bed, propped up on many pillows, his eyes three-quarters closed and his mouth slightly ajar. I pulled the stool over from Mum’s dressing table and sat down next to him.
‘Dad.’ I touched his hand that lay on the covers.
‘Mm!’ he startled, and opened his eyes, glassy and pink from his last dose of morphine.
‘Oh . . . It’s my darling girl.’ He smiled. ‘How was . . . ah . . . how was . . . ’ I knew what he was trying to say but I also knew he didn’t like it when I put words in for him. He’d get there eventually.
‘. . . rehearsal.Yes, how did it go?’
‘Fine, fine, we’re getting there. How was your day?’
‘Oh, well, Mummy and me, er. I had to have my blood test and um, we watched . . .
Sunday Arts
. . .’ He trailed off and stared down at the covers.
It wasn’t Sunday. They couldn’t have watched
Sunday Arts
. And lately he’d been referring to Mum as Mummy, as if I was a little girl again.
His eyes were three-quarters closed again. He’d kind of dozed off. I sat next to him, conscious of the terrible ache in my chest that comes from not crying. After a few minutes he opened his eyes again and continued. ‘Uh . . . something about Watergate and, um, make sure you stay calm and project your voice at all times. You have a lovely voice.’
He was gone again. I kissed his forehead and went to my room to change.
Despite the apprehension that had been curled away in my belly since the hug-of-death, I was actually having fun at school. Suddenly the social circle was wider than Daniel, Abigail and Lara, although they were still the core. Now we all stopped to chat with Liam’s group at lunch, and called hello to each other in the halls. Ffion and her best friend stopped being openly withering and now gave out smiles and greetings and little
Kiss Me Kate
in-jokes. I wasn’t fooled though. We weren’t friends, and I had a feeling we never would be.
Ffion was kind of beautiful. And even if she wasn’t really really beautiful, she was the star of the show and exuded a confidence in her position that performed the same function as beauty. She got to do the real acting. She and Riley. My part was silly really. Silly and supporting.
One lunchtime I walked past their group on the way to the canteen and I saw Ffion and Liam laughing about something. She put her head on his shoulder, sort of mock-crying, and he leaned his head on top of hers, mock-comforting her. I kept walking. If he was talking to anyone else, I’d have made eye contact or gone over and said hello. On my way back I kept my eyes fixed on the middle-distance, straight in front of me, but out of the corner of Cthee e my eye I became aware of some frantic movement. I looked over and saw Frank from Liam’s group waving at me with both hands and grinning broadly. The second I met his eye he looked relieved, as if he had accomplished a mission. I waved back dispiritedly and noticed that Liam was still talking to Ffion. Ensconced.
My mum’s best friend Sarah and her husband Graeme started coming over most evenings. They would cook a meal, help Paddy with his homework and do some housework, while Mum and I worked upstairs with Dad. Trying to get him to eat, trying to get him out of bed and over to his commode – it was no longer practical for us to get him all the way down the hall to the bathroom – getting him washed and into clean PJs. He was so thin now that it was more awkward than heavy when Mum and I put his arms around our shoulders and hoisted him out of bed. Mum was getting thin too. Her mouth was most often a grim line and her usually blonde hair had months of regrowth. At about 9:30 or so she and I would go downstairs and sit at the table, where Sarah would have served a meal. Sarah and Graeme would then go upstairs and sit with Dad while we ate. Or tried to eat. Dad had started saying crazy things at night, so Paddy wasn’t allowed in after the sun had gone down.
It’s strange, when I look back at that time, those evenings and weekends when my mum and I were looking after Dad was probably the most united my mum and I have ever been. United in our task, united in mostly grim silence, but moving and thinking as one.
‘You’re such a strength to your mother,’ Sarah said, more than once, as I descended the stairs late at night with an armful of soiled linen, rinsed a few patches in the laundry tub and pushed it all into the washing machine. I’d put on the wash cycle and then dash back upstairs to help Mum put clean linen on the bed. For once in our family life it was Paddy who was on the outer.
The nights got later and later, but strangely I wasn’t tired. I felt strong, invincible, ready for battle, with little need for sleep or food. Soaked with adrenaline. If I was home for one of Trisha or Dr Sue’s visits, they would talk to Mum and me about Dad, instead of just Mum. I was generally out of my school uniform, and I was losing a bit of flesh, especially on my face, which made me look older, and I guess they came to see me as . . . not a child.
Another medication was added to the syringe driver for night-time. It was called haloperidol and it was supposed to help with the night-time crazy talk and general agitation. My mum was getting more and more buggered. She insisted on continuing to sleep with Dad in the double bed, and he tossed and raved through the night. I could hear him from down the hall, but I still managed to drop off to sleep occasionally. I don’t know how, or if, my mother slept at all.
