Zigzag Street (2 page)

Renovation is endlessly complex, I realise after dinner as I flick from one channel to another trying to work out which movie to watch. It's endlessly complex, despite my mother's assertion that it's quite straightforward if you have a plan. If you take it one step at a time and prioritise.

I have a plan. I have steps, I have priorities. But so does she. So while I'm planning to start at the front verandah and work back, she's coming round with swatches of fabric to talk about blinds, even when I make it quite clear to her that blinds are too far into the house for me just now.

She almost seems worried about me when she has to come to terms with the fact that I'm just not ready to look at blinds yet. As though there was some period in my life when I was stable and normal and easily entertained by chatting about fabrics. She wants the blinds to make me happy. She doesn't say that, but I can tell. I should tell her that blinds have never made me happy or unhappy, so however great the blinds are they are unlikely to resolve any of the big issues, other than the penetration of sunlight into the house. My long-term happiness will not be influenced by the blinds at all.

I told her my front to back plan. I explained its elegant simplicity. I explained that this way I'll miss nothing, and I guaranteed she would be pleased with the
result. So she put away the swatches and we had a dispute about the colour scheme for the verandah railings instead. This lasted several weeks.

During that time I painted an old wardrobe, first in regulation white and then with blue dabbed over it using a loofa I found in the bathroom. And while I was doing it I really thought it seemed artistic. Seemed like a hell of a good idea.

Then my mother apologised for making a big issue of the paint and the next time I looked at the wardrobe it looked like trash, like something my mother would hate, something she would take as a personal affront. So I put it in my room and apologised right back to her about my role in the colour dispute, and I said to her that this was her house, so we should use the colours she wanted.

And that, I suspect, is the basis of the problem. It's her house. Ever since my grandmother died. And the deal is that I live here rent-free if I renovate.

So I sit around in the musty, shut-up, old people's smells, the exaggerated security and cardboard boxes, not yet renovating, while my sinuses play up like buggery.

I talk to myself out loud. I talk to Greg, my grandmother's cat, who was there when she died and doesn't yet trust me. I need to hear voices in the house, even if they're all mine. I am adjusting only slowly to living alone.

I can't get into the movies tonight, not any of them.

I look out at the verandah, at the painting that isn't being done, and I think fuck it. Instead I sit down at the piano. I let my hands loose on some scales and they run up and down with the finesse of a couple of fat pink spiders. For some reason, some reason I shall never know, the sheet music for ‘Always on my Mind' was curled up under the lid the first time I opened the piano. I've now flattened it out and it's starting to become playable. This evening I do it first as Elvis, then as Willy Nelson, with appropriate introductions, but I can't do it like the Pet Shop Boys. I try to imagine myself sitting under Michael
Bolton's hair and doing it the way he would, and I try to do it like Nick Cave. And when you do it like Nick Cave it's a no-shit song. You can take it from me, when he says you were always on his mind, he means you were always on his mind.

It's probably only Greg's incessant shouting for dinner that makes me stop. He purrs as he eats and he seems happy, in an unreasonably simple way. I want to take issue with him about this. And I want to explain that I didn't mean to make his dinner two hours late tonight, and that this isn't easy for me. That I'm not used to being responsible for feeding anything other than people, not used to living alone, not used to having a piano in the house, not used to arguing about paint, not used to a hundred and sixty-eight days of celibacy, and I'm not quite sure what happens next.

My previous record was a hundred and two. That was at least six years ago, and I must admit, I thought it would never be broken, that I'd be old and toothless and hopeless before I went without for a hundred and two days again.

Greg licks up his dinner and copes with all this change a little better than I do. It must be very different for him here now. The noises I make. Music, TV, ‘Always on my Mind', one crap version after another. Very different to my grandmother and her deaf person's exaggerated human sounds, the loud clatter of pots and pans, the casual slamming of unheard doors, the unmonitored flatulence.

Greg, the big-shouldered, confident orange cat named, my grandmother once told me, after her red-headed doctor of whom she was fond. He used to shout at her and write notes and smile, and receive graciously the biscuits she made for him because he looked too thin for his own good.

How can I renovate these loaded rooms? Where do I begin in this House of Boxes? Whose past do I start to dismantle, rehabilitate, dispose of? Mine or my
grandmother's? Everything that is each of us is packaged here, dumped into scavenged boxes with the undue haste of death or forced departure.

Dozens of boxes. Many dozens of boxes, scavenged from bottle shops in August last year, and then November.

