The Thompson Gunner (21 page)

It's out now, my secret.

I have one drink and I get up and do my stuff. The day has worn me down but the audience brings me back enough, and the material is there as it always is. People might say I missed a few punchlines, I don't know, but mostly it goes the way it should. I notice Felicity's boyfriend, Adam, in the audience when I'm about halfway through, and that distracts me as much as anything.

He
buys beers afterwards and no one seems to know what to say, so I tell them we should get a camera and the three of us should pose for a photo, one of those photos which would have me with my arms around both of them in a way that could only say Drunken Sex Romp.

He clinks his beer against mine and says, ‘Works for me,' and Felicity tells him not to be so insensitive.

‘I've been thinking,' she says. ‘I don't know if the article's going to cause any problems over the weekend but, if there are any, let me handle them. Let me help with this. It might be totally okay, since you don't have any interviews scheduled, but if anything comes up I'll make sure I get in its way. I'll tell anyone to call Emma next week, and then you two can work out a plan.'

Three people from the audience move in on us before she's even finished speaking. They want to get programs signed, and they're treating her like a fan whose turn is up and who should be moved on. I push the rolled up
NW
into her bag and I tell her I want her to keep it, or get rid of it, but never give it back to me even if I ask for just one more look.

‘I've read these magazines for years,' she says. ‘I never thought about what it would be like if it was actually your life in there.'

Later, on the way back to the hotel, I work out what must have happened for the photo to have appeared. Gary took it in Calgary, I gave him my website address, he emailed the photo to the webmaster – as people do – and the webmaster routinely forwarded it to media. At which point, despite the esteem in which the webmaster holds me, the media usually decide to slip the email into the trash. Not this time. It's simple how these things happen. There's no need for conspiracy theories.

I want
to read the article again when I'm back in my room, but I'm sure it's better that I can't. I'd get stuck gazing at it, at the horror of seeing my life dissected. I'd read it over and over until I'd find myself being able to quote whole paragraphs of it long into the future.

Murray said I was shutting him out. He said I was depressed, accused me of being depressed. That was his tone, accusatory, as if depression was another thing I was keeping to myself but giving him glimpses of when my guard was down. He said I was depressed and not admitting it to myself and I told him that was wrong, and also logically inconsistent with his idea that I was shutting him out. Or was I now shutting myself out too?

That was, I suppose, two years ago. Things can take a long time to fall apart, even once they've started to. Murray was putting in a lot of hours at work then, I got into kick-boxing, my new TV idea came along. That these occurred at around the same time is no more than coincidence, I'm sure of it, but before then we'd been able to fix our problems, as far as I can recall.

I'd seen Cindy Crawford's arms on a magazine cover, toned new arms that looked like they meant business but didn't look bulked up. It was a great photo, a powerful photo. I don't even know what she'd been doing to get them, but I went to the gym and said I wouldn't mind Cindy Crawford's new arms and I ended up kickboxing.

It felt good,
I felt good. I wanted to do more, the TV show idea was evolving. I started thinking more about my character and her physicality, how it worked for her, where it had come from. I needed to understand her better. It was a quiet process, an internal one, not one that I talked about. The dots don't join exactly that easily, but it was something like it.

No one was being shut out. But Murray would come home from his day's work and I'd have nothing to tell him about mine. My day had been fine, but I'd spent it in my head. I'd insist that I had nothing to tell him, though I probably sounded vague about it, and soon enough the smallest things would aggravate us both.

We fought about raisins once. He wanted some for a recipe but I didn't buy them because I thought we had some in the pantry. ‘I wrote them on the list,' he said. ‘I wrote it down because we didn't have them. I thought the plan was that whoever did the shopping got what was on the list.' But he would often put things on there without checking, and we had a pantry full of chick peas.

It was a small incident, and one that should have been a non-incident, but our life started to feel as though it was made up of conversations like that.