One concrete thing that changed was that I no longer handed in homework or assignments. I just didn’t have time. I went to class, listened, learned, went to rehearsal, came home, helped my mother. Everyone else handed in their homework, laid their assignments on the teacher’s desk or made vociferous excuses as to why they had not done so. Not me. I walked straight out and was never questioned. Instead, the teachers would shoot me tightlipped glances of sympathy. Mum or Ingrid or someone must have rung the school and told them to go easy on the little trooper.
One afternoon, Dad was sort of dozing, waking to sa C waandy crazy things and then dozing again. I sat next to him in the rocking chair and Mum was putting away some clothes in their built-in.
‘Will it take us long to get there?’ he asked my mother.
‘Where?’ She closed the wardrobe door.
‘To Broken Hill. I hope there’s a pool.’
Dad had moved to Broken Hill with his family when he was nine and his father got a job in a mine there. They lived there for two years.
He dozed again, and then looked up very suddenly, quite lucid.
‘When is my next chemo?’ he asked.
My tummy churned and I sat stock still.
‘Um . . . well, darling . . .’ Mum sat down next to him on the bed.
‘Or radio? Am I getting marked up again for more radiotherapy?’
‘No darling.You’re not well enough for any of that right now.’
He took this in.
‘When . . . ?’ he looked amazed. ‘When did it get this bad?’
Mum burst into terrible tears.
He looked at her, not quite sure what he was looking at.
I sat on the train platform at 7:20 a.m. one temperate Thursday. Sometimes I decided to have an alcohol-free day to give my liver a break (with varying degrees of success). Recently I had decided to occasionally have a iPod-free commute, so I didn’t forget about the sounds of the world, even the horrible ones.
On the train to work a few months previously I’d noticed that every single person in my carriage had headphones on. They are so handy for blocking out the sounds, and the presence, of the ubercrazy, or the pack of thirteen-year-old girls. But then I got to thinking about the . . . well, the alienation of us modern types and how much effort we put into sealing ourselves off, thanks to those little gadgets. And dammit sometimes I was going to make myself sit on that platform and listen to the
ke-chang ke-chang
of the train wheels passing over the sleepers, the compression brakes of semi-trailers hauling freight through suburbia, the international jet planes bringing home weary travellers to passionate embraces at Kingsford Smith Airport, the automated audio messages from City Rail telling me that my train has been cancelled or delayed, the crazy guy screaming back to his phantoms in Arabic, the group of junior high school boys who I wanted to dare, to
double dare
, to compose a sentence, any sentence, without using the words ‘fuck’, ‘cunt’ or ‘bra’. They couldn’t do it, for love nor money.
My dad wrote and taught about alienation in our modern incarnation of capitalism, ab F waant="out community building and social capital. He taught in the School of Social Work at my uni actually, although long before my time there. So a lot of my lecturers, and the older social workers I have encountered in the field, all get excited when they work out that I am John Yarkov’s daughter. And they feel sorry for me of course. Sorry for my loss. I must have been so young, they work out.
I was at the platform early because I’d woken at 5 a.m., and couldn’t go back to sleep. So I thought I might as well get on in before the day’s shenanigans started up and enter some stats on the shitty computer I shared with Nick, Gareth and Hannah. I liked entering the building in the quiet, being the first to switch on lights, considering the space without the ringing of telephones. I didn’t know exactly when it had started, but generally I’d been regarding the approaching working week or day with a leadening sense of ennui. But I perked up at the thought of seeing Nick, of sharing a space, of another day with him, of our talks on the milk crates. His affect had so much energy it injected me with energy. I wondered if everyone used him for that purpose, if it was exhausting for him to keep it up. Could it be a front? It would make sense for it to be a front.
The time before Nick came to work at Befftown is a bit of a blur to me. Some other nurse guy . . . Simon . . . used to sit in his cubicle. He was nice enough . . . his wife was having a baby . . . I think they were Christians . . . Then he applied for regrade to a higher level, which he was totally entitled to. Johanna blocked it and he left in a snit, for a much better paid job with a different health service. Then I took a holiday. Simon’s cubicle was empty when I left.
It was my first ever paid holiday. Three months after I had started at Befftown I took a fortnight off. Tim and I locked up the flat, flew to Ballina and drove to a resort in Lennox Head – near the scene of the original crime, i.e. the genesis of our union. For a week we ate, drank, swam, had sex, walked. It was lovely, if a bit windy.
