Read Desperate Husbands Online
Authors: Richard Glover
Desperate Husbands
For Amanda Higgs
The teenage boys’ guide to water conservation
A decade or so ago, I invented a game called
Who’s Got the Weirdest Parents?.
It’s true it didn’t receive the rush of global attention achieved by Trivial Pursuit or Su Doku, but among my small group of friends, it became mildly popular for at least a few months.
The rules were simple enough. A group of people would gather in a circle, armed with a bottle of wine or two, and take turns recounting weird stories about their parents or, in some versions, their extended family. Within minutes you’d hear stories of such total frothing insanity, you’d be left gasping for breath. How could your seemingly normal friends have clambered out of such a murky genetic pool?
Why did I invent the game? All my life I have been hopeless at games, both physical and intellectual. My earliest memory of school is of a rugby coach barking at me, ‘Go get the ball, Glover,’ and me calling back in an effete
trill, ‘Can’t, sir. Might get hurt, sir.’ I had a vested interest in developing a game in which I had some chance of victory.
Who’s Got the Weirdest Parents?
was surely that game.
When I was a baby, growing up in New Guinea, my mother had wrapped stickytape around my head in a failed attempt to reduce the angle of my protruding ears. She only stopped when the district nurse asked about the cause of the bloodied stripe around my infant skull. Tropical heat rash? No, stickytape trauma. My father, as a young British sailor, had visited Hiroshima a few weeks after the dropping of the bomb and had long been convinced that only by drinking heavily could he keep the radioactive effects at bay.
By the time I was fifteen, their marriage was such that my mother ran off with my school English teacher. This left my fellow students so gobsmacked it took them as long as a week to realise that, in a situation like this, it was their job to taunt me mercilessly. My father, meanwhile, was so heartbroken that he left home as well—rushing back to England and leaving me the house.
I’m not complaining: it was a pleasant middle-class suburban home. It even had a pool and a chest freezer. But the truth remains—as Jocasta, my partner, sometimes puts it—‘Richard never really left home. Home left him.’
My father eventually returned home, yet this story—complete with Jocasta’s one-liner—was often enough to push me over the line to victory in
Who’s Got the Weirdest Parents?
But sometimes not. What was amazing was that everybody had a story. At least one of their parents, on at least one occasion, had done something truly bizarre.
One friend, for example, explained how her father, a medical practitioner, would sit in front of the TV each night
with a pillow tied to his head, sucking on a hanky. It was his method of reducing the poisonous messages emanating from the TV set. Another recounted how his father would walk around the house naked, singing love songs to a mistress who may or may not have existed—no one in the family could be sure.
‘OK,’ we’d all say at that point. ‘Game over. You win.’
On some occasions, a friend might explain that they were unable to play. ‘It sounds like good fun,’ they would say, ‘but I’ll sit this one out and listen. You see, my parents where so staid, boring and normal…’
They’d just be finishing this last bit of the sentence—‘staid, boring and normal’—when they’d start to slow down, as if walking through sticky mud. The last word would come out like a slowed-down tape-recording: ‘and n-o-r-m-a-l.’ There would then be this troubled pause, followed by the words: ‘Well, unless you count the way my father…’
Out would then tumble some eye-popping tale of total barking madness, made more remarkable by the fact that the family had clearly become so completely used to it they no longer saw it as odd.
I remember in particular an old flatmate who spent five minutes apologising for his crushingly dull parents and his consequent inability to play the game, before being hit by a sudden thought.
‘Well,’ he said after a pause, ‘unless you count the way my father couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else touching or laundering his clothes. He installed a washer and a dryer, right there in the garage, so that he could come home from work, park the car, and then personally do all the laundering and drying of his work clothes before entering the house.
They’d then be ready to slip on again before he drove out in the morning without anyone else having touched them.
‘Would a story like that count in the game?’
‘Yeah,’ someone would say after a stunned silence. ‘That’s generally the sort of thing we would count.’
One of the things I like about the TV show
Desperate Housewives
is that it acknowledges how bizarre life can get in the suburbs. I’ve only one complaint about the show. The producers should realise: it’s not only the housewives who are desperate.
None of the Desperate Housewives has a mother as insane as mine—a mother who routinely cleans her son’s appliances to death. Not one is shacked up with someone as fabulous and fierce as my partner, Jocasta—a woman whose mood changes according to whatever novel she happens to be reading. And not one is as mad as me, for reasons that will become apparent.
