Portable Curiosities (11 page)

‘The big clear ones with the swirls inside,' said Stefan. ‘Or it's no deal.'

‘What do you take me for?' said Two. ‘I'm not the sort to bargain for quality.'

It was only when they were halfway to Narrabeen on a father–son daytrip strongly recommended by the school counsellor that Ralph noticed a duplicate boy in his rear-view mirror. He pulled the Lotus over to the side of the road.

‘Who's this?'

‘My avatar,' said Two. ‘In training.'

Two II, formerly known as Stefan, grinned at Ralph, thinking only of his imminent wealth: five marbles for the day and two marbles' holiday loading.

‘Gnarly,' said Razza, in keeping with the day's beach theme.

Ralph made a mental note on his mental clipboard to address this inappropriate use of language in Razza's annual performance review.

Razza was assigned the task of teaching Two how to fish.

‘Don't worry, I'm right behind you,' he said, as Two stepped onto the narrow concrete wall leading out to the rock shelf.

Once they were there, Razza produced a lunchbox full of live worms.

‘Let's teach you how to hook one of these.'

The thought of even touching a worm turned Razza's stomach but he put on his best fishing face, took one of the squirming things and layered it onto the hook. Two watched the creature twist and turn – a length of straining, suffering muscle.

‘I feel sick,' said Two, interrupting Razza's improvised explanation of the efficiency of using live, rather than plastic, bait.

‘Shit,' said Razza.

‘I really, really feel sick,' said Two.

‘Here.' Razza handed him the yellow bucket meant for the fish.

Two vomited into it. But the acid taste in his mouth didn't bother him because Razza's hand was on his elbow and Razza's voice was saying softly in his ear:

‘Hey, little fella. Let's get you cleaned up.'

Later, the two went for a gentle walk along the beach. They picked their way through dead bluebottles to the edge of the water and stood staring out at the horizon.

Each time the waves drew back, Two felt the sand pulling away from under his feet. He half-panicked that the sand would suck him right under the ocean and drown him. But he knew it wasn't going to happen that day because Razza was there.

‘I like you, Razza,' said Two. ‘More than Ralph.'

‘Gnarly,' said Razza, feeling that less was more in playing this beach scene.

Having taken over operations at the rock shelf, Ralph was reeling in a jewfish.

‘I'll deal with it,' said Two II. He unhooked it, took it by the tail and bashed its brains out on the rocks.

‘Unorthodox,' said Ralph, ‘but shows initiative.'

Two II shrugged. ‘Life is brutal. Why fight it?'

Ralph ruffled the hair of the duplicate child and decided that this was a boy he had the right skill set to raise. Two II smiled up at him.

‘Your father must be proud of you,' said Ralph.

‘My real dad's a drug lord,' said Two II. ‘He'd give me up for a bag of crack.'

‘People should have licences to have children,' Ralph said and cast his line back into the sea.

The sun was setting. Two was crouched in the sand with his camera, looking for a nice way to frame the view, when he noticed Razza and Two II within shot.

They were far off in the distance, walking down the beach. Razza was ruffling Two II's hair and resting his hand on the boy's shoulder – a perfect moment between avatar father and avatar son.

Two let the camera drop around his neck. He ruffled his own hair and wondered why it wasn't innately lovable. After all, it was the same honey colour as Stefan's and dropped over his eyes in the same way. Yet it wasn't loved, thought Two, not even by a faux father who'd been hired to faux love him.

Ralph was standing next to Two, seeing what he was seeing, both of them unable to look away from the pair.

‘I want to go home to Lola,' said Two, after a while.

‘We're going,' said Ralph. ‘Don't you worry about that.'

Two was no fool. He knew in his gut that if Razza's heart belonged to another, he would have to take swift and decisive action.

That night, in the semi-darkness of Two II's parents' front lawn, with the verandah light illuminating the boys' honey-coloured hair, Two made his smirking avatar redundant, citing budget cuts due to slowing growth in the marble economy.

*

As soon as Stefan's very alive, very law-abiding parents had retracted all allegations of kidnapping against Ralph, and life had returned to normal, Ralph decided it would be a good time to take stock of all he had acquired.

