Zigzag Street (11 page)

On the way up to our Friday meeting with Barry Greatorex, Hillary tells me he's still not smoking, but that he has a bowl of chocolate-coated coffee beans on his desk instead.

And it's not working out well
.

She's right. He doesn't look good. He looks very large now, seriously larger than the already excessive largeness of ten days ago, his beady, sleepless eyes set further back in his head, sweat glistening among the grey flaps of his jowls and creeping into broad circles under his arms, despite the air-conditioning. His buttons are straining and a couple are missing, or at least undone, and he is losing his trousers beneath the broad mass of his abdomen, which sits across his thighs like a Stable-table, kept in place by a pair of thick red braces that end somewhere beyond view, as though two mountaineers have just abseiled down his front. He is clearly biology gone wrong, a system without the usual checks and balances, a victim of his own rebellious chemistry.

So
, he says, craning up the big sweaty flaps of eyelids,
so
, rocking back at a perilous angle in his chair then cannoning forward again, as threatening as a medieval battering ram.
Fill me in
.

Well, I tell him, feeling really sane, I'm trying to keep everyone involved at all stages, trying to make everyone part of the process, so it's not quite as quick as I'd like
it to be. But it's under control and they're with us so far.

Timeframe
? he asks, opening his hands into a chubby kind of question.

End of next week probably, before I hear back from everybody and have some kind of response together.

So we think we might go to Sydney the week after
, Hillary says.
The timing's not a problem and it gives Rick a chance to shore things up a bit
.

He nods and then looks as though he is distracted by something out the window. He stares at the sky for a while then jerks his attention back to us and nods again.
Hmmm
, he says, and goes through a series of apparently purposeless facial movements. He scoops up a handful of chocolate-coated coffee beans and tips them into his mouth.
Fine, fine
, he says as he crunches, showing us a snarl of brown-stained teeth, and it appears we are free to go.

It's hard to be sure if he trusts our work, or if he's adopting a more hands-off management style, or if he's just losing it.

Good meeting
, Hillary says when we're in the lift.
I thought he was a goner when he leaned back in the chair. I thought, if Barry hits the floor he's a dead man. We'll never move him
.

She comes with me into my office.

So, end of next week then
.

Yeah.

I've got to organise Sydney, okay
?

Yeah. It will be ready. I'm sorry it's taken as long as it has, but I think it's there now. I've done the work, I've liaised appropriately and now it's out there and I've just got to get everyone's views and do whatever I need to to take them into account.

I hate letting her down. This should have been done by now, I know that. And this is the closest she'll get to telling me. Saying the deadline with just a hint of doubt.

I go to Jeff and Sal's for dinner, and as soon as Sal opens the door I smell curry.

It's chicken
tikka masala, she tells me.
It's been a big month for chicken
tikka masala.

I had a shopping problem
, Jeff says from the kitchen.

As you can see he's slightly defensive about it, as men with his neglected planning skills are prone to be. We have seven cans of
tikka masala
sauce and, I have just discovered, no toilet paper
.

I'm really not appreciated
, he tells me.
I make the dinner, I make the lunches, I tidy up after breakfast …

Yeah, yeah, we all know. Tidying up after breakfast, the most underrated domestic task
.

And your only job is the cleaning and you hire someone. One small misjudgement with the shopping and this is the thanks I get
.

Seven cans of
tikka masala
sauce and no toilet paper? What is the appropriate way to thank someone for that
?

She turns to me but just at that moment I'm not doing well. And it's not because I've just realised I regularly seek detailed advice from a man who is set up to make a curry for twenty-eight people, but hasn't the foresight to provide toilet facilities. I don't have any theories about appropriate thanks just now. I think seven cans of
tikka masala
sauce and no toilet paper would be just fine. I want to tell them that. I want to say, Sal, don't worry, toilet paper's easy. You can always buy toilet paper. But I can't say a thing. I try to breathe deeply.

We eat the chicken
tikka masala
. We drink wine. I talk and they listen. I spill my guts and it takes who knows how long. I drink more.

Sal says,
You get through these things. They happen and you get through them. And you never know when it's all going to change. When, suddenly, things are different. I didn't think I was ready for anything when Jeff came along. I hadn't gone out with anyone for months. I'd missed exams because of glandular fever. I hadn't worked either, so I had no money. Things could have been better.
And then it all changed. Suddenly, from this diet of potatoes and bread and cheese, there was this boy turning up, with wine. And you know what? I liked him
.