And I was hung-over more often than was strictly necessary. Don’t know why I did that. It was harder to get work out of my head than I had envisioned, and I didn’t have to get up early, so alcohol was my default position.
The second week Tim returned to work and I was on my own in Sydney, pottering around the flat, driving to IKEA and taking walks along the Cooks River. I bought us a proper couch and arranged for the council to pick up the ancient fold-up futon we had been using. It was a really grown-up purchase, that couch. A couch for adults. And it felt like our first real joint purchase, although I put it on my credit card. We had bought the fridge together – but that had been last-minute ‘agh, we are moving into the flat next week and we have to have a fridge’ kind of unconsidered.
‘We can’t split up now . . . ’ I joked to Tim, when he sank onto the new couch for the first time. It was very comfy and solid. A base from which to build a life, that couch. That first night we sat entwined on it, watching
Spicks and Specks
.
‘“Careless Whisper”!’ I shouted, digging my fingers into Tim’s thigh. ‘“Killing Me Softly”! I am so good at this.’ I said between rounds.
‘You are babe, you are.’ H Karendse hugged me snugly around the waist and leaned his head on my shoulder.
‘“Living on a Prayer”! Oh my god, I got that in, what, a
microsecond
? I got that after the first note!’
Tim shook his head in admiration. Possibly ironic, but I didn’t care.
‘Hey, garcon,’ I said when the credits rolled, ‘bring me another beer,’ I kissed him, ‘in your underwear.’ He laughed.
‘I don’t know why I put up with you . . . um . . . you know . . .’
‘Ob
ject
ifying?’
‘
Objectifying
me,’ he pulled off his T-shirt, ‘the way you do.’
‘And the shorts, doll-face.’
A fresh beer was brought to me, and promptly forgotten about. Life was good. On the new couch.
I’ve often remembered that scene, and others like it, when I sat on that couch alone, on the edge of an unthinkable thought.
I returned to work the following Monday, blinking at how fast the holiday had gone and hoping that none of my clients had hit the fan in my absence. I sat down at my desk, looked with distaste at the pastiche of memos and post-it notes that had accumulated over the fortnight, and noticed what looked to be a shock of dreadlocks visible over the partition separating my cubicle from the now-departed Simon’s.
Then they moved. Upwards. And a face appeared.
‘Hello there! I’m Nick! I’m new!’ His default mode was always to speak in exclamations. It wasn’t until we got to know each other better that he dropped them.The face was one big smile, with blue eyes and healthy-looking white teeth. A guy a couple of years older than me, I reckoned, still well-shy of thirty, with light-brown dreadlocks held back by a black cotton band and a man-necklace made of wooden beads. He wore a short-sleeved plain white shirt, like a junior-school boy, or my Year Seven geography teacher, Mr Fasch.
‘I’m—’
‘You’re Holly and you’ve been on holiday! How was Lennox Head?’
‘It was lovely, thank you, er, Nick. You seem to have settled in well.’
‘Yeah, well Tessa and Kristo have mainly been the ones showing me the ropes. They’re like the parents I always wanted.’
I stared at him. ‘They are aren’t they?’ I gestured to all the messages in my desk. ‘Anything big happen while I was away?’
‘Well . . . I helped out with your case-list last week . . . and all was pretty much settled . . . except, er . . . you know that lady . . . the bipolar lady who got fired from the Department of Education for, um . . . stuff . . . ? Ktuf . #8217; ‘Leanne McCarthy.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh god, what happened to her?’
‘Uuuuum—’
‘Is she dead?’
‘No! No she’s not dead. She’s just um . . . She took a bit of an overdose last week . . . quite a big one . . . all the lithium she had and some valium . . . ’
‘Christ.’
‘But luckily she called herself an ambulance in time and was admitted to ICU, and the good news is that she’s being extubated today!’
‘Oh. Well . . . that is good news.’
I leaned heavily back in my chair. Nick gave me a moment to consider Leanne’s (latest) close shave, before he stood up.
‘Well, I’ve just had my first tutorial on how to work the coffee machine, so I’m going to go and put some on.’
‘Oh . . . thank you . . . I could use . . . something.’
‘Reckon we all could.’ That grin. He offered his hand over the partition. ‘Good to meet you, Holly.’
‘Likewise.’ I shook it. It was warm, and although he made an effort not to crush me, I could feel that his hand, and arm, were very strong.
Left to my own devices I grabbed a pen and paper and accessed my voicemail messages, including one from Leanne McCarthy one week previously, telling me that I had failed her and that she was going to kill herself because
I wasn’t there for her when she needed me
. I didn’t write that one down.
