Portable Curiosities (9 page)

You're right.
He grabbed his son by the shirt and breathed into his face.
Never aspire to be more than a token yellow. That's how you stay out of trouble. You hear me? One-dimensionality will save your life.

One day he took off his Yankees cap and left it on the kitchen table with the brim facing his favourite chair. Then he walked to a cliff on the edge of the island and stepped off it into the three-dimensional air, as if the cliff were a flight of stairs and he had failed to notice that there were no more steps.

*

Soon after the yellow man had resolved to stop giving way, he and the yellow woman were leaving a McDonald's on George Street, opposite the cinema from which they had first emerged. The two had become friends, having met through an association for refugees from 3D cinema.

They were sharing a box of fries and heading towards the station when a blond man, neglecting to pay attention to where he was going, walked straight into the yellow man.

Angered by the yellow man's aggression, the blond proposed a fight.

The yellow man refused. Having only ever been a one-dimensional ninja on screen, he knew much less about ninjutsu than about Fellini – an imbalance of knowledge suitable for panel discussions but not for street fights.

Yellow cunt
, said the blond man.
Where are your kung fu buddies?

The blond man king-hit the yellow man. Golden fries – in slow motion – flew into the air and scattered all over the bitumen. The skull of the yellow man split against the kerb.

The blond man spat on the yellow man's face and disappeared.

The yellow man's last thoughts, as his eyes turned to glass, were of a man stepping off the edge of the island, and of a baseball cap abandoned on a kitchen table.

The yellow woman batted away the arms of sympathetic passers-by. She scrabbled about collecting the fries strewn around the yellow man's body, shoving them back into their red cardboard box. She placed the box back into her friend's hands and closed his fingers around it.

She looked up and saw a crowd staring.

Ni hao
, she screamed.
Konnichiwa.

No one replied.

She sat on the kerb and cried. A few people perched next to her and rested their hands on her shoulders. Others tried to revive the yellow man, to no avail. Most, however, continued to stare.

Look at how I've swamped your country
, she shouted at them.
I've been selling all your secrets to the yellow people. Your secrets of unreliable public transport and circus-like government. I will kowtow at your restaurant table, lead your men into sin and poison your babies with my cheap synthetic milk and my peasant ways.

Listen hard to what I'm saying
, she said,
because this is the amazing thing I do with my tongue.

*

For years afterwards, many locals remarked to each other – in the privacy of their own homes and on talkback radio – that the aggressor in the incident had been the yellow man, and that they were deeply concerned by the oversensitive and inflammatory nature of the woman's remarks, by the weak and hysterical character of her emotional display, and by her ingratitude to a nation that had so generously accommodated her, even though she was a member of such a cruel, meek, blank-faced race.

Two

‘As we count up from one, three is the first most interesting number.'

– Michael Cunningham

Nothing is known of Ralph's childhood except that he once dived between the legs of a monk, trying to see if there was orange underwear under those orange robes.

The monk, laughing, had scooped the little boy up and held him to the light to see him better. The bald head of the ascetic gleamed in the morning sun.

‘Always remember,' said the monk, ‘the fleeting nature of life. Your past is dead and your future is yet to come. There is only this moment.'

He set the boy down and went on his way along Circular Quay. Ralph watched him shuffle past the blind bagpiper and past the docking ferry, until he disappeared from view.

‘If life is fleeting,' Ralph said to himself, ‘then I'll beat it.'

Tucked into bed that night, he drew up a checklist for his life, which he knew would lead him to certain triumph in this world.

From that moment on, Ralph was in a very big hurry.

*

When it came time to marry, Ralph advertised for a wife in the local newspaper.

There was one applicant.

She perched on Ralph's couch wearing a brown dress covered in large black numbers. The brown was almost indistinguishable from the black and the black almost indistinguishable from the brown. Ralph thought it the ugliest colour combination known to man.

‘My name is Lola,' said the girl. ‘I'm nineteen.'

‘A good vintage,' said Ralph, who wanted to demonstrate his sophistication through viticultural terminology. ‘What sort of things do you like?'

‘I like chess and dresses,' said Lola, although she had neither a strategic nor a stylish bone in her body.

‘I like sports cars that are British racing green,' said Ralph. ‘Any colour that races is a good colour.'

‘I'm flexible,' said Lola. ‘I could like fast cars that are racing green.'

Ralph supposed Lola was physically flexible too, which could make a few items on his checklist quite enjoyable.

‘You'll do,' said Ralph.

At the registry, Lola wore a chequered dress. Kings, queens, rooks, bishops, knights and pawns floated on it, tilted at various angles.

Ralph wore his work suit and white sneakers. He always wore sneakers, even to bed.

He had been plagued, for as long as he could remember, with a recurring nightmare in which he was being chased by faceless men. The dream never left him, even in marriage. He would toss and turn, kicking Lola in the calves while flying over back fences, swinging around Hills hoists and hurdling through low, open windows during the night as sirens wailed and helicopters swung overhead, their searchlights flashing to and fro over garden gnomes and glassy swimming pools.

