Green (26 page)

‘Good advice, Love Master. Hey, how would you describe my chin?'

‘Your chin?' I show it to him side on, and he gives it some thought. ‘Decisive. What do you reckon, Ness? Decisive?'

‘Yep.'

‘You know,' he says, nodding his head as if the change might have come from my much-needed gallivanting, ‘I'm not certain I noticed that before.'

 

*

 

Of course, the morning ended the way I'd expected.

‘I assume there'll be a call going in,' Frank said in the car once he'd given me the phone number. ‘Say, tomorrow evening? That'd be two days, generally taken to be the right balance between desperate and not interested.'

I made some evasive remark about preferring her friend, but it didn't get me too far. So I told him I'd think about it and he threatened to dial the number for me.

‘I'm going to put it to you,' he said, ‘that you're afraid you can't live up to last night. And, can I just say, if you did it once you can do it again. You were the man last night, and I'm doing my best to adjust to that. Give me a break and do the follow-up.'

So, now calling Jacinta seems to be a favour to Frank.

I'm glad when I'm back in my room, lying on my bed and listening to him gun the Valiant up the street and over the hill. My mother's at rehearsals, my father's gone into work and there's plenty of time completely alone to launder things that need it.

You wouldn't have believed the mess on the
Paradise
, I'll tell my mother. Not even I could leave clothes around in that state for someone else to wash. French onion dip everywhere, and you know how it goes off if you don't get to it.

I pick up my bullworker. I put it down again.

The images of last night stagger before me like pictures in a home movie. Pictures in a home movie no home should make and that I know I don't want to watch, but I also know I can't walk out on it. The lurching moment of abandon as control switched to autonomic and there was nothing I could do to save it. The tousled silhouette of the food and beverage manager against the city lights. The torchlight, flaring and flaring from my cuffs, my hands darting around in my pants like surprised hamsters, trying to vanish, to bolt away from the light. Only looking more like masturbation in action.

 

*

 

There's also pressure from my mother, growing by midweek, to be part of the protest at the campus on Friday, the day Joh gets his honorary doctorate. She tells me she'll be protesting, but there's a limit to what she can do since she's on staff. I ask her what that means and she says, ‘Peaceful protest,' which makes it sound as if she's urging the violence on me. She tries to explain, but blithely tosses in the expression ‘front line', waves her hands in the air and says, ‘Oh, Philby, that's all rhetoric. You know what I mean. It'll be rowdy, nothing worse.'

The other topic that came up after Saturday night was my neck. Early Sunday evening, when I was watching TV and the room was becoming dark, my neck apparently gave out a yellow glow from behind. We talked about it at dinner. I explained it was from a feather boa, a glow-in-the-dark boa, but that didn't seem to dispel concern in quite the way I'd wanted it to. I told them it was nothing more than one of those spur-of-the-moment dance-floor things, an incident involving a little playful lassoing. I said it as if playful lassoing was something we'd do most family dinners between courses. Anyway, it put me fifty bucks closer to the video camera. That's what the
Paradise
was about.

‘You should be pleased for me,' I told my mother. ‘I'm sticking with my plan and there was interest in me last night. Not interest that'll go any further, but interest nonetheless.'

There was no need to complicate the story with the admission that I came home not a cent richer.

 

*

 

Frank doesn't let up, but I knew he wouldn't. On Monday I got encouragement, on Tuesday questions, on Wednesday in the car on the way to World of Chickens it's deteriorated to, ‘I don't get it. What's your problem? She's slipping through your fingers.'

‘I'm not like you,' I said, but it did no good. ‘I don't call them all.'

How should I have put it? ‘Frank, I took things a step further on the
Paradise
than I might have admitted. But I took that step alone . . .'

I'd call her. I would, and that's what annoys me about it. I'd call if Saturday hadn't ended the way it did. But there's no changing it now, and it's good to get back to World of Chickens, to normal conversations with Sophie and the life that preceded my
Paradise
-pants madness.

‘Pray, sirrah,' she says the first time I come out of the toilet in costume, ‘give me something poetical.'

