Green (10 page)

‘He never liked me,' Frank's saying.

‘He never liked anyone.'

‘Yeah, he never liked anyone, but he knew my name. You kept a low profile. Smart bastard. “RESUBMIT. Please see me.” I'm going to use that word Cyndi hated, and it starts with a C.'

‘It's the Mater, Frank, and you're shouting. Use it quietly. It's not a nun-friendly word.'

‘Mindless copying. Are you telling me you didn't copy from the patient's file? Are you telling me you made it up?'

‘No. Not at all. You'd be mad to make it up. Copying's inevitable, it's the mindlessness he took offence to. The visible display of copying.'

‘I've got to resubmit. Have you worked that out? At the end of this term, in the mid-year break, I've got to go to a hospital, attach myself to some poor sick bastard, write it all down and resubmit. And, even if I've passed the rest of the term, if it doesn't work out when I resubmit I get to do surgery again at the end of the year when you're all off doing an elective somewhere.'

‘It won't happen that way. You'll pick a good case, and it won't be a patient of O'Hare's and you won't use abbreviations and you'll be fine.'

‘Could I just copy yours, maybe?'

‘Do you want to think that through? You might as well go and find a few nuns now and shout that word Cyndi didn't like right at them. And I could probably come along and do it with you, since I reckon O'Hare would be gunning for both of us. You could find a case that was like mine, and that might make it easier.'

‘Ah, like yours,' he says, smiling, nodding, putting the emphasis on like. As if things are looking up, but now being conducted in code. ‘I get it. So should I take yours with me now?'

‘We'll talk in the mid-year break.'

 

*

 

Frank tosses me the keys when we get to his car at the end of the day.

‘You take the wheel, Mister Seven out of Ten,' he says, and we drive.

Mister Seven out of Ten, as though it ranks me among the big over-achievers.

As we loop around onto the freeway from the Mater the sun is low in the west, easing down towards Mount Coot-tha, eye level and in front of us as we merge with the traffic. We're on our way to World of Chickens.

Frank opens the glove box. He takes out the jar of Staminade, sucks his finger and swirls it around among the clumps of crystals. He rubs the finger on his gums and works his tongue and saliva vigorously like ‘Lancelot Link Secret Chimp', that is, like a lower primate battling with a mouthful of toffee to create whimsical dubbing opportunities, and a kind of sixties TV I'm glad I can only vaguely remember.

Staminade, for Frank, isn't merely a green salty sports drink. It's become a habit, and not a simple one. If he's not driving, and if work is done for the day, he'll have a mouthful of vodka too. It's reminiscent of the best of his invented cocktails, the
brizgarita
—the hometown Brisbane version of a more famous salty cocktail from somewhere else. But the complex formula of Staminade means that the hard work's already done with the brizgarita, already in the jar. And all you have to do is mix yourself a strong, cold glass of it and toss in a shot of vodka and a shot of tequila. Perhaps with a slice of lemon and some Staminade powder crusting around the rim, if it's an occasion.

As Frank sees it, with that cunning electrolyte balance it's got its own built-in hangover cure. And if you don't get the ratios quite right you can always have a couple in the morning, with a raw egg and some B vitamins substituted for the vodka. The tequila, he says, isn't really negotiable.

‘The brizgarita's day will come,' he claims, though it hasn't come yet. But right now, that kind of glory isn't on his mind. That's the ambitious Frank, the other Frank. This afternoon we have the Frank who is concentrating on being loudly shitty about his surgery long case mark and being dumped.

‘Seems like he's got a lot of weekend jobs on at the moment,' he says, moving comfortably into item three of his catalogue of complaint, the fact that his father made him work most of the weekend. ‘There's a lot of people who really want to be home when you come over to their place and drop a tree. It's lucky there were no heart murmurs today, since all I can hear is bloody chainsaws.'

He goes for some more Staminade, and he's talking again before the finger's out of his mouth.

