Green (3 page)

My sinuses feel very clear, I say to Frank. Very, very clear.

And Frank says, Good on you.

I tell him it must be the mint. The mint clears the sinuses, I say quite loudly. I can recommend it. And Frank thinks I am recommending it, in an immediate and personal way and, aware that he has a problem with his sinuses, orders himself two Creme de Menthes with his next beer, taking them both quickly and earnestly, like medicine.

I am now feeling hot all over, and there is a ringing in my head coming from a long way off. I want to warn Frank about this, to say there might be side effects, but I can't possibly be heard over his singing, particularly while Vince is shouting, Yeah I think they're a bit clearer, your sinuses. Yeah. That's sounding bloody good, mate.

So he joins in.

Hey, how about some Five Hundred, Greg says, pulling a deck of cards from his pocket. Just for small stuff, for ones, twos and fives, hey?

First I think he means dollars and I wonder what I've let myself in for, and then he scoops a handful of small change onto the table and organises it into three wobbly piles. So I say, Sure, and then realise I've never played Five Hundred before.

And just when I think I'm about to be thwarted by the tribal problem, I remember the Solo my father taught me to play. The Solo he had played when in the British Armed Forces in India. No one in the Punjab could touch me lad, when I had a bit of form going, he told me once. And he's always said that Five Hundred was an inferior version of the great game, and that anyone who mastered Solo could make the best Five Hundred player in the world look like a fool.

So, after a brief clarification of house rules, we play. We play, and I hear myself shouting, but, I hope, not ungenerously as I take hand after hand. Boldly, flamboyantly, elegantly, like an impresario, like a hussar, feeling nothing below the waist, watching the table sway in front of me and rise on one occasion only to strike me softly in the face. And I feel nothing, nothing at all but mint and victory. And there are times when I'm sure my brain is resting and my arms play on without me, flourishing strategies that haven't been seen outside the British Armed Forces in India since the late nineteenth century, passing Creme de Menthe to my shouting mouth, raking money across the table.

From this point, my recollections are non-linear.

I lie on my bed with my room full of well-established daylight and stinking of old mint. Crusty green debris around my nostrils, hidden Creme de Menthe oozing from my sinuses whenever I roll over. There is a bucket on the floor near the bed. A blue bucket with a slick of bubbly green swill on the bottom.

We sang ‘Across the Universe', I recall. Sang it, or at least shouted it at the cars on Coro Drive, and they honked their horns, and I think I saluted. I recall myself shouting at all stages of the card game, loudly and in a ridiculous English accent, and saying very pukka things that today mean little. I remember giving the anthropology lecturer the bagging of a lifetime in his absence. At least, I assume it was in his absence. I can see him rearing up through my rickety dreams saying, You just got lucky kid, but I don't think he did.

And some of my large pile of small-change winnings went on a bottle of Creme de Menthe and we toasted many things, including the way the game is, or was, played in the Punjab, back when it was played by experts and the sun had yet to set on the long twilight of the empire.

And I took the pack and started ripping out card tricks at high speed, just the way my father showed me, shouting at the others in a private parody of his voice, Come on then Charlie, pick a card, any card. And I fooled them every time, baffled them, and I can hear Vince's voice saying, The man's a genius, a genius.

And I'm still in the middle of this slow, green, glorious death, heaving up some more unnecessary gastric juices into the blue bucket when my mother comes in.

Your friend Frank's called a couple of times, she says. He said to tell you that there's a barbecue at his place tonight, and that three of the four girls you mentioned last night will be turning up. He said to tell you that it's BYO—but don't worry, he'll have plenty of ice.

She watches me nod and lose a little more gastric juice.

You're doin' well, Philby, she says, perhaps in the accent she used to try out (unsuccessfully) for the part of Blanche in
A Streetcar Named Desire.
Doin' fine.

 

 

 

SAUSAGE SIZZLE—1982

 

 

 

S
econd
year
starts as it was always likely to. Frank Green is pissed on Creme de Menthe again.