‘You're overdoing it,' he said to me about my gym work. ‘You can't blame the producers for getting ideas if you're
training like Demi Moore for
GI Jane
' And all I could say to that was ‘You don't understand' because he didn't.

And I'd want to be on tour again, to get out of the house, out of my head, away from us not getting on. Emma would book some dates, and I'd go, though when the dates came around things had usually changed for the better. Murray and I would both wish I hadn't said Yes, and I'd miss the good parts of home every day I was away. I'd call him every night, and my days were busy enough that there were things I could tell him then, and he'd tell me his life was just the usual, longer hours in the office maybe since there was no reason for him to be at home on the days when Elli wasn't there.

So yes, there was, it turns out, a ‘communication breakdown', as the magazine says. But it doesn't explain it, and it doesn't say that communication can break down even when both parties try as hard as people can to stop it, and that it's only long after that you can see where some of the unravelling began, a long time before.

Elliott met Murray, and they got on well. Murray cooked dinner once when Elliott was in Brisbane, and Elliott came over with a good bottle of merlot. He'd asked me beforehand what Murray liked, and Murray took a look at the label and went ‘Hmmm', like someone who knew he'd quietly contrive to drink far more than his fair share.

During dinner we skirted around the issue of the consequences that would come if the show went as we hoped. We talked instead about the prospect of it meaning good work close to home, as though that would fix anything that needed it. But Murray and I had already been giving up privacy inch by inch and, if the plans worked, we'd start handing over yards of it.

We
went to a counsellor whose name was Janis, spelt as in Joplin. Her staff happened to recognise me, so Murray and I spent the whole first session spinning out about confidentiality. It meant that our problem intruded on our solution from day one.

Janis had long straight hair that was naturally blonde, and the blue eyes to go with it, and a contained kind of smile that gave nothing away. She'd happily stay silent after one of us had spoken, which often led the person who had been talking to say more, and in doing that they would sometimes say more than they meant to. It might have been a tactic, but more often than not the final sentence was only a restatement of what had been said already, but more succinct, more direct and often inadvertently more likely to hurt. We each, once we had explained something, wanted Janis to go, ‘Oh, now I get it,' and tell us the answer to our problem, and her silences made us wonder if we'd been helpful enough.

We sat in three office chairs, Murray swivelling and rocking in a distracting way, Janis quite still with her feet crossed at the ankles. I'm sure she can't be much more than thirty, but she looked younger, and sometimes it was as if a child was asking us the questions.

‘Are you happy?' she said to me one day, quite directly. I suppose it's always a fair line of enquiry.

Most sessions involved the three of us, but Murray and I each had solo sessions with her too. I don't know what
I expected they'd be like, but it felt like she pushed me harder in some of them.

‘How would you respond if I put it to you that you seemed to be resisting telling me some things? Maybe we could talk about your childhood, your family life, how your family communicates . . .'

Murray had, of course, already introduced the issue of me keeping things to myself, but that was weeks before and in his usual blunt way, and I'd fought him like a child about it, right there in front of Janis. We had an argument about a box of Garfields he had brought home once on a weekend between jobs. A box of plastic cartoon cats. ‘You never told me you collected Garfields,' I practically screamed at him in Janis's office, as if I was accusing him of having an affair, when really it was the only example that would come to mind of him keeping anything to himself.

And Janis sat there, as still as ever, waiting for it to play itself out, and Murray said angrily, ‘I never did collect Garfields. Someone gave me one once and it stayed on the desk and you know I'm not tidy. People came in and they saw it and gave me more of them. I was never collecting them. And I told you that. I told you that when I brought them home.'

So, we displayed the worst of our argument techniques to Janis, for the first time seriously and all to do with a box of Garfields that, over four years, had simply collected itself.

We laughed about it afterwards, of course, Murray and I. He promised he would never again accept a Garfield without first telling me. I assured him that we both knew I was in the wrong, and I told him he was at liberty to accept all the
Garfields his heart desired, with the exception of the ones that came with suckers for attaching them to car windows.