The sneakers comforted Ralph. If anything went bump in the night, he knew he had good getaway shoes.

*

Ralph and Lola produced twins. The family multiplication happened in the blink of an eye, as if two amoebae had each split in half in an instant.

‘Let's call them Maude and Claude,' said Lola, leaning on the kitchen bench with her instant twins strapped to her stomach. She was flicking through a paperback,
Timeless Names for Bouncing Bubs
. ‘Maude means “Mighty in Battle”. She'd be good at chess.'

‘What does Claude mean?'

‘“Disabled”,' said Lola. ‘But I would welcome a disabled child.'

Ralph crossed his arms. ‘How about One and Two, for easy reference?'

‘I'm flexible,' said Lola as she looked up the names Oanh and Tu, thinking she'd quite like names of ethnic origins.

The relevant item on Ralph's checklist did not say
Children
but
Super Children.

When Two, much too long after One, took his first steps, Ralph was on the phone.

‘What do you take me for? I'm not the sort to bargain for quality. No, I wanted the EBITDA for' Hang on a minute, will you? Yep. Lola? Lola! Why isn't this kid running yet? Is he retarded?'

Two's legs, weak from newness, gave way underneath him. He sat on his nappy with a thud.

Two looked up at Ralph with his very first look of anxiety, blue eyes so big they threatened to take over his face. The look of anxiety had two causes:

1. the inkling that he might never be able to move as fast as his father would like; and
   
2. the uncomfortable sensation of fresh poop pasted to his bum.
   

Ralph taught One and Two many things, including how to read a newspaper from cover to cover by the age of three. By their fourth year, they had mastered integration (of the mathematical, rather than racial, kind). By seven, they were mock trading on the stock exchange.

‘Buy, buy, buy!' shouted One on the phone to her stockbroker, banging her fist on a plastic blue play table.

‘Sell, sell, sell!' shouted Two, knocking over a matching chair in chubby haste.

Yet despite everything Ralph had taught the twins, Two continued to exhibit a clear lack of discipline and self-direction.

Ralph caught him floating in the pool one sunny day, staring up at the overhanging branches of the jacaranda tree and smiling blankly.

His fingers were outstretched, their tips brushing against the purple flowers that floated, delicate and soggy, in the water.

Drifting next to Two was an equally long inflatable banana. It had a blank smile to match.

Ralph became acutely concerned about all that was not going on in that child's brain.

‘What are you doing?' Ralph asked.

Two kept floating.

Ralph walked over and stood in Two's sunlight.

Two splashed to attention.

‘What are you doing?' Ralph repeated.

‘Improving my backstroke?' ventured Two.

What he was really doing was seeing dinosaurs in the clouds and pretending a giant inflatable fruit salad was bobbing around him in the water.

He was also imagining himself as an alien being, his tentacles unrolling over the cobbled edges of the pool, then over the pool gates, creeping through the back door of the house, then through the front door, over the camellias in the front garden, across the main road of the suburb, through the nation's capital, and extending over the oceans to every city in the world, consuming the entire planet.

*

Ralph blew his whistle. He was standing on the side of the local pool, an open-air saltwater monstrosity that looked out over a dark winter sea.

‘Freestyle!' he yelled.

Two glanced up in the vague direction of his father. He couldn't see well. He needed his glasses. Treading water, he began to reply, only to be lapped by One. He went under. He coughed and spluttered and cried in the wake of her flutter kicks. He was swallowing salt water and weeping salt water. He had become his own saltwater system.

Two was convinced he was well on the sodden path to death. He ducked under the lane divider and made like a drowning cat towards the blurry feet of his father.

‘What do you think you're doing?' said Ralph. ‘Finish the lap! And no breaststroke this time. I want freestyle.'

Two rested his forearms on the side of the pool and looked up at Ralph through the fog of his goggles. Water sat unwelcome at the bottom of the eyecups, like two tilting horizons.

‘Can I,' Two pleaded, ‘use a kickboard?'

Three lanes across the water, students in a swim squad had availed themselves of kickboards, floaties and flippers. This wrapping of children in flotation devices, Ralph thought, would not produce robust individuals with the tenacity to survive in a cutthroat world. Mollycoddling children in this manner was simply not the way of the Ralph Method.

Two realised the futility of his request. Seeing no point in waiting for an answer, he pushed off the wall, wrestled the lane divider and began a sorry freestyle. His kicks were sporadic and he spent most of his time with one arm stretched out in front and his mouth towards the sky, blue-lipped and panting.

Two could never keep up with One, even with a two-lap head start. His sister skimmed the pool like a lithe water insect, barely making a splash.

