In Bed with Jocasta (9 page)

W
e all know that turning forty poses its own challenges. But, when my turn comes, I don’t need a birth certificate to confirm the event. In the weeks leading up to this, I’ve already clocked up forty reasons to know I’ve turned forty.

1. I find myself no longer thinking about sex all the time, only once every 12.7 seconds.
   

2. I start buying Lite White.
   

3. When choosing a film, I base the decision not on the director, the star, or the writer, but on which cinema has the most comfortable seats.
   

4. For the first time since I was five years old, my age and my pants size have become alarmingly similar.
   

5. Forget the policemen looking young. That new spokeswoman for the Combined Pensioners Association looks like a real goer.
   

6. I catch myself using the phrase, ‘young people today’.
   

7. I see a friend’s garden and discover, as if by magic, that I have The Knowledge: the hedge on the left is Box; on the right, Murraya.
   

8. Passing thought: ‘That Malcolm Fraser seems a reasonable person.’
   

9. I have a long discussion with friends about their kitchen benchtops.
   

10. I make the change to Lite Cheese.
    

11. I ring a company and order a kitchen-benchtop pamphlet.
    

12. I notice that the music on the easy-listening radio station has suddenly improved, and they’re now playing what I judge to be ‘really up-to-date music’.
    

13. So are the Musak people.
    

14. I start buying Lite Biscuits.
    

15. I stop tucking in my shirts, letting them hang out, in the hope that someone might mistake The Belly for a chance billow of fabric. I realise this is but one short step from the Kaftan.
    

16. The pamphlet on benchtops arrives and I take it to bed instead of a novel.
    

17. I start buying Lite Ham.
    

18. I discover I have finally forgotten everything I learnt at school, except for the adiabatic lapse rate (3.3 degrees per 1000 feet) and the fact that guys with red hair make dirty fighters.
    

19. I realise, in the last month, I’ve painted four separate items in Brunswick Green.
    

20. I discover the insolent youngster hanging around the doctor’s surgery is in fact the doctor.
    

21. And he wants to do
    what?
    

22. I buy a book about garden compost.
    

23. Passing thought: ‘I must get a file together so I can keep warranties and receipts all in one place.’
    

24. I get inordinately upset if I miss the start of the 7.00 a.m. radio news, as if national security is dependent on my being completely briefed on public affairs.
    

25. I find myself becoming deeply annoyed when someone uses ‘disinterested’ when they mean ‘uninterested’.
    

26. Batboy beats me at tennis.
    

27. I approach heavy lifting around the house with a sense not of how much I have to prove, but how much I have to lose.
    

28. Batboy beats me at running.
    

29. I become more patient. And, occasionally, a patient.
    

30. The thing we have in a joint is no longer called ‘marijuana’. It’s called arthritis.
    

31. I start buying Lite Ice Cream.
    

32. I am alarmed to discover that someone’s decided to print the instructions on the Panadol bottle in increasingly smaller type-sizes.
    

33. The benchtop company rings and I choose the second-cheapest product, rather than the cheapest.
    

34. I preface political arguments by saying ‘I think there’s a lot of truth in what you’re saying’, and actually mean it.
    

35. I buy Lite Jam.
    

36. A single game of soccer leaves me unable to walk until at least the next World Cup.
    

37. For the first time, my annual dentistry bill exceeds my combined spending on clothes and CDs.
    

38. I describe a sixty-year-old friend as ‘middle-aged’.
    

39. The benchtops arrive, together with a ‘care’ booklet. I take it to bed to read, but fall asleep during the first page.
    

40. I consider having a Saturday night birthday bash, but realise this may involve missing
    The Bill.
    Apparently, tonight the boss has a terrible argument with DCI Jack Meadows!
    

W
e’re at the Clown and Fairy Party Centre and things are about to turn nasty. The mother of the birthday girl is standing at the counter, holding her receipt threateningly, a steely look on her face. ‘Exactly how,’ she asks the man behind the counter, ‘could you lose the booking?’

The receipt certainly shows a booking has been made. For precisely this time. And for a full fairy party (‘Cake, stories and games — all with a real fairy! Just drop off the kids — and we’ll do the rest!!’).

Furthermore, the receipt, which the mother is now waving with a series of angry jerking motions, shows the party will be attended by fifteen girls and one boy.

That one boy is The Space Cadet, who now stands close to my side, his suspicions growing, as the room fills with little girl fairies, each of them wearing their own body-weight in tulle.

The Space Cadet, by contrast, is wearing his best outfit — blue check lumberjack shirt, navy blue ‘kerchief, black cowboy boots, and hair gelled up to resemble that of his favourite singer, Elvis. In the sea of pink tulle, he certainly stands out.

Suddenly, there’s a surge of fairies towards the locked door of the fairy cave, and a bit of shoving. The sparkly wings are tangling and bending; the tulle compressing like a coiled spring. If all of them breathe out at once, some fairies may well fly.

With the party delayed, the mood among the fairies is darkening. I fear it can’t be long before the wands come out. A tremble of fear runs through The Space Cadet’s small body.

