Portable Curiosities (10 page)

Ralph always wore a white shirt for his cover shots. He never wore anything but a white shirt because a very pretty stylist with good legs had once said that no, she didn't want to have a drink with him but yes, a white shirt would bring out his blue eyes. After that day, Ralph never deviated from white, even in daily life. In fact, he discarded his entire shirt collection, replacing it with fourteen identical white shirts that he wore on a fortnightly cycle.

Ralph was also of the opinion that the intense blue of his eyes was further enhanced in each cover shot by his oceanic surroundings.

‘Blue eyes and a white shirt by a blue sea,' Ralph would say to the photographer. ‘It's a win-win combo.'

It was always the same photographer who took Ralph's cover shots. To her dismay, she couldn't seem to escape Ralph-related assignments. She would snap away as Ralph talked about his win-win combo, thinking it was surely a win-win-win combo but reminding herself that nowhere in the brief was she required to concern herself with the correction of fools.

Ralph made it to the cover of
TIME
at least once a year. He took to having each new cover framed in platinum and hung alongside the others in a row that stretched down the hallway of his favourite house.

To commemorate each new addition to the collection, he would put the family dog on a leash and sprint the winding streets to the top of the cliff in his suburb.

At the peak, with sweat gathering over his top lip and on his temples, Ralph would look out over the ocean and make a strange shrill call and beat his chest.

‘Conquered Time yet again,' Ralph would say to the dog, before yanking the leash in the direction of home.

*

Reports sent home from Two's primary school said that, although he was a Gifted and Talented Individual, he Lacked Focus. He was known to talk incessantly about topics unrelated to the curriculum, such as the poetry of Coleridge, whose rhyme about the mariner, one of the reports said, did not need to be written out in full on a poster that was supposed to explain the meaning of Gross Domestic Product.

At home, Two was performing even worse. He spent every spare hour reading books on obscure topics like lotus cultivation in Asia. He was also a great fan of treatises by pop philosophers who pondered the significance of the Melting Moment in the life of the modern individual.

When Ralph asked Two to draw up his own life checklist, Two wrote it in pink crayon on the back of a failed test on complex numbers. His list included making a terrarium, learning how to whistle with his fingers, and putting his hand into the Mouth of Truth without having it bitten off.

‘What sort of loser list is this?' asked Ralph.

Two had brought a plate of Melting Moments as a visual aid to enhance communication with Ralph during their checklist meeting, which he knew would be difficult territory. Earlier that day, Two had snooped around One's desk while she was out swimming laps and had discovered that her list was typed, printed and laminated, just like Ralph's, and included stellar items such as
World Record for Distance Swum from Australia.

So when Ralph opened with that loser question, Two was well prepared to defend himself. He took a deep breath and began what he had rehearsed.

‘The reason I brought these biscuits was to show you that—'

But Ralph had already inhaled them all, like a monster out of a picture book.

‘Yum yum,' went Ralph. ‘Munch, munch.'

*

‘This girl's a magician.' Ralph was leaning over his PA's desk, watching her type. He winked. ‘I do love magic.'

Two wondered what sort of magic Ralph was talking about. Ralph had brought Two to company headquarters for the day to show him what he could become if he just had some focus. Two had been trailing after Ralph all morning, reading a book that had a black and white photo on the cover, of an old man with a white beard and round glasses, dressed in a woollen suit.

‘This is Two,' Ralph said, introducing him to the senior managers, the managers, the graduates, the secretaries, the interns, the computers and the air-purifying pot plants. A pair of secretaries squealed over Two and pinched his cheeks, their fingers and thumbs straightened like tweezers so that their aggressive manicures wouldn't leave marks on his virgin skin.

‘Hiya, Two,' they said in unison.

‘Hi,' said Two, looking up from Freud and wondering how any field of endeavour could involve so many boring-looking people in such boring-looking clothes. He wondered why they pretended to be so boring when, most likely, they were all making sweet magic in the stationery room after hours, ties flung over shoulders, manicures up against the frosted glass of the door, with the cupboards and the notepads and the highlighters and paperclips and staplers and coloured Post-its and packets of alphabetical tab dividers all jolting in time with every thrust.