I've known him long enough to know that this is one of those times when it's best to sit there and let him rant, and offer those things the psych people call ‘minimal encouragers' in reply, since that's all he's looking for. It does make me wonder if they've also got things called minimal discouragers. I could use a few of those sometimes.

Where are we going? What are we doing? And the answers aren't: World of Chickens and making burgers. It's bigger answers I'm looking for. Day One of a new term—the usual first-day scare job and a few lectures. About to be followed by several hours in and out of a chicken costume, because it'll put me a few dollars closer to a video camera.

A few dollars closer to the video camera I didn't get when I turned twenty-one late last year. It was always too much to expect, even for a twenty-first. My parents gave me a regular still camera without zoom and a copy of Jay McInerney's
Bright Lights, Big City
. I know it's ungrateful to think of that as anything less than a good result. Good photography isn't about zoom and the novel was a hardback, and one I'd asked for. But it's ungrateful to think of it in ‘result' terms at all. So, call me ungrateful.

Technically, I'm well aware it's the thought that counts. I also realise that, if parents get it close to right on birthdays, you're not doing badly. It's having the list that's the problem, but my parents encourage it so how can they feel blameless when I have it in mind when birthdays finally arrive? It's my mother who started it, her idea that a list cuts down the likelihood of unwanted presents while, if it's long enough, still allowing the gift-buyer choice. And so what if my father's list always goes no further than brandy and socks? It could, if he wanted it to.

Outside my family, choice was never a factor last year when it came to twenty-firsts. As far as the male members of the year went, it turned out by about April that it was your twenty-first that showed whether you were a pewter man or a crystal man. Frank was a pewter man. By my birthday in October, there was a new category: recycle man. I'm sure I ended up with some presents I'd seen earlier in the year, at the MarchApril twenty-firsts. Worse, I think I ended up with one or two I'd chipped in for the first time.

So, at my party I scored three mismatched pewter tankards, a set of tumblers etched with the university crest, cufflinks, a harshly ugly decanter, a cocktail shaker, six golf balls and a fart cushion. Plus, that butt of all bath-time jokes, soap on a rope.

And I have to admit, I don't get it. Pewter surely had its day in the ale houses of the seventeenth century, I don't understand cocktails, my cuffs—like absolutely everyone else's—have at least as many buttons as you could need, I don't play golf, and I've never in my life decanted. Where does that leave me? I suppose I shower, and I fart an average amount, but if that's the only personal connection with my twenty-first haul that I can muster, it's not good.

I remember looking over my collection at the end of the evening and thinking, since when did I become the man who has everything? The only thing missing was a ship in a bottle.

At least Frank's gift was original, even if deeply pornographic. It's the only hard-core wall clock I've ever seen. He said it was imported. ‘Good lord,' my mother said, ‘I think it's anatomically correct, Frank.' Then she turned to me and told me she thought it'd look lovely anywhere in my room that can't be seen from the door.

So, no video camera. My father offered me a deal, and one I'm familiar with: dollar-for-dollar matching on video camera purchase if I was prepared to get a part-time job to earn my share. With the stipulation that my share was not to include money made from reselling any of last year's superfluous textbooks—since that's my parents' already—or unreasonable attempts to manipulate routine cost-of-living adjustments to my allowance.

My father's an accountant. It's not his fault.

My allowance stretches to fund the rudimentary lifestyle I seem to have fallen into—a reflection on the sadness of the lifestyle, rather than the abundance of the allowance—and it's given to me conditional on continuing to pass all my exams. Which was always my plan, anyway.

If I want anything more, one of my options is negotiation. If what I want is seen as part of a long-term serious plan and doesn't involve compromising my medical studies, I am occasionally awarded dollar-for-dollar matching.

Frank looks on these arrangements, complex though they are, with some envy. He gets no allowance and describes himself as ‘self-funded'. Of course, it's not that simple and Frank can actually be quite a scam machine. It's not uncommon for jobs to come his way out of nowhere, and to pay cash. World of Chickens is now the job Frank calls his ‘steady gig', and he always likes to have one of those. But it was me who, through my negotiating experience hard won at home, got us the meal-plus-bottomless-soft-drink part of our arrangements.