Back at the counter, the manager is still trying to explain how he lost the booking. Foolishly, he attempts the truculent response. ‘Look, lady,’ he says to my friend, the mother of the birthday girl, and momentarily I feel sorry for him. The last guy to say ‘Look, lady’ to Diana is now successfully employed as Chief Eunuch to the Sultan of Dubai.

Oblivious, he stumbles on: ‘What am I meant to do? Even if I admit I’ve stuffed up, how can I suddenly come up with a bloody fairy? At 10.00 a.m. on a Sunday!’

He gives a little wink, and attempts a sort of greasy, unctuous smile. ‘I mean, lady, I can’t just wave a magic wand.’

The manager of the Clown and Fairy Party Centre may well believe that humour is the best way to diffuse a threatening situation. Isn’t it amazing just how wrong a bloke can be.

Fresh waves of fairies are now entering the shop, part of a second party which, it emerges, this bloke’s also forgotten to book. There are now thirty-six fairies packed into the corridor in front of the fairy’s magic cave — all of them covered in tulle, their sparkly garlands aquiver.

Thirty-six girls, plus The Space Cadet, who’s now sitting sullenly on a polystyrene toadstool, glancing occasionally towards me — his big eyes full of reproach. The question ‘How could you do this to me?’ springs to mind.

There are now two enraged mothers at the counter. And a manager whose eyes are full of fear. He might not be able to find a fairy in a hurry, but he’s facing a terrifying oversupply of ogres.

‘Look, pal,’ says my friend, stabbing her receipt towards the manager’s face, ‘you find a fairy, a real magic fairy, and find one fast.’

‘Otherwise,’ chimes in the other mother, producing her daughter’s large, spiked wand. ‘I’m sure I could make
this
disappear.’

A tremor passes across the manager’s face. ‘Well,’ he concedes, with some uncertainty, ‘I suppose we could ring Tracey.’

It takes an hour for Tracey to appear — an hour in which the thirty-six little girl fairies work their own vengeful magic on the Clown and Fairy Party Centre, while The Space Cadet sensibly creeps ever lower behind his toadstool.

But finally Tracey makes it — and in so doing makes it abundantly clear why she’s not her manager’s first option. The night before, it appears, Tracey has been making magic in her own special way. As fairies go, she’s had a pretty big night, with — from the look of things — liberal supplies of fairy dust.

‘Ahhh, g’day kids,’ says Trace, her eyes a most magical shade of red. The little girls look up, full of innocent hope, but Trace’s bleary eyes instead settle on The Space Cadet, the cloud of confusion suddenly clearing from her mind.

‘Bugger me, it’s Elvis. Hey, come here, pal.’

And so The Space Cadet slips off his magic toadstool, and comes to sit on Trace’s lap, there to luxuriate in her confusion. And to enjoy that morning’s
particularly
wild fairy stories.

As fairy parties go, it was one of the best.

T
he Space Cadet, as always, has a teenage girl at his beck and call: he is sitting on our young friend’s shoulders, being carried down to the beach. I’m on the other side of the road, walking with Batboy and Jocasta, and I can’t stop myself saying something. Putting on a bad southern American accent, I yell across the road: ‘You know you’ll spoil that boy — spoil him rotten.’

The only problem: just as I yell it out, a car is slowly motoring past. A woman is driving. There’s a child in the back. Her window is open. She thinks I’m talking to her.

Coming to a halt, and genuinely baffled, she says: ‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’ I stammer an excuse. I was just talking to my friend. The one, um, over there.

By now, though, there is no-one over there. The lady shakes her head, saddened by the proliferation of insane people since community housing policies were introduced. And then she drives off. Which is when I notice Batboy, standing by my side. He is rigid with embarrassment.

He’s stock still, staring intently at the ground, and has swivelled his shoulders away from me. His body language says it all: ‘I’m just waiting here to cross the road. The loud fat man? Never seen him before in my life.’

Of course, every child thinks they’ve got the world’s most embarrassing father. But Batboy’s sure of it.

Eventually he glances up and tells me what he thinks. ‘Oh, Dad,’ he says, but the ‘dad’ is somewhat elongated. ‘Daaaaaaaaaaad.’ It sounds half-way between a simple reproach and the sort of keening you might get at an African funeral.

The reason we’re going to the beach is to see an Aboriginal dance troupe who are performing on the sand. And, guess what? Halfway through their act they call for volunteers from the audience. Ever game, I struggle to my feet. And as I do, I notice Batboy’s face. He is agog. He cannot believe it.
Twice
in one day.

This time he almost weeps it. ‘Oh, Daaaaaaad.’

As it happens, the Aboriginal dancers only get two responses to their kind request for volunteers. There’s me. And a three-year-old boy.

We are being taught to do the Emu dance, which involves parading around the beach wobbling our bottoms, and occasionally pecking at the sand. After we’ve pecked, we’re also meant to do this little wiggle to signify the seed passing down the Emu’s long throat — an action which, I must say, I perform with some considerable flamboyance. As does the three-year-old.

