Zigzag Street (20 page)

After tennis on Sunday I buy a sausage roll and a tube of wine gums.

And you wonder why you don't shit
, Jeff says.

I don't wonder. I know why I don't shit.

Beans, eat beans
.

Beans, okay.

He insists on taking me home for a meal of beans, and I sit on a stool in the kitchen sucking wine gums while he talks me through the preparation of a kidney bean pilaf.

After we've eaten, and I have to admit that for a bean meal it's really not bad, Sal says,
Shall we give Rick his present now
?

Sure
.

So what do I get the present for?

For being such a sad boy. Sal wanted to give you something to symbolise your triumphs
.

She comes back in with a T-shirt, a white T-shirt with my fist-in-the-air
Westside Chronicle
photo on it, enlarged. And on the back, in big letters, ‘Hero of the ‘hood'.

How special, I say. I shall wear it with my medal and they shall call me the mayor of Zigzag Street.

And they can feature you in one of those curious character segments
, Jeff says,
when a current affairs show needs lightening up, you know, between the infanticide
story and the pensioner fraud story. And they can edit it and come up with bizarre camera angles to make you look like a complete idiot whatever you do
.

Yeah, and I think Kevin would be in that too. We're a double act in the eyes of the media, a sort of Steptoe and Son for the nineties, but very elegant.

I can recall a time before the trashing, perhaps a year ago, when some act of flagrant incorrectness led Sal to buy me a T-shirt with ‘Bastard' on it. Perhaps it would be more appropriate if I was wearing that now. But for the moment I'm the ‘Hero of the ‘hood', and modelling my shirt in their kitchen to some acclaim.

Later Jeff drives me home.

You seem a bit crazy at the moment
, he says in the car.
Is it just all that work you did last night? I mean, apart from the usual
?

Yeah. Yeah. No. Well, it's to do with work.

What do you mean? To do with work. Things at work? People at work? Do I get any details
?

You want the details?

Sure. Always
.

Okay.

But I don't seem to go on.

Okay? There must be more than okay. You realise the longer you spin this out, the better it needs to be
.

It's good enough. Okay. Well, last night I went to work. You know that. There's more. They turn off the air-conditioning around eight at night on the weekends and it got very hot. No-one else was there. No-one else had been there the whole time, so some time after midnight, I took my clothes off.

You took your clothes off
.

Sure.

All your clothes
?

Well, not straightaway. But eventually, yes. All my clothes. And I have to say it felt good. It felt so good that when I saw my reflection in something I just
couldn't help myself. This very strange feeling came over me, and I turned up the Musak. And I danced.

You danced naked in the office
.

It's not over yet. Anyway, there I was dancing naked in the office, specifically dancing naked in the foyer, in fact, right in front of the lifts. And the lift doors open, and there's Hillary. Of all possible times she picks one o'clock this morning to go in to work.

And you're dancing naked
.

Yeah. And this is not just dancing. This is special. I'm putting a lot into this. This is probably some of the best naked dancing the fifteenth floor has ever seen. And it's not over yet. The lift doors open again, and there's Barry Greatorex in a dinner suit.

This is a dream. This must be a dream. You can't tell me this actually happened
.

Yes I can. So, he just watches us for a few seconds, and he says nothing, then he backs into the lift—you have to remember he's got a hell of a turning circle, so it's a lot easier to back in—and he goes.

He goes, having seen you and Hillary at work at one am, and you totally naked
.

Exactly.

He's likely to get the wrong idea
.

Well, here's the twist. I didn't tell you there was a twist, but there is. And the twist is that, well, it mightn't be such a wrong idea. Because, on Tuesday night, in Sydney …

And I can't go on now. I can't actually say it.

What? What in Sydney
? He's going to make me say it.

On Tuesday night, in Sydney … Well, Sydney was tough. Sydney was very strange. It caught us both unawares. And we just, well, we just happened to have sex. It was one of those things.

One of those things? What things
?

One of those things where neither of you means it
to happen. In fact, you assume it won't happen, so it does.

You didn't mean it to happen? You had sex and you didn't mean it to happen
?

Yeah.

How does that work? How do two people not mean sex to happen and then have sex? You were both willing I take it
?

Well, sure, but we didn't mean to be.

I'm not getting this yet. You didn't mean it. Neither of you. I think it might have crossed your minds. Otherwise it's a pretty bizarre accident, a real billion to one shot. There you were, the two of you in a meeting, and suddenly, you both realised your penis was inside her. It must have been quite embarrassing. And what did the other people do? Do they think that's a Brisbane thing now? Do they think that up here we find our penises in each other all the time
?

It wasn't quite like that. And can I just say all this penis-inside business is a very limited male view of intercourse.

Right at the moment your hold on any high moral ground is at best tenuous
.

I'm aware of that.

This is big. This is bad. Did you know this was bad
?

