‘Business,’ Cutfish confided, ‘family business. My girlfriend’s best friend is with child so she’s being married off to give the embryonic bastard a house in the suburbs and a father it can recognise. ‘
‘Oh.’
‘O exactly. Her mother still claims the girl’s a virgin. Zero fondles, a no sex siren. Hell, the girls been at it since the pram was traded but her mother still claims Jesus is coming compliments of her immaculate daughter. What a laugh.’
The woman wasn’t laughing. Was thinking that these Australians were certainly a strange race. She had no way of knowing that Wright was not indicative of the breed. Or that he was about as normal as a Yeti.
The airhostess, born around the time the Roman Legions invaded Gaul, handed Wright his drink. Served it with all the delicacy of a beer hall Fraulein. Wright waited for Godzilla to depart before continuing.
‘Where do they dig up those things? Don’t they pension them off anymore? I can remember when they were young and beautiful.’
‘Yes, my husband used to fly just to leer at the air hostesses.’
‘In a Leer Jet?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Not as sorry as I am. There’s no point flying now. I’ve seen better bodies at the mortuary.’
The woman in the red coat was becoming uneasy with Leonard J. Cutfish.
‘I know it’s sexist, ‘Leonard continued, ‘but life’s to short to be served drinks by a uniformed cane toad. It’s false advertising. Air hostesses are supposed to be slim and curvaceous and ready to join the mile high club with any-one low enough to try.’
‘The Mile High Club?’
‘The Mile High Club. It’s a select club for the sinfully active. You join by making a deposit in the nearest hostess. I certainly wouldn’t invite our hostess to join. She’s more air bag than air worthy.’
It was indeed fortunate that, like a hurtling Concord, all this was going right over the woman’s head. Talking to a Zulu would have been less confusing.
‘Yes siree bob, I wouldn’t plumb the depths of that without an air sick bag over her head. And neck. And entire body,’ he said.
The woman in the red coat leapt to her feet and tried to parachute from the plane.
________________
Wright, nee Leonard J. Cutfish, Wanker extraordinaire, never could figure out why there was such a rush to leave the aircraft on arrival. Why people leapt from their seats to gather bags and belongings and choke the aisles just waiting for the doors to be flung open.
Nathan thought this penned herd was more dangerous for the flight attendants than flying. Thought the airlines must lose a few stewards and hostesses each year trampled underfoot by the wildly fleeing passengers in their urgent rush to the baggage collection carousels.
Where the passengers could hang about for hours awaiting the arrival of their luggage.
________________
The cab drove over the Harbour Bridge. The driver was a squat Vietnamese with impeccable manners but limited English. Nathan asked to be driven to his hotel which was located on the North Shore. When the taxi driver didn’t seem to understand the request Wright handed him a hotel brochure with a map on the back. while wondering if they’d end up in the heart of Sydney or the heat of Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh City, or whatever they called it these days).
Shuffling restlessly in the rear seat, carefully nursing the wedding present, he gazed through the glass and girders at the tranquil scene about him. Saw the Opera House, all sail and shape, bright in the sunshine. It was quite beautiful so quite unlike Melbourne
for Melbourne was timid, sedate, snore inducing while Sydney was exciting, sophisticated, sensual - and Nathan hated the place.
________________
Saturday morning. Wright collected Kelly from the airport.
________________
Sunday morning, he didn’t.
‘Where the hell are you?’
‘It’s 8 o’clock. Where the hell do you think I am?’
Wright was too sleepy to respond.
‘I’m at the airport waiting for them to release you from psychiatric care. What the hell do you think!’
‘What are you doing there?’
‘Booking you a ticket to Botswana. I’m sure I can locate a witch doctor who can restrain your spiralling madness...or at least make a half way decent totem pole on which to display those various portions of your body I’m about to remove.’
‘That’s one heck of an imagination you’ve rented Kelly. It’s a shame they haven’t connected it to your brain yet.’ Nathan was lying in bed with his eyes shut. He turned to search the sheet next to him. She wasn’t there. He looked under the bed, she wasn’t there. He looked in the bathroom, the closet, then in his suitcase. She wasn’t there either.
‘Where the hell are you?’
‘I told you I’m at the airport ‘
‘Yeah, sure you are Kelly. The jokes over, what are you doing?’
‘Preparing for surgery.’
‘Cut it out....’
‘Exactly.’
‘Kelly, I’m hanging up if you don’t make some attempt at sense.’
‘Jesus Nathan, you’ve been at those anabolic stupid pills again haven’t you?’
Nathan searched the room for a sign of her previous existence. Her bag wasn’t there and the bathroom didn’t resemble a disaster area so maybe she was telling the truth. Suddenly the true seriousness of the situation dawned on him.
