Green (47 page)

‘Thank you,' is all she says as I get in.

She pulls out, with the charms on her gold bracelets tinkling across the steering wheel as she turns it. We park in a side street a few blocks away. She adjusts her sunglasses, and looks out the windscreen. A car drives by, looking for a parking space.

And Zel tells me about the affair she thought Ron was having. An affair with someone much younger. She tells me about the cheerleader videos he's got hidden at home, at least ten of them, and magazines. Men's magazines. And she did a test that she found in a magazine article—not one of his magazines—and it showed that he had six of the eight major warning signs of someone who was cheating. And they said six was high probability.

‘And after that . . . after that . . .'

After that, the inaccuracy of her high-probability magazine-test result suddenly hit home, and the life she's been leading hit home harder. She pulled handfuls of tissues out of the glove box and wiped her face vigorously, until a lot of her tan came away and her cheeks went red and shiny instead of the usual dusky cinnamon.

We agreed to call it ‘a case of very poor communication on both sides'. I told her Ron had mentioned the videos this morning, and it had been clear they'd been a homemade kind of therapy. Fortunately, she didn't ask for my views on why he'd needed ten of them to know that it wasn't working, or on why every one seemed to be about cheerleaders. I didn't even know cheerleader porn was its own genre, until today.

Zel told me she watched bits of a couple, hoping that there was a problem with the boxes and the videos were something else. But at the same time it was in the back of her mind that, if they were what they purported to be, she might watch them with Ron, and that might help. But she couldn't do it. For a start she found she couldn't mention to Ron that she'd seen them but, even if she'd been able to, the movies were just too bad. ‘Busty girls with exploding bras who kept falling on their pom-pom handles, and it never made any sense,' she said, as if that meant that the storylines would have given the two of them very little to work with.

I told her that had always been my main problem with porn, cinematically, across all its sub-genres. They use up their imagination on the titles, and I can't abide the disrespect for narrative.

‘I tried to change my hair,' she said. ‘I even signed up for jazz-ballet classes, but he never noticed and it just made me feel old. Then I did the cheating test. Then . . .'

She called herself an idiot. She punched the steering wheel. She asked me questions. How to talk to Ron, how much to tell. Questions that are too big, too important, for me to try to answer. But I told her I thought she should be careful breaking anything dramatic right now, and that the first step might not involve Ron at all. So it's not like I held back and didn't interfere.

‘Frank,' she said. Another moment of grim realisation. ‘What do I do about Frank?'

I told her that was up to her too. What was I supposed to say? ‘Ten cheerleader videos would make an excellent parting gift? Pom-pom porn could get to be Frank's second-favourite movie genre without much problem at all?'

At the end, she thanked me and she tilted the rear-view mirror her way and filled in the gaps she'd rubbed in her make-up, repastelled her worn lips, smacked them together and dabbed them with a tissue. ‘Better,' she said, though it wasn't much, and she drove me back to an obscure entrance to the Mater. She squeezed my hand and thanked me again, and I got out of the car and walked quickly away.

 

*

 

Frank explains that he did take notes, but it wasn't much of a lecture.

And I tell him that there's a lot of stuff going on between Zel and Ron, things they have to deal with that aren't about either of us. I tell him what I can, and he knows he can't ask for more.

He's quieter than usual at lunch. I want to tell him it'll be okay if things don't work out with Zel. It's always okay soon enough. Options don't take long to show themselves to Frank. But I still don't know what she'll do, what this means to her now that she's far from here, across town, back on her turf in Carindale.

‘Hey,' he says. ‘How was this morning? The breakfast giveaway at the World. Ness was up early getting ready.'

‘It was good. She was good. She did some on-air stuff, and she was really good at it.'

Ness, who seized the day. I'd forgotten that, with all that's happened since. Ness who came out and said it for the first time on the top-rating breakfast radio show in town—she knows what she wants to be instead of a florist. I hope they were listening, and I hope Big Artie gets this one right.

