Green (20 page)

It was easier just to go with it. Besides, why not?

I can feel the warmth from the burgers on my thighs. I only hope the grease isn't getting through as well. Frank's mood is the best it's been all week. He's told me he reckons people have a problem if they can't turn boredom into something a lot more optimistic. Personally, I've always found ‘morose' and ‘introspective' far easier than ‘optimistic', but they're hardly attractive. Frank does morose too, but he plummets there rather than wallows, so that means he bounces back faster.

Frank, Sophie, me and the Underground—there's nothing bad about it (with the possible exception of Frank), so I should go with some of that optimism.

When we're stopped at a red light, he pulls a handful of fries out of the box and eats them loudly, with his mouth open. For the first time I notice exactly how much he's taken tonight.

‘Do you really need six burgers and two big buckets of slaw?'

‘Have you seen what we're getting paid?' All said through a wad of chomped potato. ‘I'm assuming this is part of the package. And I don't think you can complain. You seem to be spending a lot of time out the back. It's like you're being paid to go out with the boss's daughter.'

‘We were only talking. I think we've established that.'

‘Isn't that what it's like when you go out with someone? Only talk? Wouldn't that be one of your better attempts? Or has something changed?'

‘Hey, I'm a contender. I'm going to the Underground, aren't I?'

‘Sure. But I don't want to see you wasting all your time sitting there talking to Sophie. Particularly if you aren't getting paid to. Spread your charm around a bit. Get up and get a few moves happening. Imagine how they'll be when they find out you're a talker as well, not just a dance machine.'

‘I'm not fucking remedial, you know.'

‘Sure. I'm just saying, give it a shot.'

‘I've done okay in the Underground before.'

‘Sure,' he says, far from sure. ‘Sure you have. You could have some of those fries if you wanted.'

‘Thanks.'

‘You're a contender.'

‘Yep.'

I eat a couple of fries and look out at the dark hills slipping by us, wooden houses mostly with their lights out, closed shops, the Night Owl convenience store (open for business twenty-four hours). Sophie sticks close behind us all the way to the Underground and we park in the street, not far from the entrance. It isn't looking like a busy night.

‘Just go with me on this one,' Frank says as we walk up to the head of the short queue. ‘Look happy and go with me.'

There's dance music coming out of the doorway, and the smell of cigarette smoke and spilt drinks, like always. People pushing in and out, showing the stamps on their wrists, a clump of girls who are too young and overdressed and waiting to try their luck. The last word I hear Frank say is ‘Mate' as he approaches the guy on the door, using his best one-bouncer-to-another voice.

Sophie looks at me, as if I'd know what's going on.

‘There's a plan,' I tell her. ‘Apparently. I think we just have to hang back and look interested but not too needy.'

‘At least we don't look like we're going to the school formal. Do you think they'll let me in without babies' breath in my hair?'

Frank's pointing back to the two of us and the door guy's looking. I nod and smile, but in a way that's appropriately measured. He's smiling too, more than I am, and he waves us to come in.

He takes hold of my arm on the way past and he says, ‘Congratulations, you two,' like someone in on a new secret. ‘You have a good night.'

I thank him, and I tell him I'm sure we will. We go through the open door and we don't stop until we're several steps into the darkness of the corridor beyond.

‘Told you,' Frank says to me. ‘Looks like you're buying.'

‘Sure. What were we being congratulated for?'

‘Getting in for free, I suppose. There's a knack to it, and I have to say the two of you carried it off pretty nicely. Now, drinks. I could go a couple of rum and Cokes.'

‘A couple?'

‘I've got two hands. Might as well give 'em both something to do. Soph, Philby's buying. It's a rare thing. What are you up for?'

‘Oh, maybe just a lemonade. I've got to drive to Carindale later.'

‘Oh, come on, one drink. Hit his wallet a bit harder than that.'

‘Okay, let's have some vodka in it then,' she says, as though it's a wild act for a Thursday.

She tells us she has to go to the Ladies. Frank says we'll meet her inside, in the side bar since it's smaller and we'll be easier to find.

The corridor is lined with people, heads together in what might be conversation. The music's louder when we turn the corner, and the dance-floor lights make it down this far too, patches of light moving across drinks and hands and faces, the occasional chambray-shirted rugby legend, blonde private-school girls who managed to sneak by the bouncer and are standing against the wall, wide-eyed and in taffeta and wondering what happens next.