I need some boxes because I just got trashed.

I need some boxes because my grandmother just died.

But you can't let yourself hear it in your own voice, so you say something like, I'm moving house and I need some boxes to pack things into. When I was doing it the second time at least one person remembered me and said, with some suspicion,
You move a lot
. As though there could be any reason to be suspicious of a person scavenging old cardboard boxes.

From my mother's point of view, the boxes are all part of any reasonable plan. A plan that she says is easy, all you do is go through one box a night. Incredibly pragmatic. Barely possible.

It's hard to believe I lived successfully for years without my mother's reasoned and gratuitous advice. During the months I stayed with my parents before moving in here, she decided to resume high level nurturing and seems to think me incapable of caring for myself.

I'm still your mother
, she says,
and I always will be. Your grandmother gave me gratuitous advice until the day she died, and I'm going to be no different
.

So she has become fiendishly full of help, in a bustling, barging, practical way. At certain times (during a war maybe) this is probably a very useful attribute, but it lacks the subtlety required for a routine, suburban personal crisis. And she can see how helpful it isn't, which only makes things worse.

I respond instinctively with the petty childish defence of deliberately not doing whatever it is she's told me to do, and I end up loofa-ing the wardrobe. And after another weekend of renovating, forty-two and a half of
the forty-five verandah railings are still unpainted in a particularly piss-weak act of rebellion against her choice of heritage colours.

Heritage colours, even though the house has never been painted in heritage colours before. My grandparents built it in the 1920s, and as far as I know it's spent all of its seventy years as a white house with a red roof. But, as my mother said, the market demands heritage colours. So the white will become one of the many kinds of cream, a colour my grandmother would have said made the house look as though it could do with a good wash. And she would have thought even less of the Brunswick green planned for the trim.

My mother bought the paint and did the first two and a half railings to show me how good it would look, and a few weeks ago she left it to me.

I put away the unopened can, the unused brush, slip
The Queen is Dead
back into its sad green sleeve.

And I can't believe I pursued that girl for all those years, when it would never have worked.

So. Monday.

Five more days of worthy achievement before another wild weekend.

Greg eats dry food in the mornings. He's now used to me leaving after breakfast, but the first time I went to work and stayed away all day he was really shitty when I came home in the evening. I have tried to explain the concept of work to him. I have tried to explain the almost inexplicable rewards that are part of working somewhere like Shelton's (The Shelton Guaranty Company of New York, trading as PJ Shelton Bank, Australia).

Greg, it's like this, I've told him. At work I'm a very powerful man. And is not power an aphrodisiac? Day of Celibacy 169. I can vaguely remember what an erection was. In my life an aphrodisiac would be as useful as the Swiss Army knife option that removes stones from horses' hooves. And what sort of a concept is a Swiss Army knife anyway?

Buses head into town along Waterworks Road every couple of minutes at this time of day, so when I've eaten some cereal and already bored myself with the concept of work I walk up the hill and catch the next one that comes along.

The rest of the unit is already in the office. Deb, our admin assistant, says,
Hi Ricky, how was your weekend babe
? when I walk out of the lift.

Fine, I tell her. The usual. Bit of renovating. Tennis.

I'm still not used to ‘Ricky', even though she's called me Ricky from the moment she decided she liked me. My name seems to be treated as though it has an almost infinite capacity for abbreviation, and this is not something I welcome. It does not help my sense of identity. Particularly ‘Ricky', but this goes back to my childhood, when someone else was Ricky, not me.

So I'm still not used to ‘Ricky' when it comes my way, even when it seems to be meant with some affection, and seems not to mean,
Hey micro-nerd, love the tie, kill any parents on the weekend
? But maybe I did in fact have the kind of weekend grown-up Rickys have. Maybe Ricky Balaszwecki sat round doing fuck all in the name of renovation, ate half a takeaway meal and talked to a ginger cat. Reminiscing, with the fondness of hindsight, about tiny sandwiches and birthday parties.

Deb's weekend was not like that.

Well, I got really pissed on Friday
, she says when I ask what she did,
and Saturday I got a new tat. Look
.

She hooks her index finger into her top and pulls it down, proudly revealing the sun rising from her cleavage.

Did that hurt? I ask her.

Less than most
.

It's very nice, I tell her, and the nerdy inadequacy of this remark closes around my neck like a Ricky B bow tie. It's a good piece of work. Nice use of the contours.