And I don't know what he's thinking now, with that article out there, if he knows about it yet. I don't know what he's thinking about us, or about what might have happened in Calgary with Rob Castle. What
did
happen in Calgary with Rob Castle. But it was a different story then, not the story in the article.

I looked happy in the photo in the magazine, happy with my arms around Jen and Rob Castle, and my hand on my first beer. I was making new friends, I was having a moment away from my life, that's all. And the events that followed were events my life allowed. It was over then with Murray, he'd told me that.

W
E HEADED WEST
out of Calgary late in the morning in a minibus, with the mountains rising ahead of us from the edge of the brown plain. It was a cold clear day and we had the windows up, and the air was dense with halitosis, the breath of a load of battle-weary comedians damaged by drinking.

There had been a poker game till four in someone's room, and I've never been into that. No, I'm more likely to have sex with the wrong person, then spill my guts over a few beers the next evening before another night of low-quality sleep. At least I don't toss my per diems away on scotch and cards.

In Banff, I walked down Caribou Street towards Banff Avenue, struck by the scenery and the cold crisp air and determined to buy a disposable camera. I came across a fudge shop first though, and bought a large block of their gourmet Cointreau-chocolate blend. After a few bites it was too rich for me and I could barely swallow it, so I carried it in my pocket for days, to Vancouver at least. I bought a postcard for Elli, a scenic view of Banff in winter, and I sent it to
her at Laura's. ‘This place can get so cold it's insane,' I wrote. ‘I'm wearing everything I've got, but I didn't bring anything for my nose. I have no idea how Canadian noses make it through winter.'

We had a night off that night, and we all ended up going to a poetry event at the Banff Centre for the Arts, where we were staying.

After each poet, there was a few minutes in which the audience could come and go from the auditorium, and I got the timing of a bathroom visit wrong and sat one poet out.

I got talking to a young guy who was involved with the catering, and bringing out dip and corn chips for the interval. His name was Toby – he wore a tag – and earlier on he'd shown me to my room when I'd become a little lost on my way there after checking in. I asked him if he was from Banff, and if he had been working at the Arts Centre long, and he told me no one was from Banff, it wasn't that kind of place. He was from Winnipeg himself, but people came here from all over. He was taking a break between college years to reassess his options, and Banff seemed as good a place to reassess them as any. It was a good place to put your life on hold.

He said he was looking forward to winter setting in, and he told me there's a saying that goes, ‘If you can't get laid in Banff, you can't get laid.'

Setting aside the fact that some of us can get laid with relative ease in a prairie oil town, let alone the surely more obvious option of a ski resort, I asked him how he was going and
he said, ‘Well, not yet, but I've only been here a couple of months.'

This wasn't to be his night either. He was dorky and I wasn't sure he'd ever got laid in his life to date and, five hours later, after the pace of his drinking had gone badly wrong, I found him throwing up into a bin in the nightclub where he should have scored. He wasn't without charm, though he didn't know it himself yet. But I felt like his mother, detecting a nascent awkward charm in him and hoping for the best, and you can't learn about those things from your mother. He had blushed when he'd said the line about getting laid, and then laughed nervously, and those people don't get laid too easily.

The poetry had its moments. There was an Irish poet headlining, and he caught me unawares by reading a poem that made me feel Irish. I felt distinctly connected to what he read, and I hadn't expected that. From the way he had the moss growing on the rocks, to the feel of the sun and the air, to the tilt of the headstones in an abandoned island cemetery, I could see the pictures with perfect clarity. I wanted to tell him that afterwards, but there were too many people around him and I didn't know how to put it. I wanted to tell him that the rest of his audience might have caught the poetry, but I was sure I was the only one who really knew what he was saying. The only one who could see the gulls that he
hadn't
talked about, but that certainly flew over the cemetery, and who could see the exact shapes of the clouds, and the change in the colours of the ocean in winter.