I'd wanted to read
Bright Lights, Big City
since I'd read about it when it came out in America. I put it on my list thinking it'd be an easy purchase, but it wasn't available here at the time so the book shop had to order it in.

I read it straight away, and told Frank to read it too. He didn't, so I eventually had to read bits to him to make the point. He told me to bring it in the car and we'd read it on the way to and from World of Chickens, which made me motion sick but I wanted him to get it.

Bright Lights, Big City
showed me—made it clearer to me than before—what a slow, safe hole this place is. ‘Don't you get it?' I said to him. ‘In comparison we're living in Dim Lights, Big Town. Until about nine-thirty at night, when most of the dim lights go off. You see how far behind we are? How far off the pace? Even someone as old as Frank Sinatra gets to sing a song about New York as a city that doesn't sleep. Imagine one old person here staying up past nine, or even starting dinner after six. Do you think Frank Sinatra ends the day with meat and three veg in front of ‘Wheel of Fortune' at five o'clock? Don't you get it?'

He didn't get it.

Frank has no idea of the outside world at all. Frank thinks the book is cool, and he thinks it in an uncomplicated way. He really got into the second-person style because, with me reading it aloud, it made it as though the story was about him. I told him it was not choose-your-own-adventure format, and that the expression ‘insert your name here' wouldn't be occurring once in these pages.

I tried to explain what I thought second-person was about and he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I get it. You are obviously insufficiently acquainted with my literary masterpiece
Bright Lights, Big Chicken
. It's about this chicken-selling med-student guy who's a complete horn monger, but he's got this dull mate who holds him back a bit.' And he cleared his throat. ‘You are changing gear,' he said as he changed gear. ‘You are pulling away from the lights.'

I told him not to spoil it, but maybe he already had.

‘You are, in the trouser, perhaps the largest and most gifted man in this town.' Definitely spoiled now. ‘They want you, baby, they want you. Some of them will get you. It'll be excellent. They will call you the Love Master. Behind your back, they already do.'

Jay McInerney turns thirty this year, and already Frank's set him rolling in his grave.

The first reference to Bolivian Marching Powder occurs on page one, and it took us both a second to work out that it probably meant cocaine. At a better time than this, and during a better mood, Frank renamed Staminade Sunnybank Hills Marching Powder, after the suburb where he lives. And he did it without the aid of any irony at all.

We've talked more about New York since, enough that Frank now occasionally refers to Sunnybank as Brisbane's SoHo, since it's SOuth of HOlland Park. ‘Don't you get it?' he said. ‘Instead of SOuth of HOuston.'

‘We are so not
Bright Lights, Big City
,' I remember telling him, to shut all this up. ‘We're not even the fucking
Breakfast Club
.' A reference that only let Frank segue effortlessly into some very sleazy arrangement he'd like to discuss with Molly Ringwald, but had previously been decent enough to keep to himself.

Today he sits with the half-full jar of Staminade open between his thighs, loads his wet finger again and rubs more crystals on his gums. It's the dumping by Cyndi he's taking hardest.

‘Is a bit of fucking respect too much to hope for?' he says, green crystals flirting with the gaps between his teeth in the late afternoon light.

‘I'm sorry. When did it ever get round to respect?'

‘Exactly. Exactly. I get taken for granted, you know. I'm not just sex-on-tap.'

‘See, this is the problem. The emphasis there is on the “just”. You are sex-on-tap, but you aren't
just
sex-on-tap. You and I can make that distinction, but there'd be a lot of people out there who can't.'

‘Shit. That's too subtle. Which means you're right. Subtlety's never worked for me. Subtlety's what you go for if you're the kind of loser who doesn't have anything better. Present company excepted, of course.'

‘Of course.'

Okay, he's on the brink of annoying me, and I'm too subtle to tell him so he'll never know. Frank has now been single for almost four days. I've been single since September last year, or the preceding May, depending on how you look at it. I could be a whole lot more supportive if he could remember that sometimes.