Which would be fine, if we hadn't volunteered for barbecue duty at the faculty orientation sausage sizzle. Fine, if his naughty-French-maid apron didn't keep flapping so close to the heat beads.

‘It's how to meet 'em,' he said, when he volunteered us for it weeks ago. ‘Be the man with the tongs. Save the biggest snags for the spunks and offer them up with some witticism.'

And he was about to move right into the witticism, I could tell, so I held up my hand and said, ‘Save a little magic for the day, Frank. It's got to sound fresh.'

‘Sure,' he said, the magic already on his mind. ‘Mate. First years.' Said like a carnivore talking about gazelle flank. ‘First years.' Said as though he was telling me right then he'd be rooting himself stupid by sundown.

First years. I was far too scared when I started first year to think that sex might actually happen. But deciding to be a lot less scared lately hasn't made it any more likely, and that doesn't seem fair. Hanging around with Frank was, I thought, a bit of a plus. Now I'm not so sure.

‘So how long's it been since you've been close to a root?' Frank says, eyeing off the herd of grazing first years, as though he's doing it on my behalf. While reading my mind, but maybe it's easily read.

‘Dunno,' I tell him, which is a lie, since it's no problem to add nine months to my age and come up with something just over nineteen years.

Already, I'm thinking today will not be the day that changes my luck. Already I'm thinking that maybe my best possible outcome would be that we both miss out. Then at least I won't have to get the phone call from Frank in the morning. The lurid, sweaty detail. I just hate imagining Frank naked. I wish he didn't feel the need to call.

He takes a sip of his tall green drink and the ice cubes clink against the sides. He's famous for it now, his Creme de Menthe. And its strategic implications. ‘Much quicker than beer,' he's said regularly. ‘You'd be a fool to try to get pissed on beer once you know the green drink.'

So we've swapped, in a way. I'm okay with beer now, a few beers. And with the barbecue fired up and a few dozen sausages to turn, I'm on my second light for the afternoon, alternating with water. Which reminds me. Today I was gone before I started, really.

My mother drove me here, never a good beginning to an event.

‘But I'm heading that way, Philby,' she said.

And I said, ‘No you aren't.'

And she half-pursed her lips and said, ‘Get in the car.'

And I sat there in the traffic in the foul sun, every second talking myself closer to ruin. Sweating and wanting to stay home and wallow in the pool. Hating barbecues and preferring watermelon and feeling the mad fluttering of trouble let loose once again in my stomach as I thought about the next few hours.

She talked on and on, in vague and offensively encouraging tones, but didn't quite say anything encouraging enough that I could go off at her about it. She's getting better at me being a loser, and the only thing worse than that is, so am I.

‘It's stinking hot today,' she said as I peeled myself from the passenger seat upholstery and climbed out of the car, trying not to hear her say things like ‘tenner for a cab home' (though I took it, of course) and ‘I'll make a bed up for Frank, shall I?'

I just wanted her to go away, go away, let me sneak away from her privately, and I'd made it as far as the refec steps when I heard her shout, ‘Be careful, Philby. Watch your fluids.'

And I ignored her utterly, but the world knew just whose mother she was, and I got several pieces of good advice about fluids over the next half-hour or so.

It's my confidence problem, and it just isn't going. And putting a name to it's only made it seem like some disease I've got, and helped me to anticipate everything it puts me through.

Any time I'm in the vicinity of a heterosexual female of approachable age, I get a bit edgy. I think I've been saving myself for a little too long without ever meaning to. I am comprehensively inexperienced. I am stuck at the stage just before the conversation stage, and I know enough to know that that's very stuck, and far removed from the main game.

It's all down to attitude, I know that, and I've worked on it. I rehearse in my room, saying plenty of clever things quietly into my pillow, factoring in a range of possible girl responses and working out where I might take the conversation from there. And my mother thinks my sensitive side's a plus and my pillow thinks I'm a right charmer, but in the real world I'm like a pencil-drawn outline of my better self.

