The Thompson Gunner (2 page)

I stood there in my underwear as he took a deep breath, faked something like charm for a sentence or two and then kneeled down in front of me with a roll of Glad Wrap, ‘Just to make the most of those lovely natural curves.' He practically grunted as he made the most – or in fact least – of my lovely natural thighs, wrapping them tight, and then he bound me to stop my lovely natural breathing and stapled me
into a long spangly sheath of emerald fabric that turned me into some kind of mardi gras mermaid.

Then, when I thought things could only be made worse if he brought out a garland of seaweed and a buffed King Neptune, he got down on his knees again and tugged at the fabric around thigh level and said, in an annoyed kind of tone, ‘Are you a cyclist? Or anything like that?'

To which I could only say, ‘I don't know. What's like a cyclist?' because he seemed like the sort of person who would be flimsy enough to break if I hit him hard.

He looked at me blankly so I said, ‘Other cyclists?' and the look turned blanker, if that's possible.

‘Sorry, honey,' he said, ‘but I really need to focus. So if I could have a bit of shoosh?'

Maybe just one slap to the cheek would have been good but, no, that's not me. I'll seethe, bitch to Emma, make sure I'm never back here, line up a couple of years of therapy to help me learn to love my thighs, and that'll be that. I left him to be slapped by someone else later in the day – someone without my grace. Or control.

I bumped into Susie O'Neill on the way out. She was sitting like a next victim, with a magazine rolled up in her hands, not reading it.

‘Hi,' she said, remembering me, I think, from when we'd met at a couple of functions. ‘What's it like in there? What do they do to you?'

I told her she'd be fine, but that she shouldn't expect a dress. And I sat in the cab on the way to Parramatta thinking I bet there'll be no Glad Wrap for Susie O'Neill. She looks
as fit as she ever did, though leaner across the shoulders now than a butterfly gold-medallist.

We turned a corner and the sunlight came in my window and onto my cargo pants, and I looked at them and convinced myself they weren't bursting apart at the zips. These thighs run up hills when they get the chance. They do, occasionally, cycle. They've never been in better shape. They're as good as they're going to get, and that's the last time they'll be Glad Wrapped. And I haven't been asked for a bit of shoosh since I used to get terminally bored in geography in about grade nine. That designer had nothing to commend him, nothing at all.

At the shopping centre in Parramatta, a publicist was waiting to pay my cab fare.

‘We're really glad you could make it,' she said as she signed the credit-card form and took her copy. ‘Really glad.'

I never caught her name, but I knew she was a publicist by the way she treated me like a special idiot, someone who had some kind of gift but who could not be expected to show any sense or remember what they were there for. And I had little sense in me at that stage, and less memory, so she was on the money. The plane trips, the cab rides, the long, long time away – all that was catching up with me and leaving me a little woozy, and the air was already warm outside the cab at Parramatta while she paid. I couldn't in that minute remember much about the piece I'd written for the book, so I needed all the publicisting that was coming my way.

As we walked inside she handed me a copy, knowing I wouldn't have seen it. She told me a few new things about the charity it was raising funds for, briefed me on the people I'd be dealing with, checked I'd be okay to speak for a couple of minutes – never part of the plan until that moment, as we turned from the wide airconditioned arcade and into the crowded bookstore.

In a back room
I met Jessica, one of the editors. I sat down, I drank a glass of water and it started to make sense.

I remember saying, ‘Honestly, some days it's just one vacuous thing after another. It's a relief that this project's got some purpose.'

I turned the book over, and saw that all the contributors' names were arranged in mirror balls, and mine was directly above Boy George.

‘How about that?' I said in a way that did no more than take up time as I worried that my use of the word vacuous might be misconstrued. ‘After all those weeks when I watched ‘Karma Chameleon' on
Countdown
. . . that's a clever idea, those mirror balls.'

Then the assistant manager came in with the Cajun chicken filo from the in-store cafe, since it was past lunch-time in Christchurch and I'd told them I couldn't see myself talking to the crowd unless I'd eaten something.