Nick’s story was kind of an interesting one. He told it to me in dribs and drabs, in our alcove, on the train, in the work cars while driving to the ’hood or waiting for police, walking up to Habib’s to get lunch. And later, in pubs, little Vietnamese restaurants, by the river, and on the rooftop of the multi-storey car park next to Marrickville Station. His mum had left his dad when Nick was a baby. The only explanation she had ever given Nick was ‘your father didn’t deserve to be a part your life.’ Nick was born at Campbelltown Hospital, near where his mum’s parents lived. His mum was only twenty when she had him, and determined not to let motherhood cramp her style. He had grown up all over the shop with stints in Brisbane, Melbourne, London . . . a hippie commune near Byron Bay . . . before moving back to Appin where they had stayed for Nick’s secondary schooling.
‘Where’s Appin?’ I’d asked.
‘Case in point,’ he grimaced.
‘No, seriously, where is it?’
‘Just outside of Sydney. South west. “Semi-rural”.’
Must have been kind of intense, just him and his mum all those years. Lots of messy love affairs on Mum’s part, tears, make-up stains, mussed-up hair. He was very cagey about how they get on now. She still lived in Appin, by herself, although there was a Prize Fuckwit who showed up now and again. Nick seemed quite dismissive of her and angry, too, about how his childhood panned out. It’s the easiest thing in the world, isn’t it, judging your mother? He had pretty much flunked his HSC, lost a few years to pot along with many of his ‘semi-rural’ compadres, and then sobered up enough to enrol in the Bachelor of Nursing course offered by the University of Western Sydney. It was taught at the Campbelltown campus, a bingo for an Appin lad.
In modern times, he lived in Marrickville, just one suburb over from me and Tim, in a cheerless flat of blonde brick, at the very back of the block. There was a flatmate, Terry, who was an amalgam of every geek stereotype known to man. Pale, weedy, quiet, long hair in a ponytail, glasses, spent a lot of time on the computer, worked in statistics.
‘How did you manage to hook up with him?’ I asked, mystified, after meeting him for the first time.
‘We go back,’ explained Nick. ‘It’s an Appin thing.’
I asked him early-on if he had a girlfriend.
‘No . . . not really. No Jill to my Jack.’
‘Jack and Jill were brother and sister, weren’t they?’
‘No.’
‘I think they were.’
‘I really don’t think it specifies.
I
personally think that Jack and Jill were . . . you know . . . on a wavelength with each other. And I used their example by way of illustrating that when I skip up the hill to fetch a pail of water, I go on my own. And when I fall down and break my crown . . . there’s no one to administer vinegar and brown paper.’
So apparently no girlfriend, but often when we walked down King Street in Newtown together, he’d dodge behind me upon seeing some chick or other with Uma-Thurman-in-
Pulp-Fiction
hair, or dreadlocks swinging down past her ass, who he had rooted and not called.
High verbal IQ. That’s what I loved about Nick immediately and forever. Our minds went to very similar places, eros crystallised throughout every conversation as a matter of course.
I felt paralysed in my chair that morning. Why had I woken at 5 a.m. feeling restless and tired at the same time? I sat quietly at my desk until people started to trickle in. Johanna was screeching from the meeting room,
where
was everyone, it was gone
quarter to nine
, handover should have already
started
. And so forth.
I just couldn’t bring myself to get up and go in to listen to the day’s sad stories, the folks who had fallen upon the thorns of life and wer K liine,e bleeding.
‘
Thirty seconds,
’ Johanna shouted.
People stirred at her tone, and got to their feet, even Nick. He walked around to my side of the partition and looked at me slumped in my chair.
‘What gives, bella?’ he asked.
I shrugged. ‘I just can’t do it today.’
‘This isn’t you . . . usually you’re in there at 8:40, shuffling papers all Hollier-than-thou, tut-tutting everyone else for being late.’
‘I can’t do it, Captain. I don’t have the power.’
‘Come on . . . What are your legs?’
I immediately got that he was quoting
Gallipoli
.
‘Steel springs . . . ’ I said, without much conviction.
‘What are they going to do?’ he barked.
‘They’re going to hurl me down the track.’ I sat up in my seat.
‘How fast can you run?’
‘As fast as a leopard.’
He pulled me to my feet.
‘How fast are you
going
to run?’
‘As fast as a leopard!’
‘Well! Let’s see you do it then!’
He clapped his hands, and I turned and jogged to the meeting room.
That became one of our little catch-cries, whenever either of us needed a little inspiration or motivation at work, or was too drunk or drug affected to move.
‘
What are your legs?!
’ Try it on yourself. It’s strangely motivating.
