Peripheral Vision (13 page)

Carly starts when she hears that line. ‘A slut like you took my husband away but at least she didn't go on national television to tell me.' The line is thrumming through her. She's heard it so many times before, but where?

‘Steady, ladies,' Mac interrupted. He'd been moving around the studio, and now he came to rest behind Virginia, placing a hand on her shoulder as he spoke. ‘Virginia, what do you need to say to Carly?'

‘No, stop.' Carly surged out of her seat, tugged down the back of her dress. ‘I'm not going on with this. I won't give permission for this to be broadcast.' She'd received the contract in the mail, seen her sister's name as the feature of the show, glanced at the clauses on the first page about network serial repeat rights and other TV jargon, and signed it without looking any further
.

Placard man scooted up and down in front of the audience rows again. The shiny eager faces responded with boos and hisses and foot stamping.

‘Forget it.' Carly turned to the rows of angry faces. ‘I'm not going to be your freak show. Find someone else.'

Behind her Mac spoke to the audience in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Ladies, don't you find it amazing that no one, absolutely no one, reads the fine print of contracts. I would have thought our Carly here, a teacher of all things, would have read what she was getting herself into.'

‘So sue me.' There was nothing to stop her leaving.

Or so she thinks, but when she wheels around and strides to the stage entrance she finds two T-shirted brutes standing with their arms crossed in front of the open door.

‘Get out of the way.'

They remain motionless. Carly pushes her arm between them and tries to shove her shoulder through, the way you would at a gate that won't open properly. The men don't budge. They're welded together like the two-headed dog guarding the gates of hell. So it is true. She is in hell. Why? Why is this happening to her?

The crowd was screaming, laughing, hooting. Rage percolated in Carly's gut. She muttered threats at the guardians about assault charges, keeping her voice down and her back to the cameras. She found herself hissing at them like a cat. ‘I will not let this happen. I will not accept this.'

‘My, my.' Mac had climbed the audience steps again and was looking down. ‘Carly seems to have found her inner fury. So Glenn, I guess this isn't the ice queen you were telling us about.'

‘Stop filming me!' Carly shouted, still facing away from the crowd and the cameras and Mac. ‘I refuse to allow this.'

She certainly couldn't look at Virginia and Glenn. Glenn, who had been telling this mad chorus that she was an ice queen. Glenn, who chewed nicotine gum sixteen hours a day. Glenn, who had a swatch of wiry ginger hair at the base of his spine that she could no longer bear to touch. Glenn, who had lusted after her sister from the moment he saw her. Her sister – spendthrift, actress, star, family favourite. Selfish witch. They deserved each other but Carly would not say it aloud, because she was on TV. She was on her way to becoming an ugly reality star, and she'd watched enough TV and read enough magazines to know what that meant: if she allowed the invective to flow, the couple would be recast as the good guys, leaving her the ranting bitter cause of their coming together. She would not give them the satisfaction. She would not give them the airtime, the gloating, the happiness they thought this alliance might provide them. Shame had filled her, shame and rage and a new iron stubbornness. She would not endure this humiliation.

The cameras on their dollies wheeled around the studio floor trying to capture her face in all its mortification while she sidled to a corner and faced the wall like a naughty child at school.

‘I have to sa
y
, ladie
s
, this is not great televisio
n
.
' Mac sighe
d
. ‘What can we do to bring Carly out of her shell? Hmm?'

The chant started up again.

‘Car-ly. Car-ly. Car-ly.'

‘Tell those bastards what you think, Carly! We're on your side,' one woman screamed.

No one was on Carly's side. That, at least, was clear.

‘Go on, Carly!'

‘Smack that bitch, Carly!'

‘Car-ly. Car-ly. Car-ly. Car-ly. Car-ly.'

They think they can unleash her rage. They are wrong. How strange her name sounds when it becomes a chant from the audience. It could be someone else's name. Car-ly. Ka-li, she realises. Kali. Religions of the world, Year Eight. Kali, the goddess of destruction and change. Can you destroy by doing nothing? Can you banish by not accepting?

She remained perfectly still in her corner, refusing to turn around. As long as she didn't participate there was no show.