By the time I’m finished, Batboy has his hands over his eyes. Jocasta is saying to him: ‘Just relax. No-one knows it’s your father. We’ll pretend we just happen to be sitting here.’

They are both angled away, pretending to look elsewhere. I realise there’s something about this reaction that I quite like. Finally I figure it: suddenly I feel so wonderfully eccentric. Here I am: a mortgage man with greying temples, yet through the baffled eyes of my son I remain one of the most bizarre and unconventional people in the land.

Here is the wonderful egalitarianism of it: to each of our children, we are it. The bee’s knees. The ultimate. Each of us gets the award: The World’s
Most
Embarrassing Parent.

A habit of singing when walking past the school gates. An old car which belches on its way to the shops. A tendency to wear home-made drawstring pants to the end-of-year-concert. Not big things. But enough, when viewed through our children’s humiliated eyes, to turn each of us into the Che Guevara of the Suburbs.

We go home. Sunday night. Homework to be done. And Batboy’s not keen.

‘Do your homework, or else.’

‘Or else, what,’ he says.

Suddenly the idea strikes. ‘The Emu dance. I think your friends might like to see it. Especially the wiggle when I swallow the seed.’

He smiles, knowing I’m joking, and then looks at me again. He
thinks
I’m joking. But maybe he’ll do his homework anyway. When you’re son to the world’s absolutely, incontrovertibly
most
embarrassing parent, you can never be too cautious.

E
very summer, whether you head inland or up the coast, some things seem to stay the same. Here are just some of the strange laws of holiday life.

1. The Bowling Club Restaurant is Always Chinese. What’s the story? What exactly is the connection between the game of lawn bowls and the cuisine of southern China? Why not a Thai or Indian place? Why not a cook-your-own-steak joint? And exactly when did the secretary-managers of Australia sign the secret deal that would condemn their members and guests to an unrelieved diet of sweet and sour pork?
   

2. The Manager of the Local Council Pool is Always a Complete Bastard. Give a man a loudspeaker system, a whistle, and long-term exposure to hundreds of small children, and what do you expect? Although we must admit it: the more fascist the manager, the cleaner and more sparkling his pool.
   

3. The Local Butcher is Always Friendly and Funny. Big town, small town, coast or inland. Who knows the reason? Is it the hormones in the beef? Or that only he knows how much meat extender is going into his sausages?
   

4. There is No Town in Australia Which Does Not Claim to be Annual Winner of the National Tidy Town Competition. And virtually no pub which isn’t ‘historic’.
   

5. Thirty Per Cent of Any Summer Holiday Is Spent Trying to Find the Sun-screen. By all means, take ten tubes. Fill the boot with them. By Day Two they will all be missing. Ditto toothbrushes. Favourite Bears. The car keys.
   

6. The Size of the Motel Pool is in Inverse Proportion to the Size of the Sign Advertising the Pool. Just as: the size of the helpings in the motel restaurant is in inverse proportion to the number of descriptive adjectives on the menu.
   

7. The Tarmac Gives Over to Dirt Just After You’ve Passed the Property of the Local Mayor.
   

8. Every town must have a claim to fame. There are two Gateways to the Warrumbungles, three Sweet Corn Capitals of Australia, ten Homes to the State’s Tallest Tree, and — way out west, over the great artesian basin — we even visited the Home of the World’s Largest Bore. What we need is a new generation of signs: ‘Welcome to Ordinarytown — Home to the State’s Most Spurious Claim.’
   

9. The tent will never go back into the tent bag. The milk always falls over in the Esky. There’s a rock under each tent peg. There’s a natural watercourse beneath your sleeping bag. Etc., etc.
   

10. The Availability of Fish Decreases as You Get Closer to the Coast. We bought terrific fresh flathead in Tamworth, and then spent a week by the sea eating beef hamburgers (presumably trucked in from the Western Plains). Who needs to be well-travelled when your food is?
    

11. The Dirtier the Truck Stop, the Better the Hamburgers.
    

12. The More Poetic the Name of the Town, the More Dreary it Will Be. Every holiday we spend hours driving up side roads, intoxicated by the allure of the names on the map. Windy Glen. Sassafras. River Bend. They are always ugly. Or nonexistent. By contrast, the really beautiful joints are all called things like Coalmine or Abattoirville. Consider the example of Sydney’s most beautiful waterway: Pittwater. Why don’t they just call it Cesspit and be done with it?
    

13. The Map Makers of Inland Australia Have a Rich Fantasy Life. Towns with big dots on the map that don’t exist. Large rivers, traced in blue, that haven’t flowed for decades. Tourist Attractions which last attracted someone in the late 1950s.
    

14. The More Distant the Beach, the More Likely You Are to Find Your Towel or Caravan Parked Next to Someone You Know. In my case: my boss. Frankly, I was hoping to keep the sight of my new pink rash-vest between me and my family. ‘Just one picture, for the staff notice-board,’ she said, producing the camera.