Thought Crimes (23 page)

So huge was his love of this game, Ray began to hope that his mission was to save cricket from extinction. So far as the newcomer could gather, cricket was all about marshalling the forces of time: a game of patience and opportunism.

Once the initial excitement wore off, girls were less brazen in their attempts to win Ray's attention. They came to think of him as the local cricket star first, visitor from another time and harbinger of destiny second.

Although Jodi and the boy from the future soon became thought of as an item, Jodi made no more nocturnal flights, and declared herself in no rush to surrender her ‘virtue'. Knowing too well what these declarations meant in local terms, Kim Tyler made sure that Ray had condoms to safeguard against a moment when present and future might conspire to merge rather too dramatically.

At first, everyone waited, but gradually the people of Mintook began to think of Ray as one of destiny's many agents rather than time's ultimate cannibal. Newspapers were printed, bread was baked, buses were caught and missed. Children were born, old people died, and the McGibbon family shifted back to Melbourne. If Mintook's boy from the future was going to evaporate, he'd do so when the time suited and not before. After cricket's grand final, hopefully.

Even Mrs Peng began to think of Ray as just another boy in whites who cycled down her street on his way to the cricket ground every Saturday. Such assimilations were pretty much her experience of life in the towns around Koorook. Outsiders came, and they were a big deal for a while. You often wondered what they thought this place could possibly offer them, or how the town would ever learn to put up with them. Violent conflict seemed inevitable. Then, when the sun rose one day, it was as if they'd always been there, hand-picked for the town by some greater force of necessity.

INTERMITTENT RED FLASHES

Rant #1

The worst thing about this third-rate era we're consigned to is the way people are always inviting you to be impressed. Collie has a spot on MySpace where he invents axioms, publishes dog photos and blogs on about fuck-all, and you're meant to be in awe of the ten thousand hits he had last month. Of course, he never actually says ‘You should be impressed,' but that's what's implied by him spouting shit so laconically.

Ten thousand hits is new-world impressive. Old-world success doesn't cut it any more. Collie forgets that you used to work for television. No one saw your face, or knew your dog's name, but actors gave life to your words and, some weeks, two million viewers tuned in. Television used to matter the way the Net does now, but the trick was the same, to impress people without showing you need them to be impressed. To win respect without telling the world that you are a raving, fucked-up narcissist.

Stretching the Happiness Muscles

Doctor Long hates you because you call her Doctor when a specialist wants to be addressed as ‘Emma' or ‘Miz'. But even with your libido nudging zero, which it has all this decade – the entire Howard era in fact – you still get the hots for Doctor Long. She has flaming red hair and says ‘mmm' like a babe at the nipple, and her so-right glasses make her look like Solomon's wiser sister.

She's smart enough to skip talk-cures and get you the stuff that's been jollying Swiss lab-rats.

‘Mellovex is stronger than the medications you've been taking, but it should have a pronounced impact on your wellbeing. My main concern at this time is to shift the chemical mix so that you can feel happier. Otherwise, your happiness muscles will go to waste.'

‘Shit. I hadn't thought to worry about them.'

‘You may notice a tendency to obsess about things, and to get a little … hyper.'

‘Nothing that makes me ecstatic. I have to be able to write.'

‘This should be fine for that. Make sure to read the instructions on the packet, and never take Mellovex in conjunction with alcohol. If it doesn't suit, let me know.'

Puzzling Responses

It usually takes a month to do a ten-thousand-piece jigsaw. When you started Bruegel's Icarus, you were going through a bad patch, and that took six weeks. But once the Mellovex kicks in, you have three puzzles on the go at the same time, and take eight days to finish a twenty-thousand-piece red and gold Rothko.

All the stuff you never notice suddenly becomes obvious, like the exact number of active pixels on your television screen, and the number of bricks that went into constructing your living room. When you're given the key to a world of amazements, you have to share that joy with people who matter, so you get Miranda on the blower and tell her how fucking immense the world is, and how you could go some rock 'n' roll if she's up for it, which must come as a shock, given the way she stresses that you haven't seen her for twelve years. Not since Keating was PM.

