Green (19 page)

‘Not really my bag.'

‘Come and get it,' my mother calls out, using a rough-hewn western accent I haven't heard since
Oklahoma!
.

‘Musicals,' my father says, but only to me. ‘She's got that musicals bit of her brain going again. Suppose we should humour her.'

‘Mighty fine chow, Miss Phoebe,' he says as he ambles into the kitchen, a round-shouldered green-cardiganed cowpoke after a tough day on the range doing balance sheets for cardboard box sales.

From there it gets worse, both the accent and the corn level, which is definitely elephant-eye height at the very least. My mother plays accents for maximum comedy, my father tags along. My mother steals scenes with accents, my father abducts accents and then roughs them up in a nearby alley. The one thing in his favour is that he has the decency to confine it to home. He's completely aware of his own shortcomings—those relating to theatre, anyway—but his amazement at my mother's modest gift for performance seems only to grow with time.

Once we're at the table, the two of them get over it and start talking like displaced British people again. But displaced British people who, in the distant past, invented the ritual that says dinner is the TV-off time when we each have to report on our days. It's rare that anyone has anything worthy of reporting but it's still what we do, usually for two courses. Tonight: beef stroganoff followed by Sara Lee Chocolate Bavarian. My father's summary: ‘a veritable feast'.

‘Did you see they're going ahead with that honorary doctorate for Joh?' my mother says to me during course two. ‘There are posters up about it on campus.'

‘Joh? As in, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the premier? Renowned hater of universities and all connected with them?'

‘Yes, that's the one. Doctor Joh. Doctor Sir Ruddy Joh.'

‘But that's ridiculous.'

‘Of course it's ridiculous. It's worse than ridiculous. I'm going to end up with a doctorate from the same institution. Apparently it's a tradition, for the seventy-fifth anniversary. The premier of the day got an honorary doctorate at the twenty-fifth and fiftieth anniversaries, too. That's where it comes from.'

‘But that's no argument at all. Tradition's no reason to keep doing anything. If it was, we'd all wear neck-to-knee bathers and you wouldn't vote.'

‘I couldn't agree more. So you're going to be protesting then? That's what the posters are about. They're planning a big rally on campus to coincide with the degree ceremony on Friday week. It's in the afternoon, starting at two.'

‘That could be a bit early for me.' Me? Protest? Well, in principle, sure . . . ‘I think I've got a clinic on at the Mater, and they usually go until about four-thirty.'

‘That's all right. The protest starts at two, but the ceremony isn't till six. Plenty of time.'

‘I'll check my timetable.'

Somehow I've railroaded myself into political activism. But, thinking about it, perhaps it's where I should be. It's a senseless tradition for a start. Maybe there were particular reasons to do it the other two times, but to hand an honorary doctorate to an anti-intellectual whose entire cabinet boasts one Ag Science degree doesn't seem right.

My father starts clearing the plates.

‘Ah, a family dinner,' my mother says as the uneaten third of the Chocolate Bavarian is carried away. ‘We haven't had enough of those lately, what with you doing all that work and now me starting rehearsals.'

‘You only had your first rehearsal last night, didn't you? You don't need to get weird about family dinners just yet.' Particularly when, most evenings, they're just an obligation standing between me and television.

‘Philby, you have family dinners to make sure things don't get weird. That's why you have them.'

My father stops on his way back into the room, unsure of what he's missed and where it's now going. ‘I wouldn't mind a Blackberry Nip. Anybody?'

‘I'd love one,' I tell him. ‘Blackberry Nip's always been good for stopping things getting weird.'

 

*

 

Our pay cheques are waiting for us the next night at World of Chickens. I'm closing in on the video camera.

Frank's bored. I walk inside from the street to change and he's there by himself, staring into the distance. ‘Mate,' he says, ‘what is it that's so close to perfect about college girls in their underwear having a pillow fight? Is it simply the combination of underwear and squealing?'

‘If it was just underwear and squealing, you could put pants on a pig.'

As the door swings shut behind me, I can sense I'm leaving the room while there's serious thought going on, and I'm quite glad I'm not there to catch the detail.

Frank and I don't think about films the same way, but I guess that's no surprise. He once said
National Lampoon's Animal House
was the kind of film that he knew was destined to be a permanent fixture in his all-time top ten. He told me that sometimes you just know that kind of thing.
Citizen Kane
was his reference point. He said that there are plenty of people a generation older than us who have had it at the top of their top tens for decades, so long that it's now not negotiable. It will always be their favourite film, the best film they've ever seen.

I didn't know where to begin in countering that. I put it to him that it might be more a matter of content than film making, as far as he was concerned, and that
Citizen Kane
wasn't set up to deliver his kind of content. We had to reach a compromise. I had to concede that
Animal House
was at least the finest example of its genre yet made—better even than
Porky's
—and Frank, in return, said he was prepared to go as far as admitting that his favourite of the cinematic techniques used in the film was the combination of college girls, underwear and violence featuring bedding. ‘That pretty much always works for me in a movie,' he said, ‘but it reached a new zenith in
Animal House
, and I doubt it'll be surpassed in my lifetime. Five stars.'

I put it to him that there was a little more to it than that, that the full combination is college girls, underwear, vigorous squeally pillow work and a student desperado up a ladder at the window. And he said, ‘Oh, sure, there's always a desperado. Where would the frat-house comedy be without the desperado? That's where you get the dramatic tension. It's the perennial question of how much gear'll come off before they notice him or the ladder topples backwards.'

Sophie's putting in some Frank-free time out the back. She's got a large Diet Coke in one hand and she's leaning on the railing, looking intently up at the windows of the blocks of units on Swann Road.

‘Much happening up there?' Through the beak I can take the view in only a piece at a time. With my head tilted I must look like a chicken yawning at the hillside, or bracing myself to crow at it and wake the suburb up.

