The Thompson Gunner (20 page)

Soon I'm on the couch at Claire's place with a copy of the
NW
that I picked up on the way. And she's out of herbal tea,
and I'm staring at the article when she hurries back in from the kitchen with two peppermint Cornettos.

‘There you go,' she says, and we start eating them. I'm well into mine before it registers. ‘I know,' she says. ‘I looked in the fridge and it was the closest to comfort food. I thought we could do with one. Should you stop looking at the article now? Just for a bit?'

She takes the magazine from me and sits in a nearby chair with it in her lap. For a minute or two she talks with her hand over the story, as if it would be wrong to look, and then she picks up her glasses from the table, and she's reading it, and responding, and I'm moving her on from the ‘Oh my god, how could they . . .' phase, and finding myself working through useless distinctions. I'd just met Rob Castle when the photo was taken, for instance. I'm confident that it was my first beer, and jet lag never comes up well.

But she's reading on, charging into battle for me again. ‘Are they implying . . . yes, yes, I think they are . . .'

And that's when I realise I've spent all my energy keeping this at arm's length – out of my head, away from Emma and anyone else – and I have no energy left to lie. I could do it. I could get away with it – these stories are all about speculation – but I don't want to. Claire's support is too necessary but, more than that, it's too honest. She's right in front of me, slapping the magazine down on the table, outraged on my behalf.

The picture's face up – three people with hardly a thing to care about, which was a lie even then, for me anyway.

So that's when I have to admit that I slept with Rob
Castle. I have to admit it in Australia for the first time. Admitting it to Jen in Calgary was one thing, when the incident had happened hours before and was almost part of a dream, but it feels worse owning up to it in Perth. I was a long way from home, I explain to Claire, and alone, very alone, and the weather was wild and cold and something happened that night at the Uptown Screen that I couldn't rationally account for. And the next night too, back in my room.

I was single then, I tell her, but she's already leapt deftly to stick by my side.

‘These things can happen,' she's saying.

‘It had ended with Murray, weeks before.' The fact of it comes out of me as if it's not something I can control, or pause to word a better way. ‘Weeks ago, or a month now if I add it up, and I was very sad one day in Calgary and I couldn't tell you yesterday. I should have but I couldn't.'

And she says, strongly, ‘Of course' with a look at me over her glasses as if it's mad to even think it. ‘Of course you couldn't. This is all far too painful. And we were just having a nice cup of coffee and some cake at the Blue Duck.'

The afternoon passes in a stupid haze.

Emma leaves a message on my voicemail saying, in a fake-calm voice, ‘Hi, don't know if you've seen it yet, but I just picked up a copy of
NW
. Give me a call.'

I can't talk to Emma. She likes Murray and I love him, and I can't bear the details. I can't bear to have to put it into words. Next week I can do that, next week when the tour is over.

I tell Claire about Rob Castle, though this isn't ultimately about Rob Castle. I tell her about his wife and three children in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and about the note, which I realise I've almost committed to memory word for word, despite making myself tear it into pieces in Calgary as a first step towards getting it entirely out of my life.

‘I don't
even know what alt-country is,' I tell her needlessly. ‘Not that I can say it would have had a huge bearing on my actions. He sounded kind of folkie to me. How did they get that photo? I don't even know that. I never wanted to see his face again. How do they get photos like this?'

And I tell her about Murray, but I want to talk about why I was with him, not why it ended, though it'll make me sad either way. I tell her about Murray and holidays, because we've got one booked for a month's time and I'd forgotten until now. We made the booking almost a year ago and I don't know what's happening with it. It's two weeks at the start of the school holidays.

Murray loses the plot on holidays, in the nicest of ways. He'll obsess about one CD and play it to death, day after day. Somehow the record industry seems to know there are men like this, so they always bring out something like
The Best of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
at the start of summer. He'll drink litres of orange juice as if he's just discovered it. He'll buy a juicer, and oranges by the bagful, carrying them up the stairs to the apartment on his shoulder, talking to Elli in a voice he is suddenly calling his ‘peasant voice', and then handing around glasses of Freshly Squeezed Orange Juice (and don't dare leave any of that out and just call it orange juice, since that doesn't give the peasant his due).