Two, on the other hand, floundered. His backstroke was consistently diagonal, and whenever the wall of the pool sneaked up behind him, he would yelp. He plodded and stagnated during breaststroke. His butterfly was a dead caterpillar. And each time he saw the bottom of the pool slope radically downwards, he gurgled a prayer to the Virgin Mary – and to Moses, Allah, Ganesha and the Monkey God – for divine protection in the deep end.

In short, swimming, for Two, was like drowning creatively in the cold bath of a giant.

‘Out,' said Ralph. ‘We're going to work on theory as it pertains to technique, and technique as it pertains to theory.'

Two climbed out of the pool. His legs almost buckled under him. The wind smacked him in the face and carved up his scalp. He wrapped himself in his towel and stood shivering and dripping on the concrete while Ralph demonstrated, with One as his model, the ideal curve of the arm as it enters the water during freestyle.

Two wasn't listening. As he watched One's arm bend and straighten, he noticed how skinny his own arms were in comparison to hers. He wondered if this would become the source of a crippling self-esteem issue in his adolescence and early adulthood.

Once he had stopped thinking about arms, he became mesmerised by the grotesque shapes his father's mouth was forming and by a tiny ball of spittle that was rolling around, untamed, on his father's bottom lip.

Something felt wrong in his stomach.

‘I feel sick,' said Two, interrupting Ralph's explanation of the efficiency of the flutter kick.

‘No, you don't,' breathed Ralph, partly through the whistle still in his mouth.

‘I really do, Ralph,' said Two. Ralph had instructed his twins to address him by his first name for two reasons: firstly, because he believed parenthood to be a type of benevolently dictatorial friendship; and, secondly, because he hoped to avoid situations in crowds where other men might respond to a call for ‘Dad' and obscure the direct line of communication between him and his offspring.

‘Fine,' said Ralph. ‘Be sick. But don't come running to me when you're the only grown fucker on this great fucking island continent who can't fucking swim.'

Two, retching here and there on the way to the car, pulled his glasses out of his terry towelling beach bag. He pushed them onto his face. The first clear thing he saw was Ralph walking at double his speed and never once looking back.

One slowed a little to keep pace with Two. He concentrated on the ground and pretended she wasn't there. He just knew she had that look of pity in her eyes – the same look she gave him when they discovered the body of last year's budgerigar at the bottom of its cage, having met death in the night among newspaper and poop and seed shells. One had turned to Two with a look that asked if he was going to cry. They both knew that he had neglected, the day before, to refill the bird's water feeder and that he had also forgotten to take the cage indoors when the sun went down. It was autumn: the day had been hot and the night had been cold. They never knew which temperature the bird had had a fatal issue with. Maybe both.

‘What?' Two had demanded of One, as they stood in front of the cage.

‘Ralph said you wouldn't take proper care of a bird. And he was right, wasn't he? Now you've killed it!'

‘But it wasn't my fault!' Two, of course, knew where the fault lay but it wasn't One's place to say it. With a messy swing of his fist, he knocked the cage off the table. The two of them stood there in silence, looking at the upended prison and the newspaper inside it, which now shrouded the small corpse.

‘Two.' One's voice had become gentler. ‘You have to be more aware of what's going on around you. Some things just can't be fixed and this is one of them.'

Now, as they walked behind Ralph away from the pool, One put her hand on Two's shoulder, just as she did when they were staring at the tabloid shroud.

Two shrugged her off.

‘Go on,' he said, nodding in the direction of their father. ‘I don't care.'

*

Ralph liked to pull the checklist out of his pocket once in a while to check his progress. He also enjoyed crosschecking his performance against a number of laminated copies of the list, which he kept on his desk at work, under the bed next to his spare sneakers and inside his VIP locker at the gym. In addition to these copies, Ralph had miniature versions of the list made the size of credit cards. He kept them in his wallet, under his pillow and stuck to the dashboard of his car, right next to a figurine of an orange-robed monk with a jiggling head that a stripper in Chinatown had produced as a midnight surprise from between her legs.

‘I once met a monk just like that,' he would say to those who asked about the figurine. But he couldn't exactly remember the rest of the story.

So far, Ralph had crossed off a wife, two children and four houses. He had also established a company that bought and sold companies that bought and sold other companies. Promoted as always being on the bleeding edge, Ralph's company became so successful that no one in the world acquired money quicker than Ralph did. Neither did anyone make the cover of
TIME
more often than he.

Ralph insisted that all of his cover shots be set in exotic seaside locations. He liked to be photographed sitting by the ocean, with an elbow resting on a bar and a thumb and forefinger positioned on his jaw and cheek, framing his face.

Ralph also insisted that he be shown in every photograph holding a Sea Breeze – made without vodka – in one hand. The slice of lime in the Sea Breeze had to be pierced with a blue paper umbrella on an angle that protected the fruit from the damaging effects of the sun.

‘Why a mocktail, not a cocktail?' a reporter once asked.

‘Booze is for amateurs,' said Ralph. ‘Getting blind drunk on money – now that's the path to happiness.'