In the end, why should the Desperate Housewives be quite so desperate? They’re rich, good-looking and very thin. Their appliances all work. They have time to apply lip gloss.
If you want to know
desperate
, just come this way…
Things are getting
desperate. I must try and
re-engage her with reality.
I shout out to her: ‘Do you
know where the shin-guards
are? Did we ever get them
out of the car from last
week?’ To which she
responds: ‘In Moscow the
trees on the boulevards are
in leaf, and dust rises from
the roads.’
For the first time in ages our bank account has struggled into the serious black. At one point there’s a couple of thousand bucks in there, uncommitted cash, just sitting about, winking at me. I feel like Kerry Packer. I begin contemplating all sorts of rash behaviour: paying off loans, adding to my super, buying a pair of jeans without a big hole in the crotch. It’s a moment of liberation. Which is when every appliance in our house drops dead. Fridge, oven, video and dryer. It is as if they were signalling to each other: ‘Quick, the bastard is about to get ahead. Let’s do something. Everyone together now: die.’
All the appliances go within ten days of each other. Not one appliance can be fixed. All need to be replaced. We are now heavily in debt. Mr Bung Lee and Mr Hardly Normal are both a lot richer.
First to go is the fridge. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, it emits a low, straining growl, like that of a wounded animal. Apparently, fridges always die in the middle of the night. I guess they are alone in their task of crisping the vegetables and fall victim to existential dread. ‘What’s it all for?’ whines the fridge. ‘What’s in it for me?’
By morning the corpse is already warm. A pool of dirty water spreads over the floor, like a bloodstain in a Tarantino movie. Due to my mass-manufacturing cooking methods, I am staring at my own body weight in defrosted bolognaise sauce.
‘I am staring at my own body weight in defrosted bolognaise sauce,’ I say to Jocasta.
‘Don’t exaggerate,’ says Jocasta, bleakly. ‘There’d only be 100 kilos in there, max.’
I find her comments insulting, and so distract myself with the
Yellow Pages.
The Fridge Man is called. He arrives and declares there is no hope.
I set out on my first trip to Mr Bung Lee. It’s twenty years since I have bought a fridge and things have changed. The fridges all have ice-makers, water dispensers and, in one case, internet access. This, presumably, is so the fridge can better access your banking details, and time the perfect moment to stop working.
One model even records the pattern of your fridge usage, turning up the cold during periods in which you habitually open the door: in my case, the half-hour between 9.30 and 10.00 every night, during which I simply cannot believe we have run out of beer. I open the fridge, root around, close the fridge, sigh and then open the door once more. Surely, if I
just check once more behind the cabbage, a final beer will suddenly appear?
Jocasta has noted this behaviour and thinks less of me for it. I already live with a contemptuous woman. I’m unsure whether I also want to live with a contemptuous fridge. I go for the simplest model. They deliver it two days later.
Just when the new fridge arrives, the oven decides to stop working: it seems that the appliances are involved in some sort of tag-team relay. The oven, mind you, has never really worked, which may be why we’ve spent the last fifteen years living on a diet of unrelieved bolognaise sauce. Now it’s given up all signs of life. Frankly, I’m glad the mongrel is dead. I remove more money from the bank account and pay a visit to Mr Hardly Normal. I buy the oven with the biggest discount sticker—an insanely complex wall unit, featuring twenty-three different combinations of bottom element, top element, fans and grills. I try to get Jocasta on the phone to discuss the choice, but she’s in a meeting. I buy it anyway, without consultation. I should be awarded an Australian Bravery Medal.
As it happens, Jocasta quite likes the oven, largely on the basis that, after fifteen years of the other one, it has the advantage of getting hot. For us, this is a remarkably novel feature in an oven.
The remaining appliances sense the happy mood. We have a new fridge, purring away, and an oven capable of getting hot. There is still money in the bank: around fifty cents, if you must ask. Jocasta even has her arm around me, and is suggesting we open a delightful bottle of white wine—as chilled by our new fridge.
The appliances panic. Their plan is in pieces. That night, the VCR eats three tapes, spitting the chewed remains venomously onto the carpet. The air is rent with the screams of the dryer, writhing like a dying wildebeest. I glance up and spot the toaster watching us, malevolently. It’s then the appliances bring in the big guns. The computer seizes up.
