The Thompson Gunner (14 page)

Claire is a
freelancer who does a lot of celebrity pieces, as well as some food and travel. She has dark eyes and dark straight hair and rings on most of her fingers, some obviously from generations ago, some much newer. She's the kind of person who probably has a story to go with each of them. She thinks intently about things. She'll sit, holding her coffee cup in both hands and weighing the arguments up in her mind, and she'll come out with a firm view about what she thinks is right or wrong. And we've agreed every time in two-and-a-half conversations to date, so coffee with her is one of the better parts of a visit to Perth, one of the parts that most resembles life.

I don't blame Felicity for what happened at the hospital. Felicity is already good at this job on her first attempt, and she can't cover everything. I got the chance to say that before she left the ward. I followed her into the corridor on the pretext of checking the details of the evening event, and I spelled it out to her that it was not her fault and I did not want her dragging herself over the coals about it, while expecting me to watch. I took a Cabcharge voucher from her and had it in my hand when I went back in to Courtney. It made it look as though some business had been done.

It also gave Courtney something new to be amazed
about. We talked about the Cabcharge voucher and how life on tour works, and about the people you can end up doing events with. I told her some tour stories and made out that they were the type of insider stories you never get to read in magazines. That's what she wanted, something that was hers alone.

Claire and I are sitting at a table on the deck, above the beach and with the afternoon sun dazzling over the sea. We compare notes on several people we've each met once or twice. In most cases we have the same sense of them, but sometimes they've shown us something different – perhaps urbane conversation with me over a drink at a function, evasiveness in interviews with her.

‘He was quite charming,' she says of one author, in a way that suggests she wasn't entirely charmed. ‘But all he gave me was quotes. He was very good at quoting other people, which doesn't surprise me – he's a great stylist and you get the impression he's very well read – but he didn't give me much about himself.'

Claire does not expect me to be a comedian in front of her. I don't have to pick up the flowers on the table and clench them between my teeth, I don't have to drag up the old stories. I can take in the view, I can listen most of the time instead of talking, and we can discuss things. Actually discuss them. Discussion, on tour, can be painfully rare at times.

She did a phoner this morning with the actor Simon Baker in Los Angeles. It was the second time she's spoken to him and she says he seems like a genuinely nice guy. He lives with his family at Malibu and seems unaffected.

‘It's
interesting that he and Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce were all in
LA Confidential
,' she says, ‘and they've taken such different paths since then. Simon's role in that was quite small, of course. Have you ever met Guy Pearce? He seems very genuine too, but the only time I've spoken to him it was a phoner and I suppose it's their job to seem genuine. Some of them could try a bit harder, though.'

The best I can manage is a third-hand story about Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe and Guy's thirtieth birthday party in LA. It's gossip, and only low-level gossip at that, but I can't stop myself telling it.

Claire laughs and says, ‘Well, that sounds like typical Russell Crowe, if you believe what you read. Still, it'd be hard to stay normal with all the sucking-up those people get. And all the time away from home.' She takes a bite at the biscotti that's come with her coffee. ‘Speaking of which, I took a look at your website. It's quite a tour that you're on.'

‘It's nearly done,' I tell her. ‘And it's had its moments.'

‘It can't be easy for you, being away for these long stretches,' she says. ‘And it can't be easy for your partner, either. I suppose you find ways of making it work. Does he ever come along? Does his job let him do that?'

My coffee cup is in my hand, and I can't remember whether it was on the way up or down so I set it back on the saucer. I still had my Guy Pearce story in my head, trying to work out the hands it passed through to reach me, and I don't know where to start the story that would answer her question.

‘I could do with some time at home, to be honest.' That's all I can say, and she knows there's more. She's too good at getting information out of people for her not to know. It isn't in me to tell this story. Not here, not today, not yet. This afternoon at the Blue Duck is too good, too clear, too unspoilt so far.

She
asks if I'd like another coffee. She says she might have one, maybe decaf this time.

My whole face feels congested, and I try to focus on her question but I start crying anyway. I grab a serviette and blow my nose.

‘It's that poor girl,' I tell her, and the tears keep coming. ‘Courtney. It was pretty upsetting.'

And she says, ‘Yes, quite a shock. They should have told you.'

‘She made me think of Elli – Murray's daughter who lives with us some of the time.' People are starting to look over our way. I take another serviette and wipe my face, and try to look calm about it, try to take control of my breathing. ‘She's with her mother at the moment. Murray's away with work, too.'

Claire pulls a squashed box of tissues out of her bag and passes it to me. ‘Aloe vera,' she says. ‘Much less scratchy than serviettes.'

I
WOKE TO A BED
that was empty but for a note on the visitor's pillow. It read:

Meg
,

Last night was special but I have a wife and three children in Thunder Bay, Ontario, two girls and a boy (the youngest) and one of the things most important to me is being a good father to them. I don't know that that came up last night. Which was a special night, sincerely, and a special memory, and I don't thinly either of us wants it spoiled by a single unhappy word
.

I will be thinking of you
.

Rob

Two
small pieces of Fairmont Palliser Hotel Calgary paper, there on the visitor's pillow. He'd tried to cram the message onto one but perhaps, with three children, it hadn't been easy.

I was stunned at first, angry with him by lunchtime, and in the afternoon I went back to my room alone and cried half a bucketful, though I told myself it wasn't to do with Rob Castle at all. And then I realised he disappointed me most by writing such great songs and yet such a mediocre note, and I was stuck with the simple clear thought that the night had deserved better.

I had needed his company desperately after breakfast the day before, as the wind skidded in from the Rockies or across the prairie and froze my cheeks and we walked from the mall back to the hotel. I had needed an arm around me, and preferably his, and from there one thing had led to another.