He'll
eat bagfuls of pistachios too, and there'll be fragments everywhere and handfuls of shells in any empty glass left sitting around. He'll try three days in a row to make a packet cake. At home, none of this is ever mentioned. No orange juice, no pistachio nuts or nuts of any kind, and he's a pretty good cook but only savoury.

On holidays he'll hold out on shaving and relent no more than twice, each time shaving in stages. He takes a week of beard and sculpts it back to nothing, via the look he calls his George Michael look, then the Satan beard, then his porn star mo, which is far too Saddam Hussein when it really gets down to it, and a few minutes of Hitler at the end before he's clean-shaven. Each stage comes with its own enthusiastic caricature, with me interpreting it all for Elli in the best way I can.

For Elli, that's life, that's Dad. It's hilarious, but it's also unremarkable. It's more than that for me, and this year I won't have it.

The article says it was mutual, according to a source close to us, but I guess that depends on your definition of mutual. It calls it ‘a communication breakdown' but it was really more of a dead end. We never stopped talking, not until it was over. Another fine and irrelevant distinction. The article is as on the money as it needs to be, I turned myself public years ago, this is part of the deal.

‘Yes, but . . .' Claire says, and I'm not sure that there is a but.

Murray anecdotes are in my show. Murray, poor bastard, got pulled into the public domain. I took our lives on
the road, I put our lives on TV, this is the consequence. But I never thought I'd be this interesting. I thought we were safe because I'm well-known but not famous. I thought there was a line there, and that I knew where it was drawn. And that I had some control over where it was drawn. I didn't think I'd be worth a two-page feature or any sort of close scrutiny. I thought I still had privacy of a kind. I thought that was the deal I'd bought into, not this.

‘He had to take my photo down at the office,' I tell her, remembering the day he came home with it in his briefcase. ‘And it was one he'd always liked. He had it on his desk. And then he started saying I was just an ugly rumour.'

‘Rumour alone would have sufficed, I would have thought,' Claire says.

‘Well, yes, that's what I told him. Thank you.' She smiles, and I wipe my face with the back of my hand. ‘But he said it was more convincing that way. And I know why he had to say something. People wouldn't leave him alone. Or at least that's how he felt. And he still kept hearing things about me anyway – the kind of things that go around about people with public jobs, people who do jobs that put them on TV or in the papers.'

‘That can be horrible,' she says, and the look of concern is back on her face.

‘Or in my case stupid, a lot of the time. He went to one meeting where two separate people were convinced I bred dogs as a hobby. No one in the room knew that he had any connection to me. I just came up in conversation. One of his complaints was that the rumours weren't salacious enough and that he'd have to start something better. It could be pretty amusing. But it got in the way as well, and I think it boxed him in. We hadn't expected it. We didn't know it might be part of the deal. We thought that, if my career worked out, the good things we had going for us might get even better, not that they'd end up . . .' I'm trying to find the right word ‘. . . neglected.'

That's it. That's what happened. The good things in our life were done no harm – not directly –
but our attention was turned away from them, long enough that they faded, or somehow stopped being what they once had.

I get melted Cornetto chocolate all over my hands, Claire brings a cloth from the kitchen. There's a small chocolate patch on the sofa too, but she tells me to forget about it. And on my pants. Did any of the bloody chocolate end up in my mouth?

‘It's a hot day,' she says. ‘Very melty.'

I explain that it all got complicated with Murray and now he's in Shanghai, where he would have been anyway. He said I was shutting him out, ultimately, that I was getting his full story and ‘What is it with you? Some days I don't know you'. Most days he did though, and where was the credit for that? We all have moods. So what? He knew me. He knows me as well as anybody does.