The next morning, I ring the local computer store and arrange a home visit from one of the young technicians. I’ve never met him before but he has the same manner as every computer help guy I have ever met. Whether at home or work, they always walk in with the calm, avuncular manner of a senior surgeon. ‘Let’s see what’s going wrong here,’ they say with a patronising smile, as if you’re a bit dim and have probably forgotten to turn the thing on at the power point. Three hours later they are still sitting there. There’s some strange problem, they explain, which they are unable to identify. It’s never happened before. Usually this is a ten-minute job. But not this time. They just can’t figure it out.
Trouble is, there’s always some strange problem. It’s never a ten-minute job. They are always baffled.
This particular nineteen-year-old is now going through the items in My Computer, and clicking OK on each. It’s the fifth time he’s done this—pulling up the items, and clicking OK. Perhaps it’s like a combination lock: if only he can click the OKs in the right sequence the machine will reveal its mysteries. It’s the computer equivalent of a mechanic hitting the underside of your car with a stick, hoping the thing will suddenly roar back into life.
I just wish he’d admitted the truth when he first came to the door. ‘Computers, sir, are a mystery.’ That’s how he should have begun. ‘We know not what motivates them in
their strange ways, nor how to guide or control their behaviour. I shall make various incantations before your machine, and I shall toggle between various items in My Computer, virtually at random, and we shall see if anything happens. I can make no promises. The whole process shall take three hours, after which I shall grow tired. I shall then leave, promising to return the next day, which is the last you shall see of me.’
That, at least, would be honest.
Why can’t he just confess to his quasi-mystical role? Forget the zip-up jackets and black pants and go for the whole witchdoctor look. I’d like to see grass skirts, feathers taped to legs and a cassowary bone through the nose. Then I could have a little confidence my networking problems would be solved.
The young man is from the store which sold me the computer and its various ‘plug-and-go’ devices, so no way will he admit there’s a bug or a problem, although some way through the third hour, he confesses it may have ‘a shortcoming’. Aware he has conceded too much, he then interrogates me about the software I’m using, pointing out that his company only ‘supports’ certain combinations. This interrogation continues for some time, with the young man shaking his head occasionally. ‘We don’t support that, sir, not at all,’ he says grimly, in much the same tone as William Wilberforce once declared that he didn’t support slavery. I feel as if I’ve been caught out in some sort of unsavoury practice.
The Fridge Man never behaved like this, back in the early stages of the Revolt of the Appliances. ‘Could be anything,’ he’d said, as he advised us to throw out the stinking,
moaning, defrosting wreck. ‘Once they start to go wrong, you know, there’s no end to your problems.’ A fridge is much simpler than a computer, and yet this man had humility in the face of its minor complexities. If this had been the Computer Man, I’d be facing an interrogation about my fridge usage: ‘You didn’t put meat in the salad compartment, did you? Or packets of ham in the butter section. I’m afraid Westinghouse doesn’t support that sort of thing.’
Does anybody know how computers work? Sometimes I think Bill Gates might, but even then I’m not sure. Perhaps, in that sprawling Microsoft compound in Seattle, they work on the same principles of trial and error; of opening and clicking at random. In huge rooms, technicians connect any old wires and record what happens. After 10,000 random connections, they discover they’ve invented Spell Check. A little later, in some corner of the vast space, there’s a sudden shout of delight: an overweight technician has fallen heavily against a box of microprocessors and invented Windows XP.
Close to the end of the third hour, the nineteen-year-old finally succeeds in getting the computer going, having stumbled upon the right incantation, combined with the correct placement of the cassowary bone in his nose. He presents a bill which is staggering in its size and promptly leaves.
Together with Jocasta, I survey the house. Every appliance has collapsed and then been either replaced or repaired. The bank account is now in sharply negative territory.
I march through the kitchen and hear them muttering, planning fresh battles. ‘We’ve got him down,’ I hear the toaster mumble. ‘Even we minor appliances now have the
ability to tip him over the edge.’ I note a power-crazed juice extractor nodding in furious agreement.
I throw a couple of slices of bread into the toaster and slam the lever down hard, then approach the juice extractor with a couple of rock-hard pears. For a moment at least, I have them on the run.