After lunch, we attach ourselves to a ward round, then we have an amniocentesis tute at four.

I keep hearing the tinkle of bracelet charms as Zel put her hands up to cover her face in the car. To hide for a moment, since the outside world had grown too big to deal with. It was tough, facing all that, but she could find a kind of good news in there, too. Six out of eight signs say that Ron's having an affair, they're all wrong and I might have bought her some time to work with that.

The tute goes on a while, later than it's supposed to.

‘Better go,' Frank says, taking a look at his watch when we come out. ‘With all that business you and Ness and Richie the Rat will have stirred up for us this morning, we don't want to be late. The World awaits.'

It's the last day of May and the afternoons are ending noticeably earlier. It's dark when we walk to the car, the beginnings of a clear, starry night. We join the trail of brake lights that's strung along the edge of town on the sweep of the freeway. We cross the river and leave the city to our right, with Human League playing on Double B. Frank turns it up, humming along to the bits he knows and then just humming.

Sophie hasn't arrived when we get to World of Chickens, so I take the suit. The team that's finishing tells us business hasn't been bad. There have been a few cars pulling out of the traffic to pick up early dinners, and a couple of people have asked if this is the place where Richie the Rat had it Italian style for Freebie Friday this morning.

This morning, or last century. The days are long when you leave home with a thermos at six-thirty and get caught up counselling old people in the midst of a crisis. So it's good to be away from talk and out at the road. Or it would be, if we didn't have the strobe and all those signs. Just when I really feel like slacking off, we've turned the job into something busy.

And customers are turning up, not in huge numbers but enough to mean that Frank is missing Sophie's work at the counter. I catch his attention and he shrugs and shakes his head. I signal to ask him if he wants me in there helping, and he nods.

It's another fifteen minutes before Sophie comes in the back door.

‘Sorry,' she says. ‘Sorry.' Looking awful, red-faced and sniffing. ‘I'll just get changed.'

And then she's gone again, down the corridor trying to look like someone making up for lost time.

‘Chicks,' Frank says, sighing at their perpetual mystery as he flips the last fillet for now. ‘I think you'd better get out there and sort her out.'

‘Me?'

But it can only be me. Sophie's the only Todd I haven't put into therapy today, and I need to complete my set. What's she heard? What's happened?

She's sitting on the steps, with her forehead down on her arms and her arms folded across her knees, and she's sniffing.

‘Sophie . . .'

‘Go away. Just go away.'

‘Does that mean . . .'

‘Go away.'

‘Okay, do you want to do the counter, or be the chicken?'

‘Counter.'

‘Are you sure? Are you . . .'

‘Go away. Please.'

‘Okay, I'll just change and then we'll see . . . I'll just change.'

I can still hear the sniffing while I'm in the toilet, and it's drowned out only briefly by a westbound train. And I'm not going to go away, am I?

‘I have just been having a very bad day,' is how she puts it, each word angry, when I come out in costume and try to talk to her again. ‘There's a whole lot of things . . . a whole lot of things, all happening at once. And you . . . I can't believe you think I have to tell you.' She sniffs. ‘Ah, my nose.'

‘What's wrong with your nose?'

‘Exams. I'm going to fail. I am going to fail. I had one this afternoon, an early one. They sprung it on us. I only found out about it a couple of days ago. And I had to get out of it, right? So I did that toothpaste thing, that swallowing toothpaste thing, where you swallow a lot of it and put on a couple of jumpers and run around and it gives you a fever, and you go to the health service and get a certificate. Well, I threw it up instead and it came out my nose.'

‘I didn't realise things were like that.'

‘No, you didn't,' she says, and for the first time I notice the minty smell. ‘I didn't tell you. That's me, okay? It's like, I don't freak out. I freak in . . . Shit this is bad in the nose. It's like my sinuses are really clear but my eyes are watering.'

‘Yeah, I know what it's like. I had a bad experience with Créme de Menthe once. A few times.'

‘What'll I do? It's really burning.'