After work, Ralph stood in the underground car park flicking through emails on his BlackBerry while his newest employee packed folders into the boot of Ralph's car.

The new addition to Ralph's team was in his first week of induction. His official function at the company was to be available full-time as Ralph's stand-in whenever Ralph was out of the office. Ralph liked to call this employee his ‘personal avatar'. The avatar was a handsome, unintimidating, out-of-work actor who was to be referred to as Razza in order to cultivate the impression that there was a more approachable, and indeed even buddy-like, dimension to Ralph's personality, particularly when he was not present.

Although it was technically inappropriate for them to be in the same room at the same time, Ralph was finding Razza to be of additional use as a companion in the running of unavoidable errands and in the parenting of unavoidable children.

While gazing at his new hire with a feeling of self-admiration, Ralph noticed Two shuffling around the car park, still engrossed in his book. The boy looked up and saw the disappointment in his father's eyes.

‘Reading and walking,' said Two. ‘I'm multitasking.'

‘God Almighty,' said Ralph. ‘Put that book down and give Razza a hand.'

‘Ralph?' Two peered at his father through chipped tortoiseshell glasses that occupied half his face. Ralph thought the glasses were ridiculous. Two had insisted on having the biggest lenses available so he could roll his eyes right around his field of vision and be able to see everything in focus. Ralph and the optometrist had suggested that Two wear sleeker glasses like the kids at school but Two wouldn't have anything to do with a short-sighted idea like that.

‘Ralph!' Two said again.

‘What?'

‘Would you say that your first sexual impulse was towards your mother?'

‘Get in the car,' said Ralph.

Ralph's car was a Lotus. Two wondered why it was called a Lotus if it didn't look or smell or sound like a flower, or sit in a pond all day.

The Lotus was British racing green. It had two yellow stripes on top, running from front to back. Two thought it looked like a sled had run over a flock of canaries in a forest clearing.

‘Why do you have a racing car?' asked Two. ‘There aren't any autobahns around.'

Ralph huffed and sighed.

‘I have a Roadster, Two, because I want to know I can outdrive a cyclone if the occasion ever calls for it. We are cyclone-ready. We are a cyclone-ready family.'

‘But cyclones never come here,' said Two. ‘If we lived in Kansas, on the other hand, like Dorothy—'

‘We are not in Kansas. We are not Dorothy. We are cyclone-ready.' Ralph was quite taken with how his succinct, on-message delivery of these facts incorporated the repetition of the inclusive ‘we'. He realised that this approach might also prove useful in his next company-wide video message, during which he would unveil the exceptionally inclusive new redundancy program.

‘The other reason we have a fast car,' said Ralph, ‘is that life is about position. The number of cars you have in your rear-vision mirror is the number of suckers you are beating at any given moment in the race.'

To demonstrate his point, he revved the engine and wove in and out of traffic with just one hand on the steering wheel, overtaking three cars at a time, even on the bends.

Two gripped the sides of his seat and vomited his lunch into his lap.

I am pondering
, wrote Two in his diary that night,
how these dysfunctional father–son dynamics will affect my psychological wellbeing later in life
. He tapped the end of his pencil against his bottom lip and contemplated methods for minimising the damage.

After an intense brainstorm, involving an entire packet of connector pens, Two concluded that the key to improving his relationship with his father must be to engineer some sort of sentimental connection over a common interest, or, at the very least, an interest of Ralph's that Two could pretend to share.

Pleased with his progress, the budding therapist closed his diary, slid it under his pillow and had a nightmare that Ralph was teaching him to drive. Two was cross-eyed the whole time. He couldn't see straight through the bending, swerving, groaning traffic.

*

‘Smell it,' said Two, fanning a deck of cards under Ralph's nose. ‘Isn't it good?'