‘What did I do? Come on Kel, whatever it was I apologise. Don’t leave me. I’m a stranger in a strange hotel room, don’t orphan me.’ God, she must be really angry to have gotten up and left during the night. He could remember being drunk but he couldn’t remember being any more drunk, or any more aggravating for that matter, than usual.
‘Please Kel, forgive me. I’ll do anything. I’ll change, I promise.’
‘Well that’s a promise you should reserve for your underwear whose change would be welcome but I have absolutely no idea what you’re raving about.’
‘Us. You. You at the airport.’
‘You promised to meet me.’
‘Have you gone totally berserk!’ This was no way to speak to the woman who’d just left him, and for whom he’d even alternated underwear for, but Nathan was never exactly diplomatic. ‘I met you yesterday,’ he shrieked down the phone, deafening most at Sydney Airport but not Kelly who was used to his megaphone vocals.
‘You really are sick Nathan. Yesterday was Friday and Friday I dropped you at the airport.’ Nathan slumped silently back to the pillows.
‘I think I’m having another attack....’
‘Not yet you’re not. Wait until I get my hands on you.’
________________
The steel doors opened and Nathan, dressed in jeans, shirt and odd socks, headed straight for Reception. Several questions later he’d established that, in the opinion of woman behind the glasses behind the counter, it was indeed Saturday. That he had arrived last night, that no-one had joined him, that he’d ordered a single meal from Room Service, watched one video. And was undoubtedly on mind altering substances.
Wright wished he was. In case this was some sort of CIA plot or worse, a Kelly planned joke, Nathan ran for a newsstand a full block away from the hotel. Unfortunately when he got there it was still Saturday. As an added precaution he put the question of the date to twelve people he stopped in the street. These included a Rabbi (who he considered beyond reproach), a Nun (whom he considered second only to his mother on the scale of truthsaying) and several good looking girls (whom he would have asked for a date anyway), but sadly none of them gave him the Wright day of time. Again and again he received the same answer - that IT WAS Saturday and HE WAS mad.
So he hailed a cab. There was a deranged woman at the airport booking him a ticket to Botswana and she had to be stopped.
________________
‘What’s gotten into you?’
‘Doubleday.’
‘Oh, I see, I’m the real time victim of your personal watch warp.’
‘Go on laugh. I’m going manifestly crazy and you don’t care.’
‘I don’t care to wait an hour and a half for the crazy to arrive by cab to take me away,’ she sighed, applying fresh make-up to pursed lips, not angry but not exactly placid either.
‘Why can’t you be normal Nathan? Just once. Why, when I know I interrupted you in the middle of some other woman....’
‘Oh yeah, what was I doing, banging away at her navel?’
‘Do shut-up’
‘Yes sir.’
‘Just why is it that when I catch you exercising your wand with some other woman your excuse so pathetically peculiar? For God sake Nathan why, when I ask you, as politely as possible, to explain your delay, can’t you be like any other normal, sane, decent liar. Why don’t you say that you overslept? Or that you couldn’t find a cab, or you simply forgot? Or the girl wouldn’t leave without payment in full, and in cash? Oh no, not you, you have to be different. You acquire a disease only H.G. Wells ever experimented with. You get Doubleday...’
‘Doubledazed,’ Nathan corrected, ‘the thing itself is called Doubleday, what you actually get is Doubledazed....’
She shook her head while patting his. Her task on earth was to suffer and she was doing her saintly best to not suffer in silence. She sat back, lips drawn to a thin line, her face calm as a Madonna’s. Then those divine lips parted. ‘You really should have your mindsight checked. It’s obviously failing. Perhaps your brain needs glasses,’ she proposed still sighing, wondering why she bothered. Nathan, desperate to interrupt this impressive display of the quintessential martyr, leant over. And kissed her. Then she really wondered why she bothered.
________________
He spent most of the day trying to explain the warp to Kelly who wasn’t interested in what the warped had to say so he dropped the subject.
Nathan decided it was an aberration. That the day, the night he thought he’d had - he hadn’t. It was a vivid dream perhaps or the effects of alcohol maybe.
It wasn’t, but it also wasn’t worth worrying about.
Yet.
________________
Nathan was devoutly nocturnal. The morning’s sleep was interrupted at an obscene hour by an awake girlfriend bearing an obscene suggestion. Rolling over, he told her to fuck off. She fucked on anyway. Nathan feigned consciousness just long enough to reciprocate Kelly’s advances, and although he didn’t do a great job, he did grunt and groan in the appropriate places and she did seem appropriately dissatisfied at the pumping climax of his three minute marathon, but it was enough to convince her of the futility of any further attempts so she went back to sleep. Victory to the sexual sloth.
Wright consistently made this effort to reciprocate in order keep the peace but they weren’t sexually suited. Nathan liked doing it at night while Kelly, like most women Wright had experienced, enjoyed it most in the morning. Sex in the morning invigorated Kelly. It crippled Wright.