I go to the faculty functions. Frank makes me. I'm the man with the plan (he makes me say that, over and over), and soon enough, I'm as dynamic as paint in there. Silent and desperately two-D up against the wall and wanting to try again some other night. Or never. Looking around at the casual talk and the coupling and realising I'm so seriously behind in this faculty that I have to have some form about me first time up, and practice (verbal or otherwise) just isn't going to get me there.

I thought this'd get better. It's got so bad my mother even told me that she'd thought it'd get better. It's so bad she offered to buy me a book on it, and in that instant it got much worse.

I think the eighteenth century was good, plenty of other centuries were probably good. I think you could write poems for girls then (or sometimes even just quote someone else's), and make them love you before you even met. At least, in some cases. I'd be up for that. I write the odd poem.

Frank doesn't. Well, occasional limericks, but only when he can find two rhymes for ‘hornbag', and that's not the same thing. But it works for him. He keeps the limericks for the guys and gets the girl action he wants, better than 30 per cent of the time, and he never gets stuck in a relationship.

We work the barbecue and heat wells up from the beads and the sun flogs us from behind, through the spindly trees that grow out of the rockery. And there's not much enthusiasm today for meat.

Frank toys with a fat ten-inch sausage and says, ‘This beast'd be mine,' any time a first year (female) comes up to the barbecue area, but it usually only costs him eye contact and doesn't get him far.

He's surprisingly resilient though, when it comes to things like this. He calls it ‘the numbers', reckoning he's got nothing to lose, a 2 per cent chance of success each time and an awful lot of sausages to serve. Frank's more strategic than he looks. Frank knows intercourse never happens by chance, even though you have to make it look as though it does.

‘Never had a root I didn't have to work two hours for,' he once told me, as though it was advice.

I ask him if he wants just a plain water next, and he says, ‘Nuh.' Quaffs a mouthful of green. He points out possibles in the crowd, telling me, ‘I'd go her. I'd go her in a flash. Sizzle, baby, sizzle,' he says, staring shamelessly, poking his now-favourite sausage with the tongs and giving a bit of a jiggle of his hips.

‘Those three over there,' he says. ‘Those three. Second-year physios, aren't they? I've seen them at a few of these things before. I'm giving them heaps of eye, mate. You can even have first pick and I'll take the other two. Can't say fairer than that.'

And he slurps Creme de Menthe, gives me a dirty man's wink. Frank Green is the only person I know who expects to both get drunk and have sex every time he leaves the house, and that ends up giving him a great outlook on life. Even though most of the time he only manages to get drunk.

But he's going to get lucky today. I can tell. He's got the confidence going, more than usual even, mainly because of the sausage. He doesn't often get to operate with the aid of such an overt symbol of his penis. People like confidence. Frank told me once, or several times, that someone had described him as ‘fully self-actualised', and he's quite proud of that. Sometimes he even tells girls. Sometimes he explains it to them as meaning that he's ‘pretty much 100 per cent horn, baby'. On two occasions known to me, he has alleged that this claim has led to intercourse, reasonably quickly.

There are days when Frank Green's whole world scares me, even though I'm a part of it. Days when I know the maths is stacked against me, and I know that I'm only about 20 per cent self-actualised, and feeling no more than fifteen.

‘So pick,' he says. ‘Which one?'

‘The one with the nose,' I tell him, but I know that I'm fucked.

I slip into a tail spin and sludge a few onions around on the hotplate. I like the smell of onions cooking. I like it when people don't talk to me or when they just go, ‘Hey, great onions.' I like the idea of someone wanting you, in a nice way, wanting to be with you and things, and other things arising as a consequence. I like days that are not dominated by performance anxiety and fear of the unknown, and I have them sometimes. Most recently, there was a day two weeks ago just like that.

I serve more onions, to low-key acclaim.

Meanwhile Frank has spiked his massive sausage with a fork and is passing one end of it in and out of his mouth in order to attract attention.

So far, no attention.

Frank, again, has managed to be the first person at a faculty function to have far too much to drink. So his Creme de Menthe theory's holding up.