Green (58 page)

He called her Miss Grable, so she called him Mister Clancy. When he made a joke because it crossed his mind and he figured he had nothing to lose, she laughed. And every lunchtime that week, Betty Grable turned up at the same spot in Macarthur's car and Noel lied about having a follow-up medical appointment so that he could meet her.

She swore him to secrecy, and he couldn't have imagined a better secret. She told him she was between pictures with Victor Mature, and the President had asked her to lift the boys' spirits. No one outside the military was to know about the trip until she was safely back home.

On the Friday she said, ‘I'm leaving tomorrow, for parts unspecified. Look after yourself, young man.' As Noel tells it, she paused then and drew back on her cigarette before adding, ‘If it all goes wrong, tell me you'll head south.'

It was the winter of 1942 and the Japanese were getting closer to Port Moresby. The next Monday Noel went back to the park, sifting through leaves until he found a cigarette butt with Betty Grable's exact lipstick on it, and he kept it forever in an old cough-lozenge tin.

That's the closing frame of ‘Lunch with Betty Grable', a shot of the actual tin in Noel's own old hand. Or it will be, if the film gets made. There are people to meet in New York about that.

Frank sent me a text with the room number, telling me to go straight there. The hotel has a doorman with a cap and epaulettes that have the look of an admiral's costume from a musical. I make my way across the lobby with my hand in my pocket, searching for a key card I don't yet have, just to avoid explaining myself. The carpet is thick and the wheels of my suitcase are silent on it. The lobby seems to pride itself on its silence.

It's Otter who opens the door to the suite. He has a leather cap on and, with his black handlebar moustache, my first thought is it's a Village People pastiche. Before I can ask if Frank's the motorbike cop lead singer, he appears from one of the bedrooms. If the Village People had a whippet in the line-up, Frank would be it. Actually, he's leaner than a whippet or, if not leaner, perhaps his leanness is more emphasised. He looks like a whippet staring through a window at a sandwich.

Not that Frank's entitled to sandwiches. Otter has him on six meals a day, and meal two is underway. It's a smoothie made with bok choy, choy sum, rice milk and protein powder. Once it's in the glass, it looks like a pond the council would want to check for mosquito larvae.

Frank drinks a mouthful and the peristaltic wave bumps his Adam's apple forward like a boat. He has trimmed down to become an anatomy lesson of his former self.

‘I'm ready,' he says, his grin full of lawn clippings. ‘I'm going to ace it.'

He takes a photo of his glass of pond scum and posts it on Twitter.

His race number—five digits, in the mid-thirty thousands—is sitting on a pile of paperwork on a table that looks as if it was looted from Versailles. The table lamp has a muted olde-gold lampshade and a pair of whimsical porcelain lovers as its base. She's looking coyly over her shoulder at him, he's lounging as if reciting verse. Or trying to conceal the pain of a gallstone.

The curtains—the ones from the picture—look even heavier in real life, with more brocade and plumper rope ties. Each curtain looks like it would amount to approximately my bodyweight in chintz. The dining table seats six and each of its metalwork legs is an arc of opposed c-scrolls—a shape that means the diner has no intuitive sense of where the leg might be, and its hard edges could take a piece out of a shin. The white baby grand is almost invisible against all the gilt and the curly curly furniture.

Just as I'm thinking that the room is one big rococo vomit, Frank says, ‘Cool place, hey?'

‘You know me,' I tell him. ‘I always leaned towards chinoiserie.' Once again I can't crap on his misfired exuberance, but nor can I stop myself sniping at it as I pass.

‘You should check out Otter's room.' He points to a nearby door. ‘It's all pagodas and shit. Totally willow pattern.' Thirty years of sniping and I've yet to hit the mark.

Frank's already at the door before I can stop him, and flinging it open to reveal a folding screen with an island pagoda and bridges, a bedside table with a black-and-gold faux-lacquerware jug and a pair of leather chaps on the bed, next to a codpiece and something that looks like a tail. With straps.

‘You need to finish your smoothie,' Otter says. ‘It's time for your poultices.'

Right on cue, a microwave pings in the kitchen. Frank pulls down his shorts.