‘I'm on a new medication, and it's fantastic.'

‘Sounds like you're on a new planet.'

‘C'mon, a quick one for old times. I'll count your freckles.'

‘No. When I wanted them counted, you weren't interested.'

Would You By Chance Have Some Spare Milk?

Work? You can't keep up with the words spilling from your head, and this new work is like nothing you've written before. All the old themes are there, but the sentences have rhythm and cadence. You'd pause to admire them, only there's a new sentence waiting to be recorded.

You are so caught up in the novelty of being productive that you don't hear the movers at work in the neighbouring flat. But you hear the doorbell, and there you are – the unshaven, unwashed savant in a threadbare dressing gown – opposite two stunning brunettes: voluptuous Liz, with eyes and lips to die for, and her even more exceptional daughter, Sian, nine tiny freckles on her left cheek, eight perfect flecks on the right.

‘Would you by chance have some spare milk?'

‘You're in luck. This is a shrine to long-life milk.'

Sian giggles, and if that's the last sound you hear before dying, you'll die a happy man.

An Everyday Use for Venn Diagrams

When Collie asks why you're always so determined to pursue the wrong woman, you tell him to poll the readers of his blog, but the cur has set you thinking about the women you once imagined to be right. A detailed statistical analysis might have something to offer.

Of the twenty-nine women you've seen/dated/romanced over the past thirty-one years, a disproportionately high number (thirteen) have French given names, but no obvious patterns emerge from hair shade, eye colour or body type. You have certain abstract preferences, but when a woman with a pretty face and an interesting voice comes along, ideals vanish.

But statistics need to go deeper. So you come up with this new one about brothers. There's barely been one. Those twenty-nine women have had forty-five sisters (that is, seventy-four female offspring in their families) but just twenty-three brothers, and only eight of the women in question had an elder brother. That's got to mean something, but what? Are women from these female-dominant families more likely to be hyper-feminine, or to have been nurtured as if male? Did they find you attractive because they didn't have older brothers to correct that tendency, or did they identify you as a man who might become a sister in a brotherly way? Having entered these affairs with eyes closed, you've now lost the chance to count freckles and hear what their skin has to say.

The Gingerbread Housing Initiative
‘

‘Maybe I should make another appointment. This stuff is too good. It's cocaine, heroin and Viagra in one punch. I'm floaty and priapic, and I've never written so much.'

‘You sound happier.'

‘Not sure. I'm taking stats to evaluate that.'

‘There's no need to fear bad stuff when you're only experiencing good things.'

‘Doctor Long …
Emma
… What you just said sounds like the turning point in every German folk tale.'

Anxieties of Influence

You've read the instruction leaflet fifty times. It mentions the compulsions, the horniness, and the inability to draw breath between sentences. In bold letters, it warns against combining Mellovex with alcohol – as if liquor could make you feel better than this Swiss pharmaceutical dynamite – but nowhere on that leaflet, above the text or below, does its author allude to the possibility of delusional thinking.

So when the spectacularly well-curved Liz Barclay leans against the balcony, looks into your eyes, and reacts as if your every word was scripted by the Bard himself, it's feasible that it really is happening the way you see it.

‘I met that big friend of yours the other day.'

‘Collie?'

‘He said you write for television.'

‘Used to. I'm reinventing myself as a novelist.'

‘You wrote
All Björk and No Play
…'

‘I was on the writing staff.'

‘Wow,' she says, in a tone reserved for Tarzan hot off the vine.

‘That's incredible.'

When a woman like Liz sets her eyes on you in that way, it's no use saying that you hope those TV years won't be seen as the high point of your professional life. She doesn't want to hear it.

‘You should come in and hear Sian sing.'