Why is everything so old?
he thought as he inspected his favourite house. The carpet had worn thin and mould was creeping down the walls. He ran a finger along the sideboard, leaving a mahogany-coloured streak in the thick layer of dust.

Then he noticed that, sometime in the last ten years of their marriage, Lola had turned into a table lamp. She wasn't even an attractive one – brown with black numbers and frayed at the edges.

Ralph realised things had progressed in a direction with which he was not entirely comfortable.

‘I can't stay the husband of an item of furniture,' he said to the lamp.

The lamp flickered as if to say: ‘I'm flexible.'

A tear rolled down its shade.

‘Be careful,' Ralph said, as he put the lamp out on the street for the council's next bulk waste collection. ‘No need to get all teary and electrocute yourself on account of me.'

*

In the spirit of renewal, Ralph bought another house for himself and his numbered offspring. The house was big and white, full of sharp edges and cold marble floors. Ralph hired men dressed in green jumpsuits and green caps to remove the grass and lay down artificial lawn, in order to produce, instantly and permanently, the effect of a well-tended garden.

One night at the dinner table, Ralph rubbed his hands together.

‘Do I have a surprise for you.' He produced a stack of pages that his PA had prepared. ‘The checklist says I have to see the world and you're coming with me. Our whole holiday is set out in this spreadsheet.'

When laid out end to end, the pages of the spreadsheet stretched from the front to the back door and back again.

‘We're going to cover every single city in existence,' said Ralph to his offspring, as he walked them through it, ‘at a minimum rate of one a day.'

One's eyes shone as if she had just seen a tower of chocolate sprout from the ground. She knelt next to the spreadsheet for a closer look.

‘As you can see,' said Ralph, ‘our movements for each day have been broken down into five-minute blocks.'

Two mooched back to the dining room, sat in his allocated spot and stared into his chicken soup. His only comfort in the world at that moment was the warmth his palms felt against the sides of his bowl.

‘Be careful,' Ralph said. ‘No need to get all teary, even if it is with joy.'

There were documented holiday policies and procedures to ensure that One and Two kept up the appropriate pace.

They were on a minibus leaving the Leaning Tower of Pisa when Ralph said: ‘This calls for Protocol Number Three.'

He handed Two a video camera.

‘Sorry, Ralph, what's Number Three?'

‘I quizzed you at Heathrow.'

‘I know,' said Two. ‘I'm really sorry.'

‘Just point this out the window and stop recording when I say so.'

Two pushed the lens up against the glass and pressed the red button. His arm ached all the way through the blur of Florence and Rome, and a red circle formed around his right eye from the pressure of the suction-cupped viewfinder. When the minibus drew up to St Peter's Basilica, its last stop for the day, Ralph looked up from his BlackBerry and asked why the hell Two was still recording.

While the trio caught an orchestral performance in Vienna, Ralph made the children watch a
Highlights of Italy
package on his BlackBerry. The video had been edited from Two's Protocol Three footage by Ralph's PA back at company headquarters.

‘Goes pretty well with this music,' said Ralph, rather surprised. The patrons behind them stared in fury at the back of his head.

As Ralph and the twins sipped mocktails in Vanuatu, they began writing postcards home. These particular postcards had been picked up in Cambodia, so Ralph insisted they all be backdated to the day the family sped through that country on the back of a ute.

Hello from Siem Reap
, wrote Ralph to the CEO of a company he had just bought. He wrote so quickly that none of his loops joined up. His As and Os all looked like Us, while his Es looked like Ls and his Ls looked like Es. In Two's eyes, the message appeared to say
Hleeu frum Silm Rlup
as if the letters were floating around a bubbling pot of turtle soup.

That night, One whispered to Two that she thought Ralph's handwriting looked like a pigeon had had a case of bad worms, shat all over the page and then hopped through its own poopsie lala. They giggled and snorted together, both sandwiched flat on their backs between the hotel's starched white sheets.