At the baggage carousel in Perth I practise their names in my head: Felicity and Adam, Felicity and Adam. Felicity the festival publicist, Adam her boyfriend. I can see that it's night outside. We're waiting for my suitcase – me, Felicity and Adam.

‘Its Adam's
car that we came in,' Felicity says. ‘I don't drive. Well, not much. We'll be using cabs mainly, for the interviews, but I hope you're okay with the car. Adam was going to clean it, but . . .'

She's dressed better than I am, as though she's been out somewhere that required it. She's wearing a long navy jacket that makes her look thinner, and she's already thin. Her height exacerbates that. She's as tall as I am and Adam looks dumpy next to us. She swaps her phone from hand to hand and she's the first to notice any silence and make a move to fill it.

She asks about the flight, and where did I start the day exactly? And how was the food, and did I get a movie? She has freckles across her nose and thick wavy hair, a mixture of blondes, the kind of hair other women envy but that annoys its owner most mornings. Hair like mine, and that's how I know. Plenty of days you just end up grabbing it and shoving it into some kind of shape, planning to sort it out later.

Fortunately for Felicity, having been in primary school in the eighties, she should never know the need to try the perm I went for back then. Unless fashion turns on her, which it always might. I was eight feet tall with that perm, I'd swear it. And it was wide too. I was like a hedge on a stick.

My case arrives and I lift it from the carousel and click the handle up into place.

‘Black with wheels?' Adam says, and he hasn't said much so far. ‘I thought you had a green backpack. I thought I read that on a website.'

‘Right, and now I'm supposed to just get into a car with you people in an unfamiliar city and let you drive me off into the night? And there's nothing in the back but a big plastic garbage bag, a boning knife and a shovel . . .' Adam laughs at that, but Felicity doesn't. ‘I did have a green backpack, but the Americans or the people at Heathrow busted every lock and every zip with the increased security they've got now. And I got back and I thought, bugger it, who am I kidding, I'm old enough for wheels.' We trundle towards the exit. ‘It's nice to see websites don't know everything.'

‘So,
the partner called Murray,' Adam says, ‘his daughter called Elli, you being Brisbane born and bred – does that all stack up?'

Felicity snaps at him. ‘Adam. You are creeping Meg out. You are here because you have a car, remember, not to talk. I'm sorry, Meg.'

‘It's okay. He was creeping me out until he got to Brisbane born and bred. Despite what most websites say, I was actually born in Northern Ireland.'

‘It's his sense of humour. I'm sorry. Not the born-and-bred part but the creeping you out part. It's not funny, Adam. I knew I should have just used Cabcharge vouchers . . .'

‘I don't think I was the one who mentioned the boning knife,' Adam says.

She snaps again. ‘Don't say “boning knife” in an airport, you idiot.'

‘But Meg . . .' He thinks better of it. ‘I'm going to shut up now.'

Felicity says she'll sit in the back with me, if that's okay. There's festival business to talk through.

I take
the seat behind Adam, Felicity fiddles with her phone, I find mine in my bag and turn it back on. My tongue finds the sharp edge of my broken tooth and can't leave it alone. It's the gap that's the most unsettling thing, the space where once there was good hard tooth. My tongue feels swollen back where the tooth has cut it, and the inside of my cheek is cut too.

There are trees on the way out of the airport, tall pale gum trees that seem almost white in the lights of Adam's car. He won't have hair when he's thirty. That's how it looks from where I'm sitting. But a shaved head would probably suit him. He's got a look that would work with it.

I ask him what he does and Felicity says, ‘Adam's a writer, a novelist.'

‘Well . . .' he says, as though a secret's out and he wasn't expecting it.

‘He's writing his first novel while doing freelance web design on the side.'

‘And,' he says, wanting to stop her, wanting his own turn at this. ‘And working in a coffee shop in Northbridge a few days a week. That'd be on the other side. Freelance web design's a pretty competitive business.'

Felicity gives him a look, but only I get to see it. He clearly hasn't gone with her plan. I think, for the purposes of this drive from the airport, he was supposed to be a novelist. I want to pitch in and help him. Is this how their relationship works? Maybe it is, but I still want to pitch in and help him.