‘Out, out, brief candle!' I jump into delivery position and stand, legs braced, the way I hope Olivier might. ‘Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more; it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.'

‘God, tough piece,' she says, back in the language of the century of our birth.

‘Sure.
Macbeth
, Act Five, Scene Five. It's a tough part of the play. He is within the castle at Dunsinane, and he is indeed buggered. Now, as Churchill, circa Battle of Britain 1940. Note change in intonation.'

I run through it again, and she says the change is more subtle than she'd expected. I put it down to Olivier, drawing on Churchill at that moment. Back when Olivier did Macbeth, I'm sure Churchill's phrasing was still recent and compelling. So, next, I decide to go for the same speech in the voice of Peter Brady as Bogart. Degree of difficulty: 2.8.

‘Pork chops and apple sauce,' I'm saying as my warm-up, ‘pork chops and apple sauce,' when the sound of humming, and shoes on the steps, comes up from below.

That stops me. It turns out to be Zel and, from the way she looks at me when she gets to the top, I know she heard. So I tell her it was a vocal warm-up, since it's my turn out at the road. Deep inside the chicken head, I can feel my face go red.

The three of us walk through to the front and Frank, when he sees Zel, immediately looks more focused and says, ‘Burger, madam?'

‘Why, yes, Frank, how nice of you.' She walks round to the customers' side and puts one proprietorial arm up on the counter, her trinkets settling noisily, like a handful of loose change. ‘How have you all been this evening? Good?'

She's more contained than usual, more business-like. Frank, I expect, will take it personally. His interaction default setting is ‘flirt', it's worked with Zel before and business-like isn't an easy shift from there. In the car, I'll explain to him that the change in Zel's style of presentation is actually a good idea.

When I'm back at the roadside, I work out pretty quickly that
Macbeth
Act Five, Scene Five sets up a miserable mood for chickening. I resort to a few old favourites. I throw in some Heart, once I've done a quick scan through the beak and I'm sure there's No one around to hear it. Then Heart done by Peter Brady as Bogart. ‘Magic Man' followed by ‘Barracuda'. Now, that's tough. That's talent. Actually, when it's echoing around in the chicken head, it feels like I'm not alone in the suit and the other guy's pretty creepy. So I stop.

I start humming ‘Eye of the Tiger'. That song's pursuing me. More than I thought—it might even have been what Zel was humming on the steps. It must be three years old now. It's getting far too much airplay. It always has, and I've never liked it.

Antepartum haemorrhage, I tell myself. Think instead of antepartum haemorrhage. Think of the causes, common and uncommon, and come up with a flowchart that could differentiate between them.

 

*

 

Something beeps as I go back inside. For a second I wonder if I've triggered it, then Zel pulls a pager from her bag and says, ‘It's me, don't worry,' as she presses buttons to read the message. Frank shows her where the phone is while Sophie and I go out to change.

‘I wonder who it is,' Sophie says. ‘She's been getting a few calls lately.'

‘I didn't know she had a pager.'

‘It's for home hairdressing, mainly. Dad pages her sometimes, but she's got it for work. She does hair, make-up and style consultancy part-time,' Sophie says, as if reading it to me from a business card. ‘She says the big word in hair right now is “volume”. Have you noticed she's got volume?'

‘I've never been one for volume really, or for noticing hair. But, yeah, I think I might have noticed hers.'

‘Some of us don't even have the option of volume. Me, for instance. Dad doesn't even have all his own hair and he looks kind of two-tone, but Mum reckons it's different for guys. She says my hair comes in just this side of “lank”. Lank, for hair people, is a bad word, and I don't think that's going to change. Whatever anyone's tried with my hair—even Mum—it just falls right out. Even perms. And I don't mean just some stupid home perm. Mum used to have her own salon, but she sold it a few years ago. She was good, you know. Respected. She was the first person on the southside who could do every style from ‘Charlie's Angels' and match it properly with the customer's needs. As far as the salon business goes, she went out on a high. Round about when Dad's World ideas started taking off.'