‘Yeah,' she says, without looking round. ‘But all the usual things. People in kitchens making dinner, TVs on. Nothing really dramatic, not that I can see. But you don't know, do you? You don't know what it means from this distance. Some of those dinners might be people's first together, or their last, and from here it all just looks really . . .'

‘Mundane? It's like that photo—that series of photos—put together by Robert Doisneau to represent . . . ' starting to feel like a wanker, pushing on regardless . . . ‘a building in Paris in 1963. With the guy on the top floor having a smoke next to a girlie poster and someone on another floor trying to touch her toes and the old guy downstairs having a blast on his tuba.'

‘Except, when it's black-and-white photos from Paris, it's like there's more . . .'

‘Dignity?'

‘Maybe, but do you always finish people's . . .'

‘Sentences? No, not usually. I don't know what's got into me. It's being the chicken. It makes me kind of pushy. I'll have to watch that.'

‘I might have just been going to say “smoking”.' Now she's looking right into the beak slot, as if my interruptions should be firmly put in their place. ‘There's more
smoking
in Paris.'

‘And maybe there is, but that's not what you were going to say, so don't suddenly make out that I was being pretentious. You were going to say “style”, maybe even “art”. In Paris there's more art to it, living some cheap shitty life in a flat.'

‘More berets. I bet there's more berets. I don't know about art, though. I'm not sure how that'd work.'

‘Well, Sartre would have been in one of those places in Paris in 1963. In some cheap shitty flat writing something.'

‘That's one guy. I bet there were plenty more guys with dirty posters on their walls, and hundreds of people happy just to touch their toes, and not many of him at all. Most evenings in Paris I'm sure people just eat dinner and watch TV. You can't go out every night. Even Sartre. Don't tell me Sartre never had TV.'

‘Don't spoil Sartre for me.'

‘I can't spoil Sartre for you. I'm only guessing, so I can't spoil anything. It's not like I even really know who he is. I know the name, obviously, but I don't think I've read anything he's written and I wouldn't have seen more than a couple of his movies. I'm doing media studies, remember, not . . .' She laughs, as if she's got nowhere to go . . . ‘Sartre studies.'

‘And I'm doing obstetrics at the moment, so as if I can . . .'

‘And, by the way, you're a chicken.'

‘So it's not like I'm an expert. I'm sure he had a TV. How could you not have a TV? How could you make any relevant comment about contemporary society if you didn't have a TV?'

‘Exactly. So maybe there are people up there on Swann Road living the Sartre life and not even knowing it.'

‘Anguish and sitcoms and supreme pizza.'

‘Family size with free garlic bread and a bottle of Coke.'

‘That Sartre knew how to impress chicks.'

‘Hey, I've had far worse than a pizza deal. What's your worst? What's the biggest disaster you've ever had when you've gone out with someone?'

‘Disaster? I've had some that have been bad, but I've tried to avoid disaster.' Disaster. Should I tell her that usually they just peter out into awkward silences and after that my calls don't get returned? Or, even more often, don't get made? ‘We should probably do the changeover. You know Frank can be trouble if he's left unattended.'

‘Nice change of topic. You must have had a few bad nights out.'

‘Hey, I haven't had a bad night out for months. Many months.'

‘A year?' She's smiling, figuring she's got me on the run and that a disaster story might be about to be prised out of me. ‘How about a year?'

‘Let's not get bogged down in details.' She has no idea of the key to my recent perfect record, and that's how it's going to stay. ‘Let's just say there have been no complaints for some time about what I've got to offer.'

‘Ha. You're hiding something. But you'll keep. For now I'll settle for a poem, an Elizabethan poem. You were doing some of that stuff out at the lights. I could tell.'

‘Okay. The one I did at the lights?' That'd be Martha and the Muffins' ‘Echo Beach', as far as I can recall. ‘Okay. John Donne's Meditation Seventeen.' I strike the pose, and deliver:

 

‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.'

 

I do it once in a version that sounds as olde English as I can make it and then, while I'm taking the costume off, I find myself trying it as Brando, then as a race call.

‘Was that a poem?' she says when I come out.

‘You're tough. I'm not even sure it's Elizabethan, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Would you settle for Jacobean? There's something very wise about it, though, don't you think?'

‘What if you don't live in Europe?'

‘Good point. You should talk to him about that.'

I hand her the costume, and she goes in to change.

‘Hey,' she says, ‘I was talking to Frank earlier and . . .' There's a clunk as the beak hits the inside of the door. Her voice becomes muffled as she pulls the chicken head on. ‘. . . and he said he thought we should all go to the Underground after work tonight. He said you guys are going.'

‘I don't know where he got that idea from. I've got a twenty-four hour shift in Labour Ward starting at eight in the morning. Plus, we wouldn't get there before ten. We'd have to pay the cover charge. There's no way I'll be going to the Underground.'

 

*

 

On the way to the Underground, Frank turns the radio up and sings loud sinusy words that are all his own, and that he thinks might be comical. Sophie's lucky that she gets to go there in her own car.

‘I just did a shift in Labour Ward,' he said back at the World. ‘That's no excuse for anything. You should be out all night deliberately, to get your body clock ready for tomorrow. I'm doing this as a favour to you, you know.'

So, I'm in his car with his burger box on my knees. He had all the answers. Today's takings could go under Sophie's seat, because we take practically nothing anyway. He's right. Most day's takings could go in a standard business envelope if you left enough coins for the next day's change. And he said it didn't matter if his burgers got cold—they're always cold by the time he gets home. And it doesn't matter that the cover charge kicks in at ten. He'll do the talking and get us in for nothing, then I can buy the first round of drinks to pay him back. That's the deal.