Nathan viewed any such pre dawn doona diving as an unwelcome interruption - as an infringement on his sleep with its dreams full of wild women who were always fucking him anyway so why bother to wake up. He liked to bonk when the world was dark and he was at his most handsome. Kelly, who was beautiful, didn’t suffer from the complex, so she enjoyed it best when the dark turned light. Nathan liked braille, Kelly liked brilliance.
They were about as compatible as Jenny’s cooking was edible.
________________
A loud burst of sunlight swept the room as Kelly threw the curtains back. Nearly naked she stood at the window gazing at the harbour.
‘What time is it?’ Nathan asked, pillow for a hat.
‘Time you evolved and grew legs and walked upright.’ Kelly said seating herself on the window ledge, white T-shirt covering soft breasts, her nipples growing hard in the chill morning. Her firm thighs exposed a delicate strip of untanned rump where underwear or bikini left the skin a patch paleness. Her breathing was relaxed and gentle as she drank in the scene of sail on sea. The harbour, a calm rinse blue, was awash with Sunday sailors.
‘It’s really beautiful here,’ she sighed contentedly.
‘Ugh.’
‘Your enthusiasm is noted Nathan. Now get up and get dressed before I have you stuffed, mounted and displayed in the lobby as a tourist attraction.’
‘I’ve already been mounted and I’m already stuffed,’ Nathan moaned heading for the shower, ‘and I have no intention of letting you use me as a lure for gaping tourists,’ he grinned turning on the tap, hoping a good drowning would wash night’s sleep from today’s morning.
Kelly laughed loudly.
‘A lure? You! You may be rat bait but you’re no lure.’
________________
She looked fantastic.
’You look like a Barbie Doll,’ Wright said. It was his idea of a compliment.
‘You look quite presentable for a change,’ she said adjusting his tie then kissed him ever so lightly so as not to spoil her lipstick. Nathan grabbed her. Hugged her to him and ran his hand up her leg until it met the seam of her pantyhose.
‘Nathan, get your hand out of there,’ she scolded but edged closer.
‘It’s not IN anywhere to get OUT.’
‘Don’t be crass.’
‘Why not? I am craszzzy! You’re always telling me I am.’
‘Jesus, you really are, aren’t you. Earlier I couldn’t have paid you to put your palm there, now you want to play. You need your wires checked.’
‘I need my wire checked in.’
‘NATHAN....’
‘Yes sir.’
‘......there’s plenty of time for that after the wedding, now let’s move.’
So Nathan moved. Tried to throw her on the bed and have his evil way with her. She screamed. Shrieked that he’d messed up her hair and make-up and immediately locked herself in the bathroom for the next half hour when it really was time to leave.
________________
‘Do you think God will mind me invading his house?’ Nathan wondered aloud staring at the steeple feeling decidedly uncomfortable. He only went to church when he couldn’t avoid it. Occasions like funerals, weddings, christenings. And those times when life was giving him such a hard time that he snuck into them to pray for wealth or women.
‘Oh I think she’ll forgive you. She knows your a man so she knows what a tragic creature you are,’ Kelly laughed into the box of confetti she was saving to shower the newly weds with.
________________
There was only one thing that made him more nervous than church. Weddings. Today Nathan had hit the jackpot.
________________
‘You know your girlfriend had to get married don’t you?’ Wright whispered. He and Kelly were standing idly waiting for the service to begin, Nathan drawing obscene suggestions with the toe of his shoe in the dirt of the gravel path that ran around the front of God’s fine old house.
‘I know that were you the premature ejaculator, she’d have divorced life rather than get married. An entire platoon of humiliated relatives armed with tanks and heavy artillery would not of convinced her that death wasn’t preferable to bearing the flower of your demon seed. Christ, we’d be attending her funeral and not her wedding if you’d been the groom,’ Kelly retorted snidely, removing her sunglasses.
Nathan stared at her dress. ‘Well, at least you’d be correctly attired for her final pit stop,’ he suggested.
‘Find a scalpel and drain yourself,’ Kelly suggested, casually adjusting the creeping hem of an expensive black dress bought specially for the occasion. ‘Why do you say things like that anyway? You know it isn’t true. Georgina is no angel, but she knows about contraception ...which your poor unfortunate mother unfortunately didn’t,’ she sneered, fiddling with the white pearls strung curved around the high neck of her simple, well tailored, worth an oil well, funeral black dress.
‘Leave my mother out of this,’ Wright defended. ‘If Georgina isn’t carrying a load, then who’s the guy with the shotgun lurking in the corner by the woman wearing the welded plastic face?’ Nathan asked, pointing in the general direction of a woman too old to for skin so smooth. Kelly, seeing nothing but Wright’s imagination for the cesspool it was, pounded the murky expanse with a loaded hand bag.