It gets late. I stay the night in their spare room.

The amount of junk mail astounds me when I get home in the morning. How many pizza deals can one household use? How can junk mail work when there's just so much of it? I'm about to drop the whole pile in the bin when I notice an A-mart Allsports ad.

And I go and pick up a tennis racquet for a
Sensational!!! $100 dollars off
. Maybe I think it'll change my luck. Or maybe this is just emblematic of the change in me. From cautious contemplator to reckless impulse buyer, junk mail sucker, speeding through orange lights with my eighty bucks in my pocket and the flier on the passenger seat.

In the store I weigh the racquet in my hands and it feels very special.

Hey, sensational, I say to the guy.

You obviously know your racquets
.

Yeah. What sort of poundage would this be?

Yeah. Yeah, that's the question isn't it? Yeah. You're right you know. With the hi-modulus graphite allowing you to have those non-linear offset strings, you drop five to ten pounds, you get yourself a bigger sweet spot and you lose nothing. So where would that leave you? I'd take you for about a sixty-five to seventy pound man myself
.

Yeah. Yeah, about that.

And all this time I'm swishing to impress. I'm on the brink of telling him something about my experiences on
the fringe of The Tour, about how I might've made it if my shoulder hadn't given out. Then I realise that's Jeff's bullshit story, not mine, and I'm not sure if there's an intellectual property issue at stake.

I'm swishing backhand after backhand and taking a few slow-motion serves (but still dragging the toe). This racquet is great. This is probably the closest I've been to an erection in months. I want to tell the guy, because my first erection after all this time is going to be quite a moment, but I don't think he'd understand.

At home I toss the cover onto the table and the urge to practise (while in my mind revisiting the great Wimbledon men's singles finals of the early eighties) is irresistible.

So around the house I go. Swish, swish. Swish, swish. And it's particularly fine for backhand volleys. Greg runs past and out, I'm sure thinking,
Who is this dickhead? First the Whipper Snipper, now this. Did no-one tell him about Outside
?

Invigorated by the purchase of the racquet, but thwarted by the lack of opportunity to use it, I decide I should do something. I decide to renovate.

But feeling none too inclined to renovate, I bargain it down to tidy before the decision is binding.

I go into one of the bedrooms but there are far too many boxes.

Before I'm put off entirely I grab a box and take it into the lounge room. Here it is the only box, so it looks manageable.

It's only when I open it that I realise it's one of my grandmother's and not one of mine. On top is one of her treasured possessions, her Scrabble set. Scrabble saw my grandmother at her least compromising. She thought little of losing at Canasta, so if any of her grandchildren were unhappy and needing something grandmotherly she'd usually get the cards out and allow them a thrilling, narrow victory. Scrabble was a different matter. If your cat got run over she'd still shit on you at Scrabble. It
was one of those things. She had to. If you were convalescing from the flu and your cat got run over after eating your goldfish and you'd just done badly in something at school and it was someone's birthday and they'd invited everyone but you (or realistically maybe you and Ricky bow tie Balaszwecki), if you were smart you'd say, Do you want to play Canasta, Nan? And soon you'd be feeling slightly better than you were before. If you were stupid you'd say, Want to play Scrabble, Nan? and she'd get that reluctant pained expression on her face, because she knew she'd still have to shit on you. And how was she going to explain that to your mother? The art of being a grandparent is to judge the most important times to engineer a credible loss.

If there were ever any doubts about my grandmother's win-at-all-costs attitude to Scrabble these were dispelled three years ago, when she was eighty-eight. My mother, sensing her first real opportunity since she'd won a narrow victory when my grandmother was distracted by severe gout in 1965, challenged her during a brief hospital admission to stabilise her heart failure. The game, as my mother tells it, had reached some kind of impasse, not seen for almost thirty years, and my grandmother fidgeted and gnashed her edentulous gums before breaking the deadlock by sliding the letters CUN in front of a T and glaring fearsomely at my mother and saying,
Well, it's a word isn't it
?

Beneath the Scrabble set is something I have never seen before. It looks like an old cigarette case, and I'm not sure what it's doing there as neither of my grandparents smoked. It contains a letter, with the envelope postmarked Winton, 21.11.23.

Later that year, the money had come from somewhere to buy a block of land at 34 Zigzag Street, Red Hill. And thirteen years later my mother was born, an only child.