Ralph jerked his head away. He was on the couch, reviewing on his laptop a spreadsheet Razza had prepared, which forecasted the future growth of a company belonging to an eccentric mining magnate who was notorious for his obsession with steamrollers. Ralph had been toying with the idea of getting into the mining game and Razza, hoping to impress his new boss, had created the spreadsheet off his own bat. Apparently the out-of-work actor was not just handsome but also a commerce graduate with a credit average.

‘Take any card,' said Two. ‘Any card at all.'

Ralph pulled one from the proffered spread, with his eyes still fixed on the screen.

‘Which one is it?'

‘What?' said Ralph, trying to delete a row.

‘Which card do you have?'

Ralph flipped it over.

‘Jack of hearts.'

Two grinned. ‘And what was the card you got before?'

‘Honestly, Two, I don't remember.'

‘Come on.
The jack of heart
s!
The exact same card!'

‘Fuck.' Ralph had accidentally changed a formula that had altered all the numbers in column C. ‘Where's that fucking PA when you need her? Oh, that's right. Off in the Bahamas personally assisting some wanker in bed. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.'

‘See, Ralph?' said Two, getting the feeling that Ralph's attention was not entirely on the magical proceedings at hand. ‘Wasn't that amazing?'

‘I don't have time for idiot tricks,' said Ralph, hunched over the laptop and clicking madly. ‘Tell you what would be magic? If you fixed this fucking spreadsheet.'

Two sat on the verandah. He looked at the two-headed jack of hearts and that blow-dried golden hair. The jack, drawn in profile, was looking across at a red heart. He had a blue eyebrow, a blue nose, a blue moustache and a blue mouth. His sad blue eye had a blue line under it. He looked tired.

Two rotated the card so he could see the jack's opposite head, which still looked sad. He had the same eternal expression, whichever way you looked at him.

Two took a black texta from his shirt pocket. He wrote
RALPH IS A FUCK FUCK FUCK
over the two faces. Then he pushed the card into the soil of a potted geranium so that one sad head remained upright, staring at the front door, and the other was buried, suffocating in the dirt under the weight of its better half.

*

There was a new boy in Year Five called Stefan.

‘Not my real name,' he said as he shook Two's hand. They were sitting on a low brick wall at recess watching the other kids running around and squealing. ‘I'm in a witness protection program.'

‘Oh,' said Two.

Stefan pushed up his sleeve, exposing a freckled arm. ‘A gang did this to me. Homemade tattoo gun.'

The tattoo in question looked a lot like a scribble. It also looked a lot like it had been done in the last five minutes with a blue ballpoint Kilometrico pen.

‘So what are you in here for?' asked Stefan.

‘Eternity,' said Two.

‘You're smart. What does your dad do?'

‘Ralph buys and sells companies that buy and sell companies.'

‘Impressive.'

‘Brutal,' said Two. ‘But, as Ralph always says: “Life is brutal, why fight it?”'

‘I don't know anyone who says that,' said Stefan.

‘What does your dad do?'

‘I'm an orphan.' Stefan lifted part of a scab on his knee and examined the raw pink underneath.

‘I'm sorry,' said Two.

‘My parents fell to their deaths in a freak hang-gliding accident on their ninth anniversary off the coast of Rio de Janeiro.'

Two's eyes had already started to water.

‘Why are you crying?' asked Stefan.

‘I can't help it,' said Two. ‘Ralph says I'm a bleeding heart.'

Two cried and cried, thinking of the constant haemorrhaging of his heart, the inherent unfairness of life, the blue sky, the wayward gliding and the freaky but fatal coast of Rio.

That night, over dinner, One said to Two:

‘That new kid, Stefan. His dad does the same thing as Ralph. Buys and sells companies that buy and sell companies.'

‘Who told you that?'

‘He did.'

‘Same as Ralph, eh?'

Two narrowed his red eyes and stemmed the bleeding inside his chest.

The next morning, Two lined up behind Stefan for rollcall on the bitumen netball court.

‘Hey,' said Two. ‘Heard you resurrected your dad.'

‘What?'

‘Look,' said Two, ‘I don't know what trauma came to pass in your early childhood but you're hired.'

The final agreement was five marbles a day.