I got talking to a girl like that once at Cafe Neon and, when her friends started referring to me as ‘the doctor', I knew I'd erred. It turned out that she was sixteen, though she looked far older (now, there's an observation that never stacks up in court).

Frank cruises down the corridor with the pure confidence that owns nights like this, and this whole world. But I own it now almost as much as him. It's not a bad feeling. We're not the desperate kids at the door who won't get in without a lot of luck.

‘So what did you tell the door guy?' I shout out to him as I'm pushing up to the side bar with a twenty dollar note in my hand.

‘That you two had just got engaged. And I said you met here, round about last September when you were down on your luck.'

I shout the drink order across the bar and Frank leans in closer to tell me more.

‘I said you'd got engaged tonight, and that I thought it'd be good if you could stop in here for a drink on the way home.'

‘And he believed that?'

The guy at the bar checks that I want two of each and I give him an exaggerated nod to make it clear.

‘Sure. Why not?' Frank shouts, practically in my ear. ‘It's a level of bullshit above the usual, and that's all it takes. Have you heard what people say to that guy to scam their way in? Mostly it's just pissed chicks, crying and going “but my friend's already inside” or “but the other guy said”. It's not hard to pitch it a level above that. You just need enough story.'

‘That's surprisingly complicated.'

‘Hey, I'm full of surprises. It's just that some of them are less obvious surprises than others.'

I pass him his two rum and Cokes, then take the other two drinks and my change. He leads the way to a table in the far corner.

Engaged. I make him agree not to tell that to Sophie when she turns up. I don't think I've got too close to getting engaged to anyone I've met at the Underground (not that that's ever been the aim). Usually you just end up in a corner of the dance floor at the edge of a big clump of people you already at least half know, squeezing out some pretty average moves to Duran Duran, wishing you had better clothes and limbs. Or maybe that's just me.

I managed to pash a foreign girl in an alcove once, but she wasn't behaving like a person with a lot of judgement. She was spilling drinks all over herself and, when she started dropping the glasses too, the bouncers pulled her out and put her in a cab. I tried to talk them out of it, of course.

‘Mate,' one of them said to me. ‘Once they start smashing glass there are issues of public safety.'

Which made a lot of sense, since he was built like a bouncer and I'm built like me.

We only come here because there's nowhere else to go. The music's the same every week, but there's a certain comfort in that. And Frank tends to try a lot harder than I do, but he usually strikes out as well. So I don't mind this place.

Frank waves when Sophie walks in, but she doesn't see us straight away. She pushes past the bar crowd, checking out the tables, then she notices his flailing arms and waves back. I push her drink across to her on a coaster when she sits down.

Frank tells us he's up for a dance, but Sophie shakes her head and says she hasn't even tasted her drink yet. He finishes his first rum and Coke, puts a couple of ice cubes in his mouth and shimmies off among the tables.

‘I think,' Sophie says to me, ‘that you were about to tell me the story of your worst night out before work rudely interrupted.'

‘And I think we remember the conversation a little differently.'

‘This is going to be good.' She's treating me the way you treat a person who's hiding something, someone who's clutching onto a story they want to have weedled out of them, but don't want to give up too easily.

‘No, it's not. It's not going to be anything, because there's nothing much to say. All it could be now is anti-climactic.'

‘Go on, give it a shot.'

‘Really, there's . . .'

‘Okay, we'll do a trade. You go first, then I go. And, trust me, mine's pretty bad.' She curls up her hand and looks through it at my face, winding the other hand in circles beside the first in a mime of an old-time movie camera. ‘You're the movie man. We'll do it like a movie if that's easier. Using that technique when they cut from the main story just to a head talking to the camera.'

‘That's a pretty sophisticated technique, even though it looks easy.'

‘I know. Pretend I'm Woody Allen,' she says, still winding away.

Pretend she's Woody Allen. Winding, winding with the hand. Four girls I've gone out with since I started uni, maybe five, and not one of them's mentioned Woody Allen. Stop, I want to tell her. I want to pull her camera hands apart and say, ‘Does Clinton appreciate this? This Woody Allen stuff? I hope so.'

‘Go for most excruciating,' she says. ‘If there were no actual disasters, I'd settle for most excruciating. The time when you most knew it was going wrong.'