‘Where would creativity be without the big silver coffee machine?' That's what I start with. ‘It puts the Australia
Council in the shade when it comes to funding the arts. All you've got to add is a bit of dishwashing and you've got the perfect novelist CV in place.'

‘I've done the dishwashing,' he says. ‘It's the novel part that's holding me back.'

He checks if we'd be okay with music, and the CD he plays is Roger Sanchez. I heard it last week, driving through Calgary in a car at night, exactly this music, and I saw the video for the single days before leaving for the tour – a girl walking the streets of a cold city with a huge heart that gradually gets smaller, something sad being sung behind the beat, a chance encounter near the end, just before morning. The phone rang then, at home, and I don't know if the girl's chance encounter led anywhere. She looked lonely with that big heart, more lonely than foolish. Or maybe sentiment sucks me in all too easily.

I tell them that I heard the CD in Calgary, and that songs sometimes follow you on tour that way, and Felicity says, ‘That was the PanCanadian Comedy Festival, wasn't it? That sounds big.'

‘Well, yeah. It had its moments.' There's a fresh taste of blood in my mouth, and my tongue is trying to find where it's coming from.

‘Oh, the tooth,' Felicity says. ‘Sorry, I should have asked you about that by now. Emma called me about it.'

‘Emma?'

‘Emma from Big Talk – she's your agent, isn't she?'

‘Yeah. I just didn't know she knew about the tooth yet.'

The weight of this settles on me. The weight of being beaten here by the story of my day. I'm home, where everyone knows everything. This is my job and how it goes. Conversations are had about me – me and my tooth – people talking till they know each other and can mention one another like a third friend who's out of the room. I'm almost incidental to this, it feels, though if bits of me didn't break I guess these calls wouldn't be made.

This
whole complicated thought seems horribly ungrateful.

‘I don't have an appointment for you yet,' Felicity says. ‘It's classified as not urgent since you aren't in any pain. Emma was reasonably sure you didn't have pain, so that's what I had to go with. I'm sorry if it's wrong. Tooth pain they were talking about. Like, if it's broken down to the nerve.'

I can still taste blood. It's from my cheek, I think.

‘Oh, your itinerary,' Felicity says, and pulls some folded sheets of paper out of her bag. ‘Emma told me you like an itinerary.'

‘Yeah, um, my tooth. It's cutting my tongue. It's cutting the inside of my cheek, so I really think it needs to be fixed.'

‘Oh, sorry. Yes, sure, sorry,' she says, as if she's let me down already. ‘I'm sure they'll go for bleeding. As a reason, you know.'

‘Or, just tell them there's pain. My mouth is sore, trust me. There's pain. All you need to do is get me in the door.' It's two or three in the morning in Christchurch, my hair is greasy, my mouth is sore and I can taste my own blood. ‘If you could tell them whatever you need to, that'd be good. I know you couldn't have done anything before now, but if we could get it fixed I'd really appreciate it.'

She
offers to take the itinerary back, since some interviews will probably need rescheduling. She says it's no trouble. She's feeling bad because I don't have a dental appointment; I'm feeling bad because I'm putting her neat itinerary into disarray in the minute she's handed it to me. I feel like someone who just made a colour-specific M&M demand, but who isn't cool enough or famous enough to do it. I come very close to switching the light on and opening my mouth wide to show her the damage.

Instead I tell her I'd like to keep the copy of the itinerary. Even though a few things might change, it'll still be useful for me to look through it tonight, to get some idea of what we're up for.

‘Good,' she says. ‘Good. I know you like to know what's going on.'

She takes another sheet of paper from her bag. It's a cream Oroton bag with a silver clasp, and she keeps adjusting it to different positions on her lap and next to her, as if she's not used to carrying anything like it.

The sheet of paper is an email from Emma, with questions for a magazine's Q&A column. I don't mind Q&A pieces, though if you don't keep it brief the sub-editors cut your answers in half, and each one ends up just intro and punchline and you have to rely on the reader to fill in the rest.