‘Do you have to make that response look so pavlovian?' I've taken a step back before I realise the shorts are as far as he's taking it.

‘You should see what I do when the kettle boils.' He jiggles his eyebrows up and down. We did Pavlov together in a lazy Psych elective in '81.

Otter fetches a fold-up massage table from his room and locks its legs into place. Franks dives onto it and dunks his face into the hole in a way that suggests he's well practised at it. Otter fetches a pair of steaming poultices from the kitchen on a plate. I feel as if I'm trespassing on a ritual.

There's a salty smell, with a citrus tang. I was expecting menthol, or something herbal. There were poultices in my childhood before the logic of medicine came along and supplanted folk remedies.

‘Hey is that . . .' I stop myself, because it can't be.

Otter slaps the poultices on, one on each cheek.

‘You got it,' Frank says to the carpet through the face hole. He lifts one arm to give me a thumbs up. ‘Lemon-lime fusion.'

‘You're using Staminade poultices? Wouldn't it be better to drink the Staminade and use the smoothie as a poultice?'

Frank laughs. ‘Otter's always getting confused between the mouth side of things and the arse side of things.'

I'm not even sure what that means. ‘So if I ever make him lunch, I should expect him to sit on it?'

Otter looks on stony-faced. ‘You won't need to make me lunch.' He touches Frank's thigh with the tips of his fingers. ‘I'm going to rinse out the blender. I don't want to see a millimetre of movement from you.'

Frank grips the legs of the table as the heat works its way through to his skin. Otter swings the kitchen door firmly shut behind him, but the thick carpets slows it and it shuts with a sigh and a delicate click instead of the thump he meant it to make.

‘What are you doing with Staminade poultices? That's insane.' With Otter gone there's no reason to hold back. ‘Poultices are crazy unless your buttocks are full of pus, and they're not even last century's way of dealing with it. But a Staminade poultice? It's an affront to that weekend sports medicine workshop I did to keep up my registration. There's no such thing.'

‘Google it.'

I do. The only reference is on Frank's race preparation blog, and it's illustrated by a picture of his poulticed buttocks taken from the foot of the massage table.

‘It's the electrolytes,' he says, gritting his teeth as his arse burns. ‘It's chock-full of cations.'

‘Yeah, and probably anions too. But traditionally they get where they need to go via the mouth.'

‘It's working. It's going to work. I can feels the electrolytes surging in. And you know how my glutes seize up.'

‘No I don't. We've had no cause to discuss your glutes.'

‘Well, they . . .'

‘I think your glutes are between you, your poultices and your manservant. And your fans in the blogosphere, obviously. I might have suggested a few stretches rather than Otter's scorched arse policy, but ...'

Otter walks back in with a bottle of scented oil. ‘Top off, Doctor,' he says. ‘Rub-down time.'

 

*

 

I spend the afternoon thinking about film financiers and watching my phone not ring, and I make another partially successful attempt at skyping home in the evening. Frank sits in a gold robe and ugg boots watching me eat Chinese takeaway and drink a beer, as if I'm a 3D movie of a better but sub-athletic life.

Otter spends an hour manscaping extensively in his bathroom, and then goes out smelling of musk and sandalwood and carrying a large bag. He tells me Frank needs total quiet tonight, as if I have a party planned right after my last mouthful of General Tso's chicken.

The clock in my room says it's 5.06am when Otter crashes back into the apartment and trips on the carpet, landing with a thud. His footsteps make a clink-clink-clink sound as he stumbles to his room.

My alarm's set for six for the next semi-pointless skype home, but I can't sleep after Otter's arrival. When I open my door, it looks as if something's taken two lines of bites out of the carpet. Otter has come home in spurs.

I shut the door and sit on my bed checking email until exactly six. If I skype early it'll be in the middle of something. I get through on the third try. Charlotte refuses to sing Humpty Dumpty when Wendy asks her to. Chelsea just keeps saying ‘massive poo' over and over until Wendy confirms that there was indeed a massive poo.

It's only when the call ends that I hear Otter's voice somewhere else in the apartment saying, ‘Higher. They've got to be higher up the wall.'

There's a thump, the sound of tearing plastic, a lid doing ever-smaller circles on a tiled floor.

