Zigzag Street (4 page)

She handled it like a scientist, the trashing. Stepped back from it and took out all the emotion. Handled it as though it was the decision of some public authority, quite beyond the powers of the two of us.

She gave me a list, typed on her computer at work, headed Suggested Division of Common Property.

And she hardly made eye contact for several days. We stayed in separate rooms then. This was my choice. It was probably hers too, but I said it first. She said what we needed was a clean break, but I think sometimes even she was disturbed by the cold brutality of it all.

Then I'd get upset and she'd get upset, but it didn't change her mind. She'd taken the big step, pushed past the bewildering moment of trashing when the
panang nua
almost fell from my mouth.

I just have to get away for a while. I just have to do some other things. There's no-one else. No-one else
. And then, eventually, not really so long ago, on the phone from Melbourne when I kept pushing,
It's over. Don't you know what over means
?

Some of these sounds may never escape my head. I wake up and they're there, they're real, they're here right now. As though, in Melbourne, there's a mouth I know well making the shape of an O. Telling me
Over
Red lips, next to a phone. O-ver.

I know what it means.

I know what it means.

I make toast, I give Greg his dry food breakfast right on time, I tell myself routine is good. Healthy. A good sign.

I see red lips trashing me, just at a whisper, like they've done most of the night. And the toast doesn't taste good. Not much tastes good at the moment, particularly toast. But that's a different matter, maybe. When I first moved in the toast tasted very strange indeed, not dreadful, not as dreadful as it should have done, but undeniably strange.

After several days of this, several days of thinking maybe my grandmother toasted rye bread and its influence was somehow lingering, I decided to clean the toaster. And a crispy, multiply-toasted mouse's leg fell out. Just the leg, even when I cleaned the toaster thoroughly, just the leg. I had to sit down for a while, and in the end all I could face for breakfast that day was a couple of mouthfuls of Scotch.

I have a new toaster now and soon, I imagine, this discovery shall be widely regarded as nothing more than an urban myth.

Sal calls me to suggest takeaway tonight.
We thought we might pick it up and bring it over to your place
, she says. And before I can say, When's the latest I can let you know, she says,
And don't give me any of that when's the latest I can let you know crap
.

My tail gets munched, and a particularly glamorous Sammy the Snake performance goes the way of all before it. The game dissolves in front of me and a groan comes out before I can stop it.

What was that
?

Existential angst. Just the usual.

So we're coming round then
?

Tonight?

Yeah, about seven-thirty. We might even bring Tim and Chris. Have you got any particular food preference
? It seems they're coming round.

I'm not sure.

So does that mean no, you have no particular preference? Or are you actually unsure as to whether or not you have a particular preference
?

I suspect that at present I can neither confirm nor deny whether or not I have a particular preference, and I may not be able to do so for some time.

Does this mean I should pick
?

I'm not sure.

I'm sorry, did I call you on a bad day for your brain
?

As opposed to other days?

Okay, we'll make this easy. Just make sure you have five clean plates, five glasses, five forks and a couple of spoons for serving and we'll handle everything else
.

Five, five, five and two. Got it.

Some days my concentration is quite poor. People catch me when my mind is swimming among ideas and not able to grapple easily with conversation. Today I am endeavouring to make headway with the power station thing, and I am endeavouring not to clutter every moment with thoughts of Anna Hiller. But anything that reminds me of anything in the last three years reminds me of her. I am managing to construct an entire universe in which she is central, but absent.

And I'm well aware that this is a particularly stupid thing to do.

At home, I prepare the seventeen items expected of me and I place them on the red Laminex kitchen table. Sal and Jeff bring wine, so I drink quite a bit of it for them and feel more relaxed than I have for a couple of days. And the conversation moves briskly from one topic to another and I wade slowly after it, lurching in from time to time to offer some remark that is only just no longer relevant.

I have trouble moving on, I tell them. Trouble committing to a new topic.

And I'm watching these four people, these two couples, at least as much as I'm listening to them. And being the only presently trashed person among my friends, I seem to spend a lot of my time in odd-numbered groups. Nights with five plates.

While Jeff and Tim debate first the value of the adversarial talk show as a social document and then whether or not there's a cricket career to be made out of the backspinner, I'm privately focussing on the coupling issue and not saying much.

Jeff said to me once, when I asked him (when I said to him, Tell me exactly why and give me detail),
She's
smart and she's strong and I like that. Sure, it's not always straightforward, but straightforward never really worked for me. So it has its challenges but that's okay. We've decided she's forthright. We have a deal where I can refer to her as forthright but not uncompromising. She's generous, more generous than me. She does things for people who matter to her
. And then he shrugged his shoulders and said,
And all that's great, but so what? It sounds like a reference. Really, it just happened
. One of those things I guess. The L thing, you know. And for the L thing he offers no theory, and that's rare.