But Ralph couldn't care less about his handwriting. He called this Efficient Personal Time Management, or EPTM, which he saw as a cornerstone of the company that bought and sold other companies. Ralph's rationale was that the less time he spent writing these holiday greetings, the more time the recipients would be forced to spend attempting to read them. He felt this distribution of intellectual labour to be appropriate.

The photo featured on the postcard from Silm Rlup showed an ancient tree spreading its roots over an ancient building. Ralph didn't like how old the whole scene looked. He made a mental note to email the concierge who had given him the postcards and have him rethink the hotel's postcard acquisition strategy, on the basis that a country should always promote itself as being on the bleeding edge.

While finishing his postcard, Ralph texted an employee to acquire another company he wanted.

Have it done by yesterday. Thx. R
, said the text.

In the middle of both writing and texting, Ralph elbowed Two. ‘The Four-In-One Experience,' he said. ‘Having mocktails in Vanuatu while sending postcards from Siem Reap while acquiring MetCo from StetCo while spending quality time with the kids. This is the beauty of multitasking.'

‘I don't like multitasking,' said Two and burst into tears.

‘You read and walk at the same time. That's multitasking.'

‘Can we stop?' asked Two. ‘I'm tired.'

‘We can't have anyone holding up this holiday,' said Ralph. ‘There's no room for delay.'

‘I cannot proceed,' said Two. ‘There is a high risk I will begin to exhibit symptoms of a panic attack if I am forced to continue with this ill-advised mode of action.'

Ralph shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.'

He stuffed a return plane ticket into Two's shirt pocket and sent him and his psychological baggage straight back to their great island nation.

‘How about you?' Ralph asked One, once he had dispatched his recalcitrant second child.

‘I can keep up,' One said with a brave face. She wiped her clammy hands on her dress, the fabric of which was printed with maps of major European cities.

But One knew her own stride was only half her father's. Inevitably, during a second dash around the globe to cover cities they had accidentally missed, Ralph outran One, leaving her waiting by Manneken Pis, that famous statue in Brussels of a small boy taking a public slash.

*

Back from holidays, Ralph put out a second advertisement.

The consequent upgrade wife, who had no associated children, was called Silvia. At the interview, Ralph and Silvia ran their checklists by an algorithm designed to calculate their relationship potential. The algorithm, which took into account 216 dimensions of compatibility such as calf length and hair growth rate, determined that Ralph and Silvia were ninety-seven per cent compatible. Unsatisfied with this result yet unwilling to spend any more time searching for a suitable candidate, Ralph asked Silvia to be his bride and Silvia, experiencing a ninety-seven per cent compatible emotional meltdown, said yes.

Silvia was not one bit like Lola. She was the sort who would never turn into a lamp. ‘Only the Best for Silvia' was her motto. She liked floral rather than chess dresses, resembling more a supermarket bouquet than a board game. She invariably wore her hair in a lacquered French roll.

Said Silvia to her eleven girlfriends between sips of Lady Grey in the tearoom of a swish hotel:

‘He's quick to lose people. But I'll change him.'

The girlfriends arched their collective eyebrows and brought their porcelain cups to their pursed lips, in the manner of those who must stoically and silently look on as their loved ones make foolish life decisions.

‘Ninety-seven per cent made for each other,' said one, snapping the lips of her purse together as they watched Silvia flounce off in the cloth bouquet of the day.

At the wedding, as the guests toasted the lucky couple in a field of sunflowers, Ralph lifted Silvia's veil for a kiss. Both veil and dress had been printed with photorealistic, life-sized sunflowers, a design that inadvertently caused Silvia to blend seamlessly with her surroundings. The guests had been unaware of her presence until the moment the celebrant asked that they stand for the bride.

Upon lifting Silvia's veil, all Ralph could see was a hovering head with painted red lips opening towards him in slow motion. He suffered. His mind screamed that he was in the middle of a mistake and he felt sick in his stomach, like the few times in his life when he had tripped and realised, mid-fall, that it was too late for him to avert a brutal landing.

In the end, the only course of action Ralph could take to make those lips go away was to give them a peck.