I knew it was bad. That's why I assumed it wouldn't happen. I don't do bad things. I do crap things, sometimes insensitive things, but that's usually as far as it goes. I really like Hillary. I think she's great. And I must admit I'd had fantasies, but I thought that was fine, well, not a big deal.

Fantasies are fine
.

Good. Well I have plenty of those, and I thought this was just another one.

And then, through one act you go from the crumbly nobility of the Krapmeister to evil Schlong Lord
.

I think I still want to be the Krapmeister.

Maybe it's too late
.

I can't deal with that. It just happened. We've both agreed it just happened, and that's that. And it wasn't the way you'd think. She's been having a bad time. We both had needs. It was really intimate.

And right now I feel, and I'm sure look, as though I'm going to cry, so he eases up on me. We don't like it when I cry.

This is a very strange time for you, he says
.

Very strange.

You must feel quite out of control
.

Yes. And I don't like that. I want things to be different. I don't sleep, I can't work, I can't think straight and I feel like fucking Chicken Little, looking everywhere for some kind of affection.

You feel like fucking a chicken now
?

Fucking Chicken Little. It was clearly an adjective. It was never a verb. But maybe you've got a point. Maybe not even the chickens are safe. Right now, I just don't know.

I turn down his offer to stay at their place tonight, and he says,
Call if there's a problem. Any time, okay
? And I lie in the dark with my head spinning. I'm not sure any more if Chicken Little was the one who looked everywhere for affection or the one who thought the sky was falling, but either seems applicable.

And tonight I'm angry with Anna Hiller. Tonight it's easier to deal with if it's all her fault.

And then it's not her fault, and I don't blame her. I just miss her.

So have I made no progress at all? On nights like this it seems more a descent into madness than any kind of progress. I should be okay now. I really should. I should be okay not in a relationship. I shouldn't fall apart, and this does seem like falling apart.

I have friends, good friends, a job, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Not to mention food, shelter, clothing and the consistent and reliable absence of torture. I can make a list that says I'm better off than ninety per cent of the world's population, but that's all meaningless. It doesn't help. It only misunderstands happiness.

So it's dark and still and late and I'm missing Anna. And I thought I'd miss her less by now. I had expected to have moved on, to have swung like a single and not like a plumb bob. To have lived recklessly but harmlessly and without consequences. And my one and only reckless act doesn't fit with this at all. Some people seem to be good at being single. I don't seem to be one of them. I can't work, I can't renovate, I can't remember things, I can't be sure of what's in my own head, and everything just takes such effort.

So does this end? Jeff tells me it ends. Mister Security says things will be okay. He should envy my freedom, and I should piss him off by living wildly, but it's not
happening that way. I just make him feel much better about long-term monogamy, a much luckier man. I have days when I want to surround myself with girls, just to make him gnash his teeth, but every part of that's ridiculous.

I think I should go on one of those courses about being a male in the nineties. One of those ones where you get to shout a lot. I think shouting would be good.

And I don't want to change this house. I don't want to talk to my mother, because she will talk to me about changing the house. It should be the Way it was. I want to ask her about my grandfather, but from what she's said before I don't know that she knows much more than I do. I think Kevin was right. I think he kept a lot to himself. Maybe my grandmother knew some things, but I missed out on asking her by a matter of months and that pisses me off too.

I'm not sure why I need these answers. Why this has any bearing on the renovations, or on me, but it feels like it does. Maybe I think I've found a family history of periods of despair, and that somewhere in there is an answer. I want to know what my grandfather went through, what he did in the early twenties, what was in his head before he came here and they built this house. There should be other letters, other evidence.

I think I've been attempting to move on through reconstructing some safe platform in my own past, something that includes the answers I need, particularly, I suppose, to the end of things with Anna. I need to be able to put that down to something in the past, so I can believe it won't happen again. Then all this will feel less dangerous. I need to make some sense of it, instead of losing myself in purposeless, painful rumination. But I'm not kicking out of it. Nothing's resolving. Some days there's only more trouble.

And then there's Sydney. I want to sit down with Peter and Hillary and talk, and get whatever I deserve. I also want to run for cover, and pretend it never
happened. But it did. And I'm looking at this in a very old-fashioned way, honest retribution, just desserts, as though my life can't possibly be the consequence-free road movie I'd been hoping for the night of the flat battery, because it's already an old western, and I'm now the guy in the black hat, the amoral, straight-shooting gun-slinger with nowhere to call home, pursued by vengeance as long as it takes vengeance to find him. And I hate those films.

And I can't accept that I've made a mess of things with Hillary, that there was something great for a moment there, but I fumbled it. I blew it, and now things can't even be the way they were, and all I'm left with of her is her appalling use of the cowboy movie as metaphor.

Of course I'm thinking, has this been in me all the time? Did Anna know I was like this, and that's why she left? Did she know that there was something bad about me, some unsalvageable flaw that I'm just not brave enough to face?

Why all this guilt? Why this need for punishment?

More questions. More questions. All this thinking and only more questions.