Naturally I haven't let it rest there. In my own time, in my own head, right now in my own mad, troubled swimming among ideas, I've tested all kinds of hypotheses, trying to work out what goes right, what goes wrong. Comparing Sal to Anna, comparing Jeff to me. Comparing Anna to Jeff and Sal to me and Sal to Jeff. I've learned very little of course, but the processes of comparison are sometimes inexorable. And still the most appropriate comparison is usually me to a pair of Steelo underpants and a hair shirt.

Should I try to pursue a relationship with someone like Sal, or with someone quieter, less powerful? Should I call Anna, just one more time and …

And what about Tim and Chris? What about the other relationship in front of me right now? Tim and his PhD (Cantab) in history and his Radical Responses to the Queen Caroline Agitations (J Brit Stud, 1995) and his policy job with the state government. Tim and his fondness for recreational theorising and pulling his socks up when he plays tennis. Tim and the thing Sal refers to as his one big moment of ‘wanker fame', his credit in the Oxford English Dictionary for discovering the first reference to the term ‘rumpy-pumpy':

Chris and her quietness, placid non-meaningful quietness. Chris and her complete ignorance of the part of English history we refer to, somewhat strangely, as ‘Tim's period'. Chris and her job at a Flight Centre, where they met when she booked a trip for him once, a trip with his previous girlfriend, though it's now referred to as
My trip to America
.

How do they couple? How do they fit together? How did it even cross their minds, and how is it still going now?

One weekend, when they hadn't been going out long, a group of us went to Jeff's family's house at the coast and Tim and Chris woke us several times each night with the sounds of short bursts of vigorous mattress bouncing and one of them (we still don't know which) braying like a mule. Delirious maybe, intriguing certainly, but, in terms of duration at least, way short of rumpy-pumpy. Each morning they would get up late and look smug, knowing that we had heard it all but would say nothing.

There were six of us that weekend. Six plates, six of everything. Except couples, there were three couples.

Some days I'd really be better with Sammy the Snake. It's not quite the same, but no-one gets hurt and the disappointments are bearable.

After they go I lie on my bed. I have had too much wine. Some nights this conversation goes on all around me. What am I going to do?

Small manageable tasks, and no more than one or two at a time. That's what I'm going to do. I shall become the master of the small and manageable. Even if that might be a Jeff Ross idea.

Thursday night I go to Toowong Village. I park in the usual area in the basement carpark and I ride the escalators with my small number of tasks in mind. I buy a Whipper Snipper.

The boy in K Mart who helps with my purchase tells me he has just read an article that called Brisbane the Whipper Snipper capital of the world, and he offers this to me as though he is acknowledging my interest in a piece of the action.

Why? I ask him.

Why what
? he says slowly.

Why is Brisbane the Whipper Snipper capital of the world?

Oh, because people buy more Whipper Snippers here, or at least have more. People have more Whipper Snippers
.

I can see he is not a very analytical person and I take the bottom of the range $55 plastic model that requires limited assembly and comes with a free Home Improvements cap. On the way to the car I stop for a burger at the food court. This was never one of Anna's preferred options. She viewed the food court with disdain. When I'm halfway through the burger I begin to understand
her feelings (at least about the food court), but I decide to use this as a test of my ability to commit and I finish the burger.

We used to live in a rented two-bedroom flat near here. We were saving for a deposit on a house and we were just about there. So I can't help shopping at Toowong. It's what I'm used to, even if it's no longer quite the closest shopping centre to where I live.

I buy the groceries, and I buy a flea killing agent to be added to Greg's food. This seems like a deceptively simple way to deal with the problem.

It is. I get home and he doesn't eat the food. He looks down at it, the meal he eats every night, but now with three drops of flea killer mixed in, and he turns back to me with a look that clearly indicates he is unimpressed. I have insulted his intelligence and he would like his dinner now. It's all too clear I won't win. I throw the food in the bin and give him more, this time without the unwelcome poison. He eats it right away. Ten thousand fleas rustle happily in his fur, unaware that this is only round one.

I go through the mail. Despite the inviting wad of apparent correspondence (and the obvious loser hope that maybe she'll write) there is no actual mail at all. Only limitless junk opportunities for changing my life for the better. Arthritis treatments, carpet cleaning, wedding and engagement rings (thanks a lot), wheel alignment, mattresses (with free mattress protector), pizzas, pizzas, pizzas and the poor man's porn of underwear ads.

Why did my grandmother never get herself a No Junk Mail sticker? Did she like this stuff? I think my life is better than that. I still hate junk mail.

On the other hand, you can never have too many pizza vouchers.