Late in the evening we had
ended up at the door to my room, me with my key card jittering in my hand, Rob Castle with his jacket folded over one arm. We had stood there with the door open, my foot against it, several ways for saying goodnight in my mind. I can remember the moment when the last of them went unsaid, and I pushed the door fully open and he followed me in. His folded jacket fell to the floor, its arms splayed out on the carpet in the last of the hallway light as the door closed.

Over the next few hours I had times – seconds only – when I let myself think that this was a kind of proof. Proof that I could move beyond recent weeks and the past seven years, proof that I could and would fall again for someone for reasons of great sentiment. And I could smell the sweat lifting from his warm bare shoulders and his hair as I held him. It was his own smell, new to me. And his hair fell unevenly onto my face, brushed my closed eyes, and I told myself it was physical, all this. That's how I should see it.

I'm
left with those ideas – too many of them – and the sharp recollection of my hands on his shoulders and on his back, of the noise of bodies between thick starched sheets.

I fell asleep first. I remember him stroking my hair, saying something.

Jen picked me up for the show on the evening of the day of the note, and I did the show and I bought her a drink afterwards, several drinks. On her fourth, when she'd decided to leave the car for the night and take a cab home, I said ‘Guess what I did last night?' and she said ‘What?' and I said ‘I fucked Rob Castle'. Because that's how it looked by then, no better.

She took another mouthful of beer and made a frown and said, in a tone that fitted perfectly with my ‘guess what' way of putting it, ‘You know, I'd wondered about that. Not in a judgemental way of course.'

So I said, ‘Did you know he was married with three children in Thunder Bay, Ontario? I now have a note to that effect.'

And she said, ‘No, I didn't know that. Was I supposed to? It sounds like essential background information. A note about the family? How considerate. Was this note in lieu of a conversation, or as well as one?'

It had immediately become a kind of joke between us – which was such a good way to play it. It was as if her chaperoning wasn't up to scratch and that's where my trouble had started – I was ‘the talent' and might take it upon myself to sleep with anyone or anything in the absence of contrary advice.

She
told me that she thought the festival should have given me a better briefing, and that she wished she'd come on board earlier, or at least given herself a lot more time to read trashy magazines. Because this was Rob Castle, after all, and his home life couldn't possibly be a secret.

She blamed the whole business on the demands of her studies, and on the number of festival volunteers who were only in it for the T-shirt and an occasional surplus Danish.

I gave her the note and she read it and said, ‘I thought he was a better man.'

All I could add was, ‘Or at the very least a better writer.'

I explained myself a bit further when I could, which might have been another beer later or simply when enough time had passed after telling her, and I'd got my next lot of thoughts together.

‘I was the loneliest person in the world when he and I went out for breakfast,' I told her. ‘That's how it felt. Life hasn't been good lately. And the mall was such a sad place. I feel horribly guilty now, of course, don't think I don't.'

But he got all my back story, I got none of his. I knew nothing of his life beyond the Uptown Screen, the mall and the elegant Fairmont Palliser Hotel.

Jen stayed on my side, and I needed that. I finished the night glad about Big Rock Traditional Ale and her company and sometimes even the sex with Rob Castle which, I had to admit, had been very agreeable and perhaps necessary at the time. But I also stayed worried about the other members of a family in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and what might one day become of them.

I didn't
know – couldn't know – if the heartbreak in his songs was real or just clever invention, as it should be and as I'd thought it was. Maybe he's not creating it for the songs, and his heart breaks all the time. Maybe it broke once, long ago, and that was enough to harden him, leave him open to misadventure, and damn the consequences. Not that there would be any, this time.

T
HE RUNNING SHEET
for tonight is waiting for me back at the hotel, in an envelope tucked
under my door. There's a list of minibus times with it, and another copy of the program, which describes the venue, the Watershed, as ‘a hub disguised as an installation – part club, part performance space, part pool, aquarium and sink, but above all, it is the hottest place to be cool in Perth this summer.'

I couldn't tell Claire about Murray. I've only met her twice, and every time the break-up surges back into my head it feels like it'll burst. I didn't want to crack up in front of her, and the crowd in the cafe. I didn't want to get into any of the details, and hear good well-meaning things in return. We had a conversation going, our usual conversation, about the worries of the world and about people we almost have in common, and that's what I wanted this afternoon, something normal.

Somehow that didn't apply on that cold morning in Calgary with Rob Castle, or it stopped applying because Calgary was so unlike home. I wasn't quite myself there, from the moment I met him.

He
should have told me that he had a life back in Ontario. What kind of expectations did he think I had? A future together? Him and his lovelorn songs, me and my domestic observations, out on the wide open road playing every town on the CNBC weather map from Whitehorse to St John's? Me, working on my chick stuff, amusing him and reminding him that there are shitty, dishonest men about, travelling with all the charm and tenderness they need to wreak quiet havoc and then move on?

I want to see him again just to scream at him ‘I got what I wanted' and then to say, in less than a scream, ‘And you're welcome to Thunder Bay, Ontario, but you had plenty of chances to talk about that and you took none of them because you knew we wouldn't have slept together if you had.'

And that's the simple truth of it. The complex part, the connectedness I felt, I can't be sure of any more.

I fell for a guy – nose-dived for him, plummeted for him – because of how brilliantly he referenced popular culture, from the things he noticed and the way he noticed them, to his hair, to the well-made look of longing in his eyes. And, like a lot of men in popular culture, he was ultimately disappointing.

I struck him when I was in a moment of great need, but he wasn't what I needed, even if the story had stayed simple and we'd woken up beside each other and our tours had quietly disentangled themselves the next day when he moved on to Edmonton.