The back door swings open and Zel's there, voluminous of hair in her white and gold as she sweeps by. ‘Just your father,' she says to Sophie. ‘Worried where I'd got to.'

Her heels clang down the stairs, click across the concrete and into the dark.

‘Hey,' Sophie says once she's gone, ‘I read this article. Automatic turn-ons and turn-offs.'

‘Yeah? You read a lot of magazines.'

‘I'm doing media studies. So what do you reckon? Automatic turn-ons first. What would you rate as an automatic turn-on.'

‘Quirky observation,' I tell her and I'm quite proud of myself. It sounds so much more sophisticated than ‘sizeable shapely breasts', for example, or ‘fast trouser hand'.

‘Yeah, I'd go for that,' she says. ‘I'd rate that pretty high. Okay, turn-offs.'

‘Turn-offs . . . A lack of appreciation of the finer points of physics? No. A genuine attachment to extreme right-wing political beliefs. It'd be very hard to come back from there.'

‘So, Phoebe's not a Joh fan then?'

‘No.' Yet again, a Phoebe reference catches me unawares. Why am I never ready? ‘She's going to the protest on Friday.' And why do I always end up appropriating a small amount of Phoebe my mother to play Phoebe my girlfriend? If I don't stop doing this, I'm destined for some kind of therapy. ‘So, what's your automatic turn-off then?'

‘The named penis. If a guy drops his pants and goes, “say hello to Charlie,” I'm out of there.'

‘And if he drops his pants and doesn't ask you to say hello to Charlie?' ‘Depends on the guy, I suppose. Hey, I had a friend once who went out with a guy who was a big
2001: A Space Odyssey
fan and he called it Hal.'

‘And was that friend called Sophie?'

There's a pause, as if she honestly hadn't expected to be caught out. ‘Maybe.'

‘You've spent far too much time with the sci-fi crowd. But here's what I don't get. How do the Hal-penis guys even get that far? Nothing personal, but surely it's not the first signal that there's something wrong. Surely things aren't going along swimmingly, then all of a sudden it's Howdy Hal that gets you wondering for the first time.'

‘Depends, I suppose. That's why it's the automatic turn-off. There are plenty of turn-offs out there, but a lot get you a second chance. Howdy Hal gets you a definite nothing, at least as far as I'm concerned.'

 

*

 

Her hair's not really lank. That's what I'm thinking, sitting in Frank's car with his burger box on my lap. Thin and straight, yes, but lank's a bit harsh. Not an observation a parent should make, particularly a full-haired parent. But they do, don't they, they do. And they never mean it badly. It's been two weeks since my mother classified me as scrawn, she's not forgiven yet and she doesn't even know it.

The named penis. Sophie had had time to think about it, but it was still good material. It's reassuring that that's a turn-off. Frank's penis, from what I've heard, has many names. Not that that's made it any kind of master of disguise.

We pass within a block of the Underground on the way to my place. We should have gone there tonight, the three of us. I put it to Frank after Zel left, but he said he'd told his parents he'd come straight home after work to ‘move a sofa, or some shit. You know how it goes. And it's always got to be done today.' So the idea never even made it to Sophie.

‘I'll do you a deal tomorrow,' he says.

‘Yeah?'

‘Your parents won't be home till about six, right?'

‘Round about. My mother's usually home around then, my father some time later.'

‘I'll give you a lift home from the Mater if you'll help me out with a photo or two. I've got a plan for O'Hare.'

‘The surgery tutor? Do you really think that's a good idea?'

‘You haven't heard the plan yet.'

‘The last plan I heard was keeping a low profile and doing another case in the holidays.'

‘Yeah, this is a new plan. On top of that plan. That's still happening too. It's just a couple of photos.'

‘Okay.' Said in that ‘against my better judgement' way, but that'd never bother Frank. ‘Hey, Sophie said this thing about photos tonight.' Which I can't believe I'm about to quote, but . . . ‘I can't remember what we were talking about but she said, “Do you get that thing where, when you look at old photos of yourself in public places, you wonder what's happened to all those people in the background that you've never met?”'