The Thompson Gunner (11 page)

And
that's when he said, ‘Could we have breakfast maybe? We could meet in the lobby, say eight-thirty? There's a cafe in the mall, the Good Earth, I've been there a couple of times. I don't know what your schedule's like . . .'

I told him my schedule was good, nothing till ten or so, and I lay awake until four or later, wondering why I'd called him.

He was in the lobby at eight-thirty, as planned.

We walked outside on the way to the Good Earth, since he said he preferred the fresh air unless it was seriously cold, and he didn't really know how to navigate fifteen feet above Calgary anyway. I looked like crap that morning, I'm sure I did. Washed out, with bags under my eyes that my concealer stick was struggling to hide. The wind blew right at us on the way to the mall, and the cold came through the legs of my jeans. He didn't seem to feel it. His jacket was wide open, his hands in his pockets in a jaunty sort of way, pointing forwards and gesturing as he talked.

‘I'd recommend the spinach and feta scones,' he said, once we'd sat ourselves at the window table at the Good Earth.

He was right. They were just as they should be, crusty on the outside, soft in the middle. The coffee was good, too.

We each had a scone, and he broke his into pieces with a fork and then looked at the plateful of crumbs and shrugged, as if it hadn't quite worked.

We talked, mainly about inconsequential things. We talked about touring. He told me he always kept his house keys in his pocket so that he had some connection with home. He ordered a second coffee. He signed an autograph on a paper serviette for a customer who was on her way out, and he did so very obligingly.

We
sat and looked out at the mall. I looked at the people traffic in this place that I hadn't seen before, the hundred-year-old buildings, the shops that were closed or being refurbished. The lack of people traffic, actually.

‘My father was a travelling salesman,' he said, and I think it linked to our conversation about touring. ‘He was away a lot when I was young. More than I would've liked, anyway. I was the last kid in my class to learn to ride a bike because no one got around to teaching me. But it was an era of travelling salesmen, and there must have been kids like me all over North America.' He laughed at himself then and said, ‘Where am I getting this melancholy vibe? Do I really think you've got any interest in my bike riding?'

We talked about when we were young, and he guessed correctly that I'd been a big
Anne of Green Gables
fan. He also guessed that I would have picked Shaun Cassidy over David back then, which wasn't right, though I had friends who would've gone that way. He told me his first crush was Carly Simon, without a doubt, and his second was a girl in his sixth-grade class who never noticed him.

‘I wrote a song about that once,' he said. ‘Well, kind of.'

He yawned and stretched his arms above his head and out to the sides, and I apologised for my late night call, about five times, and about five times he said it was no problem.
He said he'd slept either side of it, hours each side, and he'd slept pretty well.

He told me he'd been expecting more ‘chick stuff when I got up on stage, so I told him that, after a while, the general hopelessness of men starts to look a little obvious.

He laughed and said, ‘I never get sick of seeing that kind of act. Men can do with reminding, you know. Some of them are appalling – full of tedious stories about absent fathers, and what it's like to be a twelve-year-old with trainer wheels.'

Outside the window, a busker stood with his back to us, tuned his guitar without any real hurry and started playing Bonnie Tyler's ‘It's A Heartache'. But his only audience was a magician on the other side of the mall, the Great Cosmo, who stood at a boarded-up shopfront, his name surrounded by spangly gold moons and stars on the small sign hanging from the tray table jutting out from his waist. He wore tails and a top hat, but his face let him down by being not even a little mysterious. He dealt cards out onto the table, executed a trick for practice or simply to keep his hands doing something in the cold. The busker played on.

‘He's quite terrible, isn't he?' Rob Castle said to me behind his hand. ‘And yet I can't look away.'

The busker finished and bowed from the waist to the empty mall, and the Great Cosmo called out, ‘That was special, Hal. You're making it your own, I'm thinking.' And the two of them laughed in a way that was about sharing the absurdity of it all, and getting through it.

‘It's a goddamn Larson cartoon,' Rob Castle said and, as was fast becoming usual, I thought it was brilliant.