Thanks babe
, she says and grins.
Knew you'd like it
.

Hey Rick
. Hillary's voice, coming from her office. She beckons me in and signals me to shut the door.
Did she show you the new tattoo
?

Yeah.

She laughs and holds her head in her hands in mock exasperation.
And we all thought the sun shone out of you
.

I'm sure.

How was your weekend
?

Fine. The usual.

The usual
.

Yeah.

Sounds good
.

Yeah.

I realise I should be saying more, so I try, How was yours?

Good. Great. Dan's sitting up now. He sat up on Saturday for the first time. Took us all by surprise
.

He's a smart kid. Some Saturdays I find it hard to work out how to sit up.

Just wait. One day you'll have kids. Sitting up'll be big
.

I bet it will. I bet it'll be huge. Only slightly less big than standing, or walking, or cracking the riddle of cold fusion, or brokering a lasting peace in the Middle East.

So which of those did you do on the weekend
?

Some standing, some walking. And last night I talked to Arafat and he was sounding conciliatory, so I'm hopeful.

Good boy, Ricky. But Arafat was already conciliatory
.

Maybe, but don't call me that.

She laughs.
How's the power station thing going
?

Fine. Fine. I'll be looking at it today. There was some tension on Friday to do with the slide in the greenback, but I'm trying to make it clear to everyone that that's not our problem. If there's a floor at one-oh-five yen it's okay. Below a hundred and it sinks.

Below a hundred it sinks. When did you get to be such a straight shooter
?

Hey, it's how I handle every aspect of my life.

You know you worry me, don't you
?

Sure.

Hillary is a great boss. This occurs to me about half an hour later, when I've long forgotten about the power station thing and I'm playing Sammy the Snake on my computer. I only realised what a great boss she was when she took a few months off last year to have Daniel and I filled in for her. She manages to stay in touch with everything, to just the right degree, and manages to stay calm. She makes being in charge look very easy. I managed only to do both our jobs badly.

The day she came back I almost, in the moment she walked out of the lift, told her how important she was. I wanted to stop and say to her, You don't know what you mean to me. You don't know that without you here I couldn't survive. But that would have been too strange for both of us, so I just said, It's good to have you back, with a kind of forced wry smile.

This morning Sammy the Snake has my measure. I have an inclination to make a few personal phone calls, but I resist and I try to look at the power station thing. But today the only observation I feel I can make with any confidence about it is that there are far too many pages. I actually hate joint ventures. They involve too many companies, too many hundreds of millions of dollars, too many governments, too many laws. Too many lawyers, and today I just don't feel like being one of them. And I certainly don't feel like a straight shooter. What does she mean by that?

I make myself coffee and sit drinking it slowly, gazing at the pile of overloaded manila folders in front of me.

Hillary is talking to me now. I miss the first part but I hear the bit where she says,
Rick, things don't seem good
.

Well, they have been better.

I'm worried that you're not looking after yourself
.

Did my mother just call you?

Before I had Daniel your shirts looked ironed
.

I just haven't organised an ironing person as part of my new arrangements yet.

And this makes my crap situation sound surprisingly special. New arrangements. It sounds as though I've made a lifestyle choice.

You could organise an iron though. I'm sure you've even got one. I mean, it doesn't bother me that your shirts are never ironed. That's not it. It's just that some days you don't even seem aware of it. You don't seem happy at all. I'm worried about you
.

Thanks. I'll be okay.

If you aren't, if you ever aren't and there's anything I can do, make sure you let me know
.

Yeah. Thanks.

So she leaves me with my half a cup of coffee and my stack of documents. She's great. And she's worried about me. She's confident, she's smart, and she's a babe, really. She's married, she's my manager. I can't understand some of my thought processes. They seem as though they're out to harm me.

She's confident, she's smart and she has a perfectly normal nice-person's interest in my wellbeing. That's it. That's what's happening.

I sit staring through a powerful blankness at the calendar that runs down the edge of my 94/95 financial year desk planner, and I tell myself to put the crap of the last six months out of my head, and to get back to the job I'm here for.

And it's almost impossible to sleep in a bed alone, when it's not what you're used to any more. Any bed now wakes me with emptiness. Leaves me lying there thinking, if you care for me deeply, why did you leave?

The power station thing. That's what I'm here for. That's what I've got to get to now. I should call New York.

I should call New York but it's Sunday evening in New York.

I turn on my computer and open Sammy the Snake.