And then I can't say No any more. It's not much of a story, but I have to tell it, and it's excruciating enough.

She puts her camera hands down when I get started. She drinks her vodka and lemonade, she listens and she laughs when I know she will, she blows on the palm of her hand when it's appropriate and she calls me an idiot when I explain the physics. Then, as promised, she pays me back with her scene, staring down at the table in front of me while she tells it.

 

INT. NIGHTCLUB. SOME TIME AFTER TEN

PHIL sits in almost complete darkness, cradling a vodka and lemonade in his hand, as though he needs the support. He is about to divulge the story of his most excruciating night out with a girl. And he's about to divulge it to a girl, of all people. This is best done if he imagines it as an aside in a Woody Allen film. In his mind, he even changes font.

 

PHIL

Okay, there was this time when I was out with a girl. We went to a movie and then we had coffee afterwards. Things hadn't been going brilliantly with the conversation, and maybe I was starting to sense that. She said something about ‘life's mysteries' and then she said, ‘like the way, when you blow air onto your hand, it's colder than you'd expect'. Well, anyway, I know now that I should be much more tolerant of life's mysteries, if I'm in the company of someone who finds such a thing mysterious. (He pauses, but is urged to continue.) Okay, but this is just an example of where I won't be going next time that kind of thing comes up. I can't really explain it. It was a kind of rush of physics to the head . . . you know the way people talk about a rush of blood? Well, this was a rush of physics. And as it happens it's Bernoulli's principle that explains why the air is cold when you blow it on your hand. Not so mysterious. As this girl now knows. (Another pause, as if he's waiting for the signal that his turn is done.) You want me to? Really? Really? She made me do it, too. (He shrugs, as though the detail of physics is usually the beginning of the end for him.) Okay, well, the theory is that the total energy of the air is constant, but that the energy can be manifested as temperature, pressure and velocity. Therefore, if you increase the pressure and velocity, you necessarily decrease temperature. And the girl said something like, ‘Right. Well, it's not one of life's mysteries at all then. Bad example.' And that was pretty much it. As you'd expect. I'm not always good with silences, and we'd had a few leading up to that point. We had more after, though. But I'd stopped trying to make the running by then. Some of those silences, they just went on and on.

 

INT. NIGHTCLUB. SOME TIME A LITTLE MORE AFTER TEN

SOPHIE sits in almost complete darkness, fiddling with the straw in her vodka and lemonade. She was the one who came up with the idea of doing a piece to camera, but of course that's not what she'll do. No, she'll look at the table instead. Phil looked at the camera, or at least at Sophie, so is it fair that she does things differently? Probably not, but that's the world he lives in, and he knows it. He suspects she knows it, too.

 

SOPHIE

My worst night out was the night with the
Star Trek
drinking game. It was a Tuesday, the student discount night, at a Mexican restaurant down the road from the World. The guy turned up with a cask of red wine, a couple of bottles of lemonade, and a bag of chopped oranges. And mint—there was a bunch of mint, too. That was all for sangria. Which, I guess, was okay. But he also had an old airline carry bag and between the nachos and whatever we had next, he pulled out all these pages of computer printout. He said we'd play this game where, just for fun, you know, we'd have to drink any time we said something from
Star Trek
. These were the complete scripts, as it turned out. And he knew them well, really well. So no way was he going to be caught out. Me, on the other hand—it turns out I speak more
Star Trek
on a regular basis than Captain bloody Kirk. Any time I spoke this guy would flip through pages and show me something like it. If it was even just a couple of words, I still had to drink sometimes. I started feeling kind of hazy, and I said maybe we could stop. So he said I was no fun. Which, since I hadn't gone out with anyone for a while—it had already occurred to me that I might not be. And I didn't want to be no fun. Once that sort of thing starts being said about you, it gets around. Even later, when I was throwing up out the window of his car, I wondered if maybe this was just the going-out world and I'd have to get used to it. But I checked with a few friends later and they said I was in the clear. No normal definition of fun actually requires the
Star Trek
drinking game. I haven't felt the same about sangria since. Or airline carry bags. If a guy turned up with one of them, I'd be out of there. I wouldn't wait for the trekkie stuff. He'd seemed normal in lectures. He probably had all the models hanging from his ceiling at home.