As soon as I step out of my room I know I've made a mistake. The door of the nearest bathroom is open and Frank is lying on his back wearing only a fleece jumper, with his bare legs well up the wall and Otter standing like a snake charmer, manipulating the tube in Frank's anus and squirting a bag of fluid down it.

Frank catches my eye and says, ‘G'day,' as if we meet this way regularly. Coffee? Beer? Enema? He notices me staring at the tube and gives a knowing kind of nod. ‘All the big runners do this—they just don't talk about it.'

‘All of them, or just all the ones trained by Otter?'

Otter has bloodshot eyes and wet hair. He's wearing the hotel robe and slippers. No spurs. Both of his heels are red and chafed. He's saying nothing.

‘You could reword the business card maybe,' I say to Frank. ‘Manservant, masseur, enemateur.'

Frank looks up at Otter. ‘I
told
you there was a word for it. Get Philby to spell it for you.'

Otter keeps pretending I'm not there and says, ‘We're just about loaded, Doctor. Now, keep yourself pursed as I come out of you.'

 

*

 

The race starts at 10.10 on Staten Island and the rules are clear—it's competitors only, no hangers on. Not an easy prospect for Otter who is used to hanging from Frank's gills most of the time. And his enema tube some of the time, as it's turned out.

Otter checks Frank and his kit as if he's off to his first day at school. Race number bib, start village colour and corral number confirmation, timing chip for his shoe, prototype Frank-conceived Otter-designed rip-off tracksuit, based on techniques pioneered by Buck's Fizz for Eurovision in '81 (patent pending).

Frank pulls at one of the velcro tabs, flashes some thigh and says, ‘We're sharing the IP on this one, Otter and me. Reckon there could be quite a market for it.'

‘That reminds me,' Otter says. ‘They reserve the right to DQ anyone who urinates anywhere other than in the supplied toilets. Worth remembering.'

He takes Frank to the pick-up point and I settle for a leisurely walk to the Upper East Side and lunch at a diner unloved by Zagat where I don't have to queue for a table.

It's the Queensboro Bridge between the fifteen and sixteen mile marks that can break people's spirits with its long climb, so the plan is for me to stake out a designated cheering zone around the seventeen-mile mark and Otter to wait near the energy gel station at eighteen miles. Queensboro Bridge takes your legs away and at eighteen miles you're heading for the wall. Otter says if we can get him through that and send him into the turn-around in the Bronx in good shape, he'll make it. Not in the time Frank thinks he will, but he'll make it.

It's a Sunday, so I'm telling myself it's okay the film financing people haven't called. I check my phone three times during lunch, in case I've turned it to silent.

The cheering zone's near the corner of East 77th and First Avenue.

A volunteer comes up to me as soon as I arrive. The place is full of volunteers, and this one's mid-thirties and wearing a loose over-sized volunteer T shirt and comfortable shoes.

She asks me for my runner's start details, and when I read them from my phone she says, ‘Oh, exciting. You're from way out of town. You'll have to tell me where, precisely where, and you'll have to make a sign. There's time. Your friend won't be here for at least thirty minutes.' She glances at a clipboard on which she's been checking off the starting groups as they come through. ‘So, where? Are you from? And is your friend from there too? Is it anywhere near Cape Town? I have an ear for accents. Let's get you started on your sign.'

She shunts me across to a long trestle table behind the action where, in the guise of sign-making, children are finger-painting and spilling glitter and one solid guy in a check shirt and trucker's cap has decided he's a solo production line turning out ‘John 3:16' signs for his many kids.

I'm handed a blue marker pen and that's when I get stuck. What kind of sentiment can do justice to the moment—to close to thirty-two years and the moment? ‘Thanks for the free room'? ‘Thanks for not making me bunk in with Otter'? ‘You have more money and luck than you deserve'? ‘Go Frank?' What do we have, now that fifty's closing in?

I'm tempted to put ‘John 3:16, Frank to break three hours?' and stand behind the kids, but instead I settle on one I know he'll go for: ‘Faster with an empty rectum?'

As I make my way towards a space at the front, the volunteer closes in, same cheery welcoming smile as before.