Green (59 page)

‘Now, what have we got here?' she says perkily, as she turns the sign around to read it. ‘You sure took your time . . . Oh. Oh dear. Is that . . . Does it have a different meaning in Australia? I think that's a part of the anatomy. The intimate anatomy. I . . . We have a list of words that you can't . . . Um, I might have to check something.'

She's back in a minute with a race marshal who starts by telling me he's an off-duty police officer. NYPD.

He takes one look at the sign, pulls it from my hand and says, ‘I don't know what your plan is, pal, but this is a family day. This is not a day for you to grab yourself some attention with your allegedly comical sign about defaecation.'

People are turning round to see what's going on. Every member of the John 3:16 family over eight is glaring at me.

‘One warning,' he says, showing me one finger. ‘That's all you get. Marcie here is now your official monitor and you can rely on me to keep checking in. Marcie, you got that two-way?'

Marcie holds up the radio. Like me, she's staring somewhere else and waiting for the moment to pass.

Once he's gone she says, ‘You know, I didn't . . . He's just having a bad day is all. And, rectum . . . it's problematic. This is live to air, you know, on a family network.'

I stand there chastened. We fight to make small talk. Frank closes in on fifty by running a classic marathon, I do it by getting in trouble for writing ‘rectum' on a sign. I want to tell Marcie families have rectums too, but she's not the type to appreciate it. At least, through her two-way, we have a pretty clear idea of when to expect Frank. She calls base to track his progress across the timing mats and then we see him, an hour behind his own projections and ten minutes behind Otter's. His face is bright red and the tracksuit is gone, but he's still moving forward.

‘Okay,' Marcie says, ‘I'll cheer with you as long as it's just, like “Go Frank” and there's none of that other business.' She gives me a look that says she wants to trust me.

‘No rectums.' I put my hand on my heart. ‘Actually, could we shout out “We're rooting for Frank?” I know he'd appreciate that.'

‘Well, sure,' she says. ‘There's nothing wrong with rooting for someone.'

Nothing at all. Only in Australia does it mean sex, here it's innocent support.

We both put everything into our ‘We're rooting for Frank' and his head jerks our way. He sees us both bellowing it and he laughs until he blows his nose. He loses his rhythm and several other runners pass him. He stops and points to Marcie and gives me a baffled look. She happily yells, ‘We're rooting for you, Frank,' and points to the two of us.

‘How did you get someone to . . .' he says to me, and then stops to suck in a couple of big breaths. ‘Tell me later. Nice work though.'

He laughs again, picks up a cup of water, and shuffles off along First Avenue.

‘Well,' Marcie says, as we watch him head north and then lose him in the crowd of runners following him. ‘I believe we lifted his spirits. Good job. And I think the marshal said I could give you your sign back now.'

She puts it to me as though I'll be glad to hear it, and might now happily wander the streets of Manhattan waving a sign with a rectal query on it.

‘I might leave it,' I tell her. ‘Who knows who might find it useful?'

I text Otter to let him know Frank's on his way and I head down 77
^th
Street looking for a bar.

I find a place that's dimly lit and largely ignored by the spill-over marathon crowd, I get myself a beer and set my phone on the counter in front of me. All the TVs mounted on the walls are showing the race. I check my emails. I take a look at the Brisbane Times and Courier-Mail websites.

From time to time the colour and movement catches my eye and I find myself looking up at the nearest screen. The winners have long finished but the race has hours to run and will go live to air locally for a while yet. The commentators keep finding things to say, new angles, recent finishers with stories to tell from life or the day.

I happen to be watching when Frank leaves the park for the straight run along Central Park South. This is spectator central, and Jackson Browne is now playing on the stage at Columbus Circle. The TV network has someone on the ground who's scrunching his face up and shouting into his microphone as a crowd of thousands cheers the flagging runners.

That's when Frank cramps, on TV and in front of maybe five thousand spectators and Jackson Browne, who is in the middle of Lawyers in Love. Frank's left gluteus maximus has clenched hard as a rock, but he stumbles on. The show of pain and suffering lifts the cheering to another level.