Through counselling we reached ‘a conclusion'. That's where we found ourselves, with an agreement that it was over, and that we would be in contact only when we were both back in Brisbane, and then only to finalise details. I broke the rules by calling him several times. He screened me to his voicemail and I didn't hear from him again. I knew I couldn't keep doing that.

And Claire
says, ‘You're rubbing your hand. Is it okay?'

I can feel a lump, a small hard lump, and I tell her it might be glass, a fragment of glass from a long time ago, an accident once. Or it might be scar tissue. There are scars there from the incident with the glass – a small scar at the base of my right thumb in the shape of an Arabian dagger, another at my wrist like a star, a third in between and fading. In time maybe they'll all fade, line themselves up with creases and wrinkles and disappear, and my hand will just be old and not injured. That's what I've been thinking. It's been years since we last found glass.

I'm falling apart, one bit of me after another – this and the tooth and the knee I whacked on the ice above Lake Louise last week or the week before. I'm sick of running repairs. I want to be home, I want these things fixed.

Claire has two friends coming over for dinner and she lets me cook. My show's on late this evening, I can do that. I tell her there's a recipe I do, Argentine chicken, that I took from a TV cook but I like to think I improved on it, so if they're okay with chicken that'd be a good one.

We go out for ingredients, and I buy a forty-dollar bottle of wine and tell Claire this is what per diems are for and there should be no argument. And the same applies to the replacement box of peppermint Cornettos.

I stand in the kitchen, searching my brain for the recipe, for the grinning face of Ainsley Harriott out on the pampas. I cut the shallots with the whole bunch in my hand, and the blade
of the sharp knife slips right through and sends little wheels of shallot across the board. I add garlic, because I always do.

The guests arrive. I think I hear ground rules being discussed at the door, but I'm busy frying the shallots with garlic and cumin and paprika, and thinking it might be time for the tomato paste. Ainsley doesn't do the garlic. That's one of our differences, but the big one is that he uses chicken mince and I grill minced chicken patties and chop them into cubes. People comment on the texture as a plus, every time.

The guests meet me with the caution due a crazy person with a knife, and that works for all of us at the moment. Something goes slightly wrong, the cooking takes longer than it should. I send Felicity a text message saying ‘with friends – won't make the minibus – see you at the venue'. She calls back and calls back and I don't answer. On her fourth call she leaves a message, saying okay.

I can't talk to her yet. I don't know the Felicity version of this. She's off with Richard Stubbs, sorting out his banana rider, and the
NW
article is too fresh for me to work out how to talk to her, how to explain the many things I've said over the past few days that, when it all comes down to it, amount to lies.

Claire says she'd come for moral support tonight but she's got a phoner to London and I tell her I've had the moral support for the past few hours and that's how I'm able to do the show. She says she'll reschedule the phoner if I want her to. We call a cab, and I take my share of the dinner on a Christmas paper plate and Claire tells the driver I've got no choice but to eat it on the way. He knows better than to argue.

There's
couscous all over the back seat when I get out, stuff the paper plate into the nearest bin, walk into the club and hand Felicity the magazine.

She's ready to tell me how things went with Richard Stubbs and the bananas – that's how she looks as I walk over, like someone with an adventure to report on – but the magazine is already opened to the right page when I hand it to her. Whatever she was about to say sticks in her throat when she sees the headline, and she opens the magazine out, stares at both pages.

‘What?' she says. ‘This is insane.' She's scanning the article, not reading properly. It's dark in here, but the headline and the break-out quotes and the picture seem to tell the story. ‘How can they write this?'

And I have to tell her that it's true, much of it, though it didn't happen quite the way they think it did. I tell her what I can, here at the edge of a noisy club audience, and she doesn't seem to care at all that I've spent three days keeping the truth from her.

She pulls serviettes from a dispenser at the bar and wipes her eyes and says, ‘You're making my make-up run, damn you.' And I laugh at that, as I'm supposed to, and she says, ‘Oh, Meg, this is so sad.'