On
our way out, I threw the busker a dollar and I noticed his case was mainly full of one-cent coins.

‘I hear they met years ago,' Rob Castle said when we were well beyond earshot, ‘on the festival circuit, and that's what becomes of such things.'

‘A chance collision somewhere and, years later, you're facing each other down in an empty mall and playing for pennies.' That's how I put it, but it sounded wrong so I said, ‘Something happened there. That was way sadder than it was meant to be.'

And that's when I told him about Murray, breaking up with Murray two weeks and three days and several hours before, for the time that Murray insisted was the last time. And that it probably really was the last time, because we'd worked through it and fixed essentially nothing, and that had taken a lot of energy and some months as well, and he hadn't returned my calls in the last seventeen days. Not that there had been many, because you get the message soon enough.

And I told him I knew that was too much information and a stupid thing to talk about, but he said it wasn't, and for a buck he'd do some Bonnie Tyler for me, if it'd help. His arm was around me then, which was good.

‘B
ATTLE OF THE
S
EXES
' – who starts the day this way by choice? Across the country, commercial radio stations wake people up and welcome them to the morning with this girl-versus-guy tussle over inanities.

I
should get Emma to add it to my list of tour requirements. Needs access to a gym, ideally with lap pool. Needs a regular supply of fruit and water. Will not do stupid dawn or red-eye flights. Will not participate in ‘Battle of the Sexes' under any circumstances.

The last time I did, I gave the guy a pounding, simply because I was so irritated with myself for forgetting to tell Emma I'd never do it again. Of course, the guy's always a sitting target. He's nervous about being on radio and annoying me merely by phoning in, endorsing the ‘Battle of the Sexes' concept and keeping it on air. Plus, he's up for a prize and I'm not. But I can't let that have too much of a bearing on my performance when I'm fighting the battle for women everywhere. I can't look weak, caring, nurturing. It's in the interests of challenging stereotypes that
I have to set out to pound him. And he should understand that.

He's Tyson today. He's standing at the breakfast bar in the kitchen at home, wearing a cap, just old enough to shave semi-regularly and wondering if the fuzz on his chin might amount to something if given the chance. He's on his parents' phone, he's taken completely off-guard by seven-forty a.m, just fast enough and just slow enough to be the sixth caller, not a chance when it comes to best-of-three-questions any time before ten o'clock.

That's the Tyson I'm seeing anyway and, when one of the hosts asks if I'm ready to go, I'm psyched enough to say, ‘I'm going to crush you like a bug, Tyson. Like a little bug.'

The hosts both go ‘Oooooh' and one of them says, ‘Sounds like fighting talk, Tyson.'

Tyson comes back with ‘Um, yep, righto . . .' and then, when they start reading question one, he talks over them with a better comeback and the question has to start again.

I'm up two-nil inside a minute, feeling a sudden flicker of the urge to nurture, and three–nil looks harsh. They ask a sport question. I give him a few seconds but all he gives back is silence.

‘You're looking down the barrel of a whitewash, Tyson,' the male host says. ‘The blokes are relying on you. Come on, it's a sport question. Come on, Tyson, you've got to know more about this one than Meg.'

That gets to me more than it usually would, and I hit him with a ‘Yeah, Tyson, who's the girl now?'

In the studio, the breakfast hosts – both male and female – cheer, and I want this all to be over. Tyson is stuck in his parents' kitchen staring blankly at the birds in the back garden, his mouth gone dry, the phone cord coiled in his fingers.

So I give the
answer, it's three–nil to the ladies, and Tyson, the pressure all gone, thanks me as if he means it and says it was cool, the way I laid it on him.

At the gym, I start with weights. I bench press more than usual, pumping away my stupid ‘who's the girl now?' line. In my brain there was irony all over it, in life I suspect there was none. I should know better.

My hand hurts again, in the same place as on the plane, on the back in a muscle near the base of my thumb. My gym instructor in Brisbane often tells me not to overdo it. I suspect that's what he'd tell me now if he were here.