And then the second glute goes. All of a sudden Frank, while closing in on the twenty-six mile mark, is in agonising bilateral spasm and skittering down the street like a giddy hatstand.

That's when we move from the wide shot to the close-up. And then split screen. The story of the race is all Frank now, three shots of him, a triptych of anguish.

‘We'd better get an expert opinion on what we're witnessing,' one of the commentators says. There's a clunking, shuffling sound as someone gets miked up. ‘I'm joined by physical therapist Doctor Lucius Tennenbaum. Doctor Tennenbaum, can you tell us what we're seeing here?'

‘In a word, Anthony,' a new voice says, ‘what we're seeing is courage. Here's one of our athletes with a disability looking at a remarkable time considering the severity of . . . ah . . . what appears to be his disability. I can't confirm this but it looks to me very much as though he has a spastic diplegia ' He says it slowly and with authority—‘one of the more common presentations of cerebral palsy. This man faces resistance from his own body with every step he takes, and today he put his name down to take an awful lot of them. I'd say we could be looking at a category winner once we confirm his classification.'

‘And I'd say we're looking at a hero,' Anthony throws in as Frank makes the turn back into the park with all the grace of a pair of compasses.

The screen switches back to a single shot of Frank in close-up, from a scooter in a low gear.

Anthony clears his throat. ‘From his number, we know that he's Australian Frank Green, a pioneer orthopaedic surgeon and co-inventor of the Green-Tarnowski Ring. And so great is his focus on fostering and indeed trumpeting his substantial abilities that in any of the bios we can find online there's no mention of his disability at all.'

‘This is a point he would make in his work every day, I'm sure,' Doctor Tennenbaum adds. ‘It's all about the triumph of ability over disability, persevering against the odds and maximising what we've got. What we're witnessing is what Doctor Green has to overcome just to get out of bed in the morning, and when he makes it out of bed he's improving the lives of others. A great man. A truly great man. It's people like Doctor Green who show us what's possible. This is what the New York Marathon is all about.'

We cut to a shot from above. The crowd is wild for Frank, pushing in against the race barriers as he lurches slowly past them. Then we're back with the scooter shot, agony on Frank's face, his jaw clenched.

We've seen dozens of other runners passing him since he seized up, but that's changing now. Runners are refusing to pass. They're banking up behind him, dozens of them, setting their pace to his and clapping as they run, cheering him on. Frank lifts his hand to wave.

And then he tumbles out of shot. The scooter brakes, the picture staggers. In another shot, we see Frank trip mid-wave and nosedive face first into the ground. He's out cold.

My phone rings. It's my mother. She's watching online. ‘Frank's down, Philby,' she shrieks. ‘He's down. What a wonderful effort. I didn't even know he
had
a disability.'

‘He doesn't. Other than being Frank.'

All talk in the bar has stopped.

‘Sixty yards,' Anthony the commentator says, as a team of people in red medical T shirts move in on Frank. ‘That's all he's got left. But can Doctor Frank Green make it? No one would think ill of him if this was it, if he found twenty-six miraculous miles in those legs, but no marathon.'

Frank's arms are moving. He's face down and swimming freestyle on the concrete, his locked legs stiff behind him. The medical staff are talking but he doesn't seem to hear them.

Then a crowd barrier falls over, and spectators start leaping over it and running his way. They're all women. And all in matching T shirts. The commentators are clueless, but the T shirt artwork says it all. It's the GT Ring. They're the GTR Girls. They're real, and they're here—a squad of hockey players and basketballers and older women who fell in the street—and they pick Frank up like a fallen warrior and carry him forward. They break into a jog while Frank, oblivious to all, swims backstroke as he crosses the finish line on their shoulders.

‘It might only be sixty yards, but this interference could tragically cost him a category victory . . .' Anthony's saying as I run from the bar.

I run all the way to Madison, then I take a left to avoid the marathon crowd. At the lights on 68
^th
Street, I get my mother back on the phone.

‘Can you see him at the finish line? Is he getting help?'