The shouting from the crowd slowly died down. The audience members began to chat among themselves. Mac raced down the stairs and murmured over her shoulder, promised her a chance to respond with dignity.

She ignored him and waited. The warm-up comedian faced down the mutinous audience, cajoled them into a few laughs, ran out of material. Mac, leaning over her shoulder and speaking so close to her face that his breath heated her cheek, threatened her with lawsuits. She waited.

The show's producer hurried onto the stage. He rode the other shoulder, his muttering a spray of warm spit. Time passed and her legs ached with tension and she needed to go to the toilet but she closed her eyes, her ears, her mind, and waited.

The stage manager ordered the operators to shut down the cameras. The big lights went off with a clank. She waited.

People chattered as they edged across the rows. She heard the rumble and clatter as they filed down the staircase and out through the exit. One or two called out to her. ‘Goodbye, Carly!' ‘Good luck, Carly. Stick it to him!'

After a long time in the dark of the shut-down stage, she felt someone behind her. A warm presence, a scent of pine. A hand touched her arm. Her body had tipped forward with the rigidity of a board leaning against a wall. Her forehead pressed against the flimsy studio partition. She stared at her feet, knotted that morning, an aeon ago, a minute ago, into the straps of her best silver high heels. She remembered that time she woke from a dream in which actors from her favourite TV drama were carrying her in an open coffin.

‘You can turn around now.' The young man who had led her to this place stood with his hand out to take hers. ‘They've shut down the cameras. The audience is gone.'

‘Is it over?' she asked.

‘I'm afraid not,' he said. ‘Let's go.'

Everything had fizzled and left an eerie dim silence, an electric loneliness, like the empty drawn-out moment when the TV is turned off.

She takes hold of his forearm and follows him out to the corridor, weak and prickly with the leftover adrenaline of her emotional storm. All she wants to do is go home, lie down, take a few days off work. It has been hellish, unbelievable really, but she stood her ground. She would not talk this through with those betrayers, not on reality TV, not in her home, not anywhere. Never.

All she wants to do is sleep. So tired she is dizzy. Things have taken on a dreamy quality. Is she asleep, dreaming? There is tiredness, yes, but there's more. A kind of echo of time passing, or moving. A swirling, eddying sense of the movement of time.

Back in the make-up room, the woman was waiting for Carly. She held a sponge already loaded with tan foundation. Carly sat down in the chair. The make-up woman looked familiar. She was probably one of the parents Carly had talked with at some parent–teacher day.

The woman stroked the first bars of tan colour onto Carly's white skin.

‘The studio lights are hell,' she said. ‘They bleach out colours. If I don't do this …'

Caramels

Across the creek a couple is squatting on the muddy bank, shoes and socks in a pile behind them on the grass, pants rolled up to their knees like little kids at the playground, except they're no kids they're pushing at least sixty both of them. The bloke is tying the string around a knob of reeking meat I can smell from here, green meat rotten enough to tickle the senses of the yabbies below, those innocent crusties hiding in their lairs harming no one when down through the water comes an alluring gob of steak.

Makes me realise I'm a little hungry myself.

She's giggling and peering at him dipping the temptation into the water, probably can't even see the string without her reading glasses, skinny grey stripe at her scalp like some tribal decoration except she'll dye it away tomorrow pretending she's ten years younger and she'll have a glass of dry white wine with a bocconcini and tomato and basil pizza and we'll all be lovely darling darling.

A bocconcini pizza would suit me fine right now, the trouble with this reserve being no one eats dinner here, after all who'd bother carting across their pizza or fish and chips and a can of Coke just to abandon it half eaten in the dark for a kiss with the girlfriend when they can parbloodytake at a restaurant up in Lygon St, everything provided, eat and drink your fill then go for a lovely walk along the Merri Creek and make Merri.

Bugger, they've got one.