So I pick up my towel and I go up the stairs to the pool.

I get about eight laps done before Murray, Elli and life sweep back into my head and won't easily be put away.

I stop for breath and tip water out of my goggles. I push off again and concentrate on technique, on long freestyle strokes and making all of them count. My hands look pale when they hit the water, crashing through the mirror of the surface and pulling bubbles down with them.

Where did we go wrong, Murray and me? We paid good money for the answer to that question. We bought ourselves quite a few answers in the end, but it was the end by then and you need answers earlier than that, while you're still prepared to work.

I
think I was still prepared to work. And that could be, might be,
am
still prepared to work, but it's no good thinking that way.

We spent too much time apart due to our jobs, mine more than his. In hindsight, it's a factor that's important and uncomplicated, and on it went from there. Too much time apart, Murray not understanding why I couldn't say No more often, Murray telling me he couldn't say No since he's not in charge of his life the way I'm in charge of mine. He works for a big company. He always has. He doesn't understand anything else, he doesn't understand jobs you invent as you go along, and put together the best way you can. Not that he didn't listen, not that he didn't try.

We both tried, fruitlessly, and it tore us apart. But quietly, like a seam coming undone or something unravelling. There was nothing ugly about it. It stopped working. We stopped having something to work with. It stopped, from Murray's point of view, being worth the grief. From my point of view it still was. Is.

He's in Asia now with work. Shanghai, I think. Elli's with her mother, where she usually is. Making the usual amount of trouble, I hope.

I'm used to him emailing me every day when he's away with work, emailing or calling. That was part of our plan. Every day in some way we would be in touch, and that's how we would beat geography. But we haven't, and it's clear to me every time I check my email or arrive at a new hotel and there are no messages waiting.

We were together seven years, and I don't know what
I'm going back to in Brisbane if I'm not going back to that.

Months ago, I talked Elliott King into bringing the other TV people to Brisbane for a look around. It was an earlier stage of the show's development then, and I took them to potential locations, specific and generic, and we visited the studios at the Gold Coast. I worked as hard as anyone could to get myself a steady job close to home. But I still have no power to decide where the show will be made, if it will be made, and there are still no guarantees. Sometimes I work for a big company too, and I don't sign the cheques. And my plan – that part of it – is holding together so far, but it's taken too long.

Tumble turns work better when you think about them less. When you leave it for your leading arm to show you the way, just like Julie said. And the arm goes, and you go after it and you push away from the wall with your feet. The next lap begins, a rhythm develops.

Rob Castle had messy hair and a denim jacket and an acoustic guitar. He looked a little like John Corbett from
Northern Exposure
and
Sex and the City
, and those guys are always sensitive, right? And he seemed a little like Woody Guthrie to me, and those guys are always out pursuing noble sentiments. The image I have of Woody Guthrie, right or wrong, comes from one photo – the photo of him on a street somewhere, his back to the camera, I think, a guitar over his shoulder and the words ‘This Machine Kills Fascists' written on it.

So in Calgary I spilled the beans, and had my first conversation outside our counselling sessions about my break-up
with Murray, there with a sensitive singer/songwriter on a windswept mall thousands of miles from home, east of the Rockies in the Houston of the north.

That's enough now, enough laps.

My muscles feel good, having worked. I'm sure I have raccoon eyes from the goggles, but I don't think I have a photo shoot till this afternoon. It's very quiet up here around the pool when there's no one else, as close to silent as you could want. The air is warming up, and I wonder if it's a lump that I can feel in the cool shrivelled skin of the back of my right hand, or if I'm imagining it. It's sore when I press it. I think it's a lump.

I get as dry as I need to and go down the stairs, past the muscle shots on the wall and the ‘Twelve Things You Should Know About Step' poster.

Back in my room at the hotel there's a message from Felicity, telling me how great I was on ‘Battle of the Sexes', and that she'll see me in the foyer at nine-twenty.