‘They didn't stop, Philby,' she says. ‘Straight past Tavern on the Green and off through the crowd.'

I keep her on the phone and run again when the lights change. I turn right at 58
^th
to go south of the park.

‘Last seen heading in the direction of the West 66th Street entrance,' she tells me when I can check again. ‘The coverage has moved on. There's a one-legged Puerto Rican grannie who's nearly at Jackson Browne. Go Philby. It's up to you now.'

I'm on Ninth Avenue, closing in on West 66
^th
Street and looking for a GTR-shirted mob when my phone rings again. It's the film people I'd been hoping to meet. I take a look down West 65
^th
in the direction of the park. No GTR Girls, no Frank, no sign of a place they'd be likely to have taken him.

I let the call go to voicemail. The message comes through when I get to the corner of West 66
^th
.

‘Oh, hi Phil,' a voice says when I pick it up. ‘Leo here, one of the team from Arcadius.'

He's speaking almost unbearably slowly. Or maybe that's just how I'm hearing it. There's no sign of the GTR Girls on a quick scan of West 66
^th
, or Frank, or anything other than a regular New York street with standard marathon madness going on down at the far end. That's the last sighting of them, so it's where I've got to start. I feel like I've stumbled into a missing persons TV show but, instead of the victim being a cute four-year-old child, it's a cramped multi-millionaire being carried by at least a dozen identically dressed women with polymer in their knees. Poppy Montgomery would have solved it in a minute, and she'd already be back at the precinct signing off on the paperwork.

The message goes on. ‘We haven't had a chance to look closely at the script yet ' film code for we haven't looked at it at all—‘but we're interested in the concept. Just a couple of questions . . .'

There's a bakery on the corner. No GTR Girls. Then a hair salon, a real estate agent and the American Folk Art Museum.

‘We were wondering about moving it to Louisiana,' Leo says, in his unmodulated rhinitic drone. ‘They're giving great tax breaks at the moment.' There's muffled noise in the background. ‘Oh, yeah, two more questions. Does it have to be lunch?' There's a pause while he checks something and while my hopes develop a familiar nauseating sag. ‘And does it have to be Betty Grable?'

I keep moving, telling myself the message is not the wall, not that sapping nineteenth mile that comes after the bridge climb. Every film ever made has this call and gets through it, and every film not made ends with it. The sickening thud of a non-comprehending response, and then silence.

Ahead there's a building under repair, a vein clinic, a children's gym and a faade that looks like Hampton Court Palace.

Then a yelping, whooping sound comes as someone opens the door to a bar called Paddy Malone's.

When I get there I can see, even through the smoky glass, that the place is overrun by GTR Girls.

They're shoulder to shoulder, toasting and cheering and yet, through it all, I can hear Otter at the bar saying loudly, ‘No, kale will not do—it needs to be choy sum'.

Frank's in a booth with an ice pack on his forehead and face. His head is swelling, he's gravel rashed and his nose is probably broken. He's grinning. He still has all of his chemically whitened teeth. Two of the GTR Girls are massaging his bare red feet. Another is holding a moist sugar cube on a teaspoon over the tealight candle on the table.

‘I'm sure this is barely legal,' she's saying to him.

There's a glass nearby with a green liquid in it that must be absinthe, and something crystalline crusted around its rim.

Frank's absent-mindedly turning a torn sweaty sachet of Eno over and over in his hand. ‘Someone cooked it up for me once at a conference in Freo,' he says, as if it's charming and will make any sense to her. His head clunks back against the wall. ‘It was a chem prac, maybe. Measured something in a sample of  . . . something.'

I call out, but he doesn't hear me. I push my way through, grab the candle and check his pupils.

‘Fireflies,' he says. ‘Look at ‘em.'

I start a quick MSQ, but he falters early. He can tell me his name, but then he gets vague.

I ask him who the Prime Minister is and he shouts, ‘I won, Philby, I won,' and he punches the air, or in fact a reproduction 1930s whiskey poster mounted on the wall behind him.

I hold my finger up to test his vision. He swats at it, but misses.