Poor little yabbie, tasty morsel of rotten meat dangling in front of the house, you peek out lured by that irresistible smell, you take the lump in one claw and it is so damn good you can't let go even though the bastards upstairs are reeling you in and you know that disaster's waiting for you but something inside has locked on to that smell and you find yourself clinging on as you're pulled up through the water, gentle as a flower drifting in a stream, the light getting lighter until it hurts your little stalky eyes and you know you should let go, you know it's all over for you if you don't but that smell has reached into you, taken hold of your mind, you've damn well cleaved to that delicious smell and it will be the death of you.

And when you break the water there they are, the bastards staring at you and exclaiming to each other what a beauty you are, and you are a beauty, you're a hulk, Godzilla of the yabbie world and still you can't let go, you're frozen in your death wish and they drop you and your meat, that useless little dreg of Judas meat, into a bucket of clean fresh water that makes you want to gag and that's it, the shock wakes you up and you think Jesus what the hell have I done and now, you idiot, you epicurean fool, you start trying to escape, your claws scrabbling against the smooth blue bucket walls but you're done for.

There it goes splash, one later to be served up on a bed of seduction salad with a chardonnay jus and a side of I love you I really do now roll over darling he'll say to the ancient scraggy lovebird who's cooing and snorking over catching a yabbie like it's fishery foreplay, look at me you juicy morsel I'm a big brave fishing man at the creek.

Me and my one-on-one love life on the other hand excuse my pun prefer a bit of privacy, which is more than most you'd guess from the shenanigans going on late at night in this reserve that I like to call the Merri motel, frequented by your underage snoggers and the ones who've left their wedding rings in the glove box for a sashay in the weedy dark with some lucky lady.

Sadly no woman would look at me now with my particularly dreddy hairstyle du jour that I can't wash since the drought and those cheapskates stealing water for their carnations so the council takes the heads off all the garden taps in the parks, and believe you me I'm not putting my head in a basin at the public toilet with half your ablutionists so blind drunk they think the sink's the dunny or the vomitorium, can't tell you how many coiled-up turds I've found in the sink and I look at the abominations and realise those idiots must have climbed up and squatted like storks to do a shit in there. Amazing what a bottle of sauvignon blanc will achieve for the human body.

Oh hell, here it comes.

If it isn't the social worker bastard come to gooey all over me, Max have you taken your medication, Max are you eating anything, Max do you want a place to sleep tonight, I tell him you twit, social workers are supposed to be girls, you're a greasy old bastard from Footscray, why don't you get a proper job and stop hassling decent citizens like myself, and he always says shut up Max if you had any sense at all you'd be living in the Housing Commission with a cleaner you moron.

I like the fresh air, haven't I told you that five hundred times I tell him and he always says there's no fresh air around you Max, you stink like something died in your pocket and I tell him it did, it's my self-respect, and he says take your hand off it Max, you could walk out of this today and get a job in an engineering firm and I tell him that's what put me here in the first place remember.

Today he hands me a plastic bag saying I've brought you a few things like a toothbrush and toothpaste because Max your breath would melt the duco off a car.

So that's what happened in the carpark the other day I say, I thought it was the hot wind.

I like that the old Footscray do-gooder sometimes brings me a feed.

We sit on the high bank and open up the paper and I've got to say the aroma of fish and chips is like rotten meat to a yabbie, I can't resist it, hungry as anything and him telling me he got a piece of flake and three potato cakes and chips, so I ask what are you going to eat and whammo he pulls out another package from his social worker man bag saying here's mine and handing me a can of beer and this is it, this is a life good enough for any old bastard, the sun shining, a pair of lovebirds torturing yabbies across the creek and a lapful of fatty batter and salt making my head spin and my mouth fill up with saliva that I wash down with a mouthful of beer.

To hell with the toothbrush and toothpaste, it would probably knock out the last of my teeth anyway.

See them over there I say to him and he looks at the squidgy love seniors dangling their meat in the creek, they're flouting the laws of the reserve I tell him, you should arrest them, they're stealing the fauna, and they're going to cook it up in white wine and extra virgin olive oil and boast about it like it's a prize marlin they've wrestled with for hours, man against nature, those bastards are turning my reserve into a dinner party.

Max he says, stop looking at them or they'll spot you for the perv you are.