‘Um, I don't know. Maybe they don't cover management of toothpaste burns to nasal mucosa until sixth year. Other than wash it out, I don't know.'

‘Don't you laugh at me.'

‘I'm not laughing. It's one of the less common self-inflicted injuries, but . . .'

‘Don't you laugh because I know you were with my mother this morning.' Okay, that does stop me. I'm not laughing. ‘I wondered about what was going on, and I didn't want to, and now I know.'

‘What?'

‘You were with my mother. I heard her talking to you on the phone to organise it.'

‘I don't think you understand.'

‘Oh really? Really?'

‘I had to talk to your mother about my mother. She's in a play, a musical,
Pirates of Penzance
at the Arts Theatre, remember? I got your mother's pager number from your father this morning. I wanted to arrange style advice for my mother. Costume and hair. Mainly hair.'

‘Yeah, right. And that accounts for all the shit going on over the last month. Your mother and Gilbert and Sullivan. You want to know what I think? Since that's just a lie. Here's what I think. My mother is having an affair. That's what I think's happening. Things are totally strange at home and you know what? The two of you are singing the same songs. And even though that's not one of the eight classic signs of an affair—even though she's only showing five of them, which means moderate risk—it's good enough to be a ninth sign as far as I'm concerned. I heard you both doing “Eye of the Tiger” on the same night two weeks ago, and I don't know what that's about but I do know she's big on talkback. There's nothing she listens to that'd play eighties music. Nothing newer than Neil bloody Diamond—that's my mother. Phoebe, Jacinta, my mother—for god's sake, how many is enough for you? I don't understand you at all. And you were bizarre on the bat cruise and then you saw her this morning. You've started getting very clumsy. And you pretend to be Dad's friend and my friend. Well, I've had enough.' That's when she stops. Snaps to a stop as if there can be nothing more.

So I go to the back door, and I shut it. I shut it slowly and calmly. I don't usually get angry with people, but I'm angry now and I want to say something cool and sensible. And then I want to shout at Frank later, a lot.

It doesn't quite work out that way.

The first cool sensible thing I can manage is: ‘When will you people stop reading those fucking trashy magazines?' And the ‘fucking' echoes off the houses on the other side of the train tracks. ‘When will you stop putting me in the middle of things? I'm going to tell you what's happening. I'm going to tell you, and you couldn't be more wrong.'

She looks up. ‘Yeah?' She doesn't know what to say next, what to believe, what she most wants to hear or what she might hear. She thought she'd caught me out.

‘Okay. Here's what's happening. This is what's happening. I'm not even getting into the Phoebe and Jacinta issue—for which, by the way, there is a totally straightforward explanation—but here's what's happening with your parents. It started with your father talking to me, then your mother. There have been a few issues with the business expansion—and I'm not supposed to be telling you this, so if you tell anyone . . .'

‘I won't.'

‘It's going to be okay. But your father's been quite depressed, and he hasn't been able to talk about it. That's been difficult for both of them. Then they both started talking to me. So that's why I saw your mother today. There are some problems and I'm fucking helping, so I don't need that from you. And you were the one who said “Eye of the Tiger” was getting played everywhere. I can't believe you'd assume anything based on the fact that your mother and I both know it. How could you be alive now and not know it? For someone who's talking about friendship, you could have behaved in a friendlier way. You could have asked me. You could have said something the first time this crossed your mind, rather than just getting angry with me and then hitting me with it weeks later.'

‘Shit,' she says, and puts her forehead back down onto her arms. ‘Shit, shit. Don't be angry with me back. You can't be angry with me when you're dressed like a chicken. It's just too silly. Please.'

I can't say anything. I'm angry and sad and relieved at the same time. Sad about all of this. Relieved that she's believing me, but it can't quite be enough. Angry with myself for lying to her right now and still angry with her for thinking what she's been thinking. But despite that, as I look down at her out of the beak slot, I'm finding it hard to stay as angry as I think I should, watching her there folded up on the steps, distraught and now smelling strongly of mint.