You tell her you've heard Sian sing, and that her daughter has a pretty voice, though that's only partly true. When Sian goes through her scales you put the headphones on, and you haven't heard her sing anything that could be called a song.

‘She has an amazing voice. But she needs to be on television. That's the only way singers get the attention of record producers.'

‘I don't know anyone that does variety.'

‘You must know heaps of people … Your friend said you wrote with Doug Stebbings.'

‘Occasionally. We weren't close. Doug's a hard man to get close to.'

‘Singers would do anything to get on his show.'

You want to tell her no way, you hate Doug, the man goosed you every way but south. He could've offered you a gig on his show if he had the wit to know real comedy from the shit he gets away with. Nothing, but nothing, will persuade you to ask Doug for a favour. This is what you intend to say, but Liz's lips are bulging, and her eyes are licking you from head to toe, and you remember Sian's giggle, and in those circumstances – those exact circumstances – you know that you have no right to deny the world access to Sian's giggle. Besides, what are the odds on someone having exactly the same number of lashes on her left eye as on her right, the way Liz does?

‘It would mean so much to us. There's nothing I wouldn't do to see Sian get the break she deserves.'

Blame Is the Name of the Game

People don't want to hear the father-shit you cart around, but they're going to hear it anyway because you're at the zeitgeist's command.

Dad was no poor woodcutter. As a big-time lawyer, he prosecuted famous criminals. Dad was a hard-hearted optimist – the world was going to get better, but to do that, it needed to become more efficient. Since the life we knew attracted too many of ‘the wrong sort of people', it would have to be replaced with something more exclusive. This meant culling the unfit, and Dad's notion of fitness focused on those unfit to make money.

Mum never contradicted him. He was the oracle so far as she and your sister Barb were concerned. If Dad told them he was draining the family fortune to establish the Tyrants With Gout Party, they would have been first to sign up. A day never went by when you weren't told how physically and mentally superior you were, and it's easy to believe that shit when you want to believe it, especially when the world's most confident man tells you to with a smile that would sway a cynical jury.

Fleas seldom cut down big, sonnet-quoting bastards, but a flea got in Dad's ear. When a friend of Mum's told him she'd seen a man who looked exactly like him riding the number 8 tram down Toorak Road the previous day, a band snapped. Dad gave up everything to look for that man, as if he'd always known he had an identical twin, and that there was a warmer, more inclusive Dad who had to be slain if his dreams weren't to be thwarted.

So the man who'd always disparaged ‘the losers who ride trams' became the most touched of all those losers, and though Mum immediately saw reality, and treated him with compassion whenever he ambled home, the transformation totally arseholed your sister Barb, who began fucking junkies like there was a bounty payable to junkie-fuckers. You and Barb were reasonably close, but she'd take no counsel. It was like watching someone be eaten alive from the inside.

All of us have experiences that we assume to be unique, but starting out in television, you found yourself part of a team of writers where no fewer than six had scagged-up sisters, while four had dads who might have been the doppelganger your old man was seeking on the number 8 tram.

On her twenty-first birthday, Sally Quinn's dad confessed that he'd met her mum when she ‘acted' in the pornographic film he was directing for her maternal grandparents. So it was Sally who mentioned Doctor Long when told that you were looking for a shrink who put pharmacy before prattle. Chemical optimism couldn't be worse than the quasi-optimistic crap Dad inflicted on you when he was still someone to be reckoned with.

The Way of the World

‘Are you on something?'

‘Why do you say that?'

‘You're talking so fast, and you've just told me it was good to hear my voice three times in a minute.'

There's history here. You told Sally you'd stay in touch, and you haven't. This largely because she took a job with that filthy shit Doug Stebbings – the moral equivalent of distributing How to Vote cards for Howard. Worse, the reason you liked Sal in the first place was her ability to cut through to the truth. So it's with some unease that you tell her you've met this girl with a sensational voice and terrific looks who will be a real winner given the chance. Doug's people could do worse than call her in for an audition.