Mate, sitting next to you I'm suddenly the dapper gentleman I tell him, look at yourself you've got to get rid of that fungus growing on your chin, what is that some kind of fashion statement or you forgot to spray on the Exit Mould this morning.

It drives the ladies wild he tells me and he gives it a quick fondle like he's Rodin's thinker and I tell him that oil off your hot chips will give it extra shine and special aroma and he says yep that's it, hot chip oil is irresistible to the kind of lady I'm looking for. Anyway Max your wife wants to see you.

They've caught another yabbie, splash into the bucket for the doomed clacker and they're probably already planning the four-course dinner yabbie à la puy lentil ragout with a twist of smug satisfaction, we caught these ourselves didn't we darling, clink go the shiraz boys clink clink clink.

Max?

Fish and chips here in my lap like a piece of stinking irresistible meat and Mr Social Worker's scratching at his weedface and looking all dewy-eyed at the beautiful nature around us, we're having a lovely picnic aren't we. Sure we are you traitor.

So whaddya reckon Max he says, I could get you a shower at the Brotherhood, give you a couple of bucks for a coffee.

Not having eaten a big meal in one go like this for a while I'll probably end up in the vomitorium tonight fighting the drunks and junkies for a bowl of my own.

I don't need a wash I tell him, the joy of the outdoor life is freedom to smell like a walking corpse, no wait, it's freedom to be a walking corpse so bugger off and let me live my wonderful life okay.

Big fisherman and his missus across the creek are packing up their Ikea fishing stools and burbling over their dinner in a bucket and I see the bloke's pretending to help her up while he cops a feel of her arse with his big pincer.

So Max?

Don't say anything to me not a word I tell the social worker bastard, because nothing you say can be right and you're in my domain here I left them everything.

I'm not saying anything he says, except kids, I'll just say that one word kids and leave it with you Max.

Where's my dessert I say, you can't treat a man to a meal without dessert, you'll never get me into bed this way and he nods and pulls out a packet of caramels.

Shit I say, did she tell you about the caramels and he says yeah she said to bring a packet of caramels and tell you Emily's in high school now and she needs help with maths, I promised I'd do it, it's done, okay now let's eat our chips Max, I don't want to mess with you.

Mr and Mrs Ikea are off now, they look back and wave at us for the dinner party tonight when they can say we saw a homeless man poor old thing, we couldn't have caught the yabbies without him, it was his stench that brought them scooting out of the water, titter titter ooh we shouldn't talk like that.

I'm performing a social service I tell the Footscray bastard, entertainment at the Merri motel they should be paying me.

You're keeping the area clear of perverts too he says, the ones with a sense of smell anyway.

I tell the Footscray social worker hey I saw your ex outside the supermarket with her new loverman and they gave me a fiver, but maybe I shouldn't have said it, Footscray's an okay bloke even if he is a do-gooder with a face like a hairy arse.

Sorry, your kids how are they I say and I think I'm being charming hobo master of the Merri manor but the hairy-arse face folds up like a squashed bun and he says they're settling into the new house and new stepfather and all that, it's okay, he'll be seeing them soon and master of the Merri misstep me backs off with a mighty flourish of a fart, sorry mate I say, too much gourmet food in the middle of the day.

I'll be off now the Footscray hairy arse says, you take care of yourself Max.

I will I tell him, sorry about your kids.

You should take me up on the offer of a shower he says, the park ranger'll be onto you for suffocating the native animals.

I'll think about it I say, maybe next year.

I'm not taking the caramels he says when he's halfway up the bank, his big hairy arse, the real one, squeezed in his pants with the effort of getting up the hill, I'll leave them with you Max.

They're tasty I call back, too rich for me these days.

I'll leave them with you he says again, you might change your mind, and the last I see of him is two big arse cheeks disappearing over the ridge.

This is the best time of day at the Merri motel.

The picnickers have gone home and the rooters and ranters have yet to arrive, the birds are starting their dusk calls, the council cleaner's been through the dunnies, the council gardener's lunch leftovers are in the bin, the free newspapers are lying around on park benches.

The yabbies, or what's left of them, slumber at peace in their dark quiet caves under the water.