Moaning pitifully, Wright was ushered into the Church where Jesus lurked.
________________
‘Do you, Georgina Joy Williams take John Michael George, for your lawful wedded husband.’ Wright leaned toward Kelly. Voice muted, he asked her quietly what sort of life one could expect going through it with a name like Georgina George. About as good as loitering through it with a name like Nathan Never Wright Kelly replied, promptly attempting to silence the Never Quiet by castrating him with a thick hymn book.
‘In sickness so long as it’s in wealth,’ Wright added when the Vicar finished the similar sentence. Kelly scowled and threatened him again, this time with a prayer book which Wright found pretty damn threatening anyway. Nathan and prayer had never gotten along too well., mainly because his endless grovelling had proven such an unprofitable exercise.
________________
Wright’s early interest in religion had been entirely founded on the word ‘Prophet.’ When he discovered truth and correct spelling, Wright the Zealot became Wright Turn. And he left.
Went to seek the one true profit - wealth without work.
________________
‘You may now kiss the bride.’ So with the Vicar’s blessing, Wright got up to do so. Kelly, expecting the obvious, languidly stretched a slim stockinged leg and adroitly sent Wright sprawling into the aisle.
________________
Seated in one of the wooden pews at the front, Georgina’s mother, overwhelmed by the occasion, was in maternal tears. Between sniffles, she whimpered how beautiful her daughter was, how she was far too beautiful for that womaniser John Michael.
Across the aisle, secure amongst the multitudinous relatives, the mother of John Michael was saying how handsome her son was, how her pride and joy was far too handsome for that slut Georgina.
It was alter egos.
Chapter Seventeen
WRIGHT OFF
TIME AND NO MOTION. Cleverly disguised as a massive hangover, gravity held him horizontal, glued him immobile to his bum on a bed above a rented patch of planet Earth.
Rotating rapidly on a wayward axis about a waning sun this dimming yellow orb was due for demolition. Soon, Wright said. In twenty five million years scientists said claiming that a new Ice Age would spread across the continents like locusts on wheat.
Wright believed them. Being the eternal pessimist, he readily accepted the worst and the fact that his world was to turn into a giant ice box sometime circa infinity was enough to fill him with a permanent dread. Even though then - he’d be dead.
God had created a short term planet.
God wasn’t to be trusted.
________________
Nor were Scientists. They were inventive buggars, great at creating wonders. And worry. Dire warnings came from them with such monotonous regularity that it was getting to a stage where nothing was healthy. Food wasn’t, it was irradiated; tanning wasn’t, melanomas would sprout; sex was out, AIDS kills and cigarettes leave you legless.
Thanks to the wonders of modern scientific research everything that was pleasant or pleasurable now seemed to be a risk to earthly existence. Scientists discovered, people suffered. Worried about the million new ways they could go. Diseases no-one had ever heard of scientists found. God knows where they looked, under Wright’s bed Kelly said knowing there was bacteria lurking there not even Madam Curie could culture.
The scientists took the mystery out of life. And revealed death.
Shoot the messenger Nathan said.
________________
Actually Wright was going to be barbecued before the sun dimmed. The Greenhouse Effect would wilt him before ice solidified him.
________________
Although Nathan felt as weird as ever, had routinely checked the TV and paper for hints, for disturbances of the time/space continuum, the incarnation he’d excused as a Serepax Tango hadn’t held. Or reappeared.
For a week or two after the Sydney experience he’d almost convinced himself that the bloody thing existed.
If it had, in reality, imposed itself upon him he’d been too full of doubt to acknowledge it. Guessed that, unappreciated, probably crapped off with him - the doubting Thomas Nathan, the Tango had simply pissed off back to the sixth dimension where it belonged.
________________
Wright was paranoid. In addition to the Serepax Tango, Wright was also beginning to suspect God and his or her motives (Wright, incidentally, was quite convinced of God’s gender. He personally believed that being a mean bastard HE must be a SHE but was loath to let anybody else in on the secret so called her HIM just to protect God’s true identity).
Wright also suspected with educated enmity that God hadn’t created everything as claimed by his mother each time she tried to convert him. (Fat chance she had).
Nathan was an atheist because no matter how hard he prayed God had never let him win the lottery so either God didn’t exist or he was a mean son of a bitch who kept Wright poor out of sheer animosity. Either way God was no friend of his.
Wright believed in scientists. He believed they’d created more than (S)HE had of late so had now usurped the Supreme Being for they, the scientists, seemed to be coming up with better ideas than (S)HE had for ages.
________________
At a dinner party last week, during a lull in a more cerebral discourse on women’s make-up, Wright interrupted the debate.
Turning to his fellow gastronomes asked:
‘When was the last time God got a Nobel Prize or cured the incurable? What has HE done for mankind of late? When was the last time God got a mention in the social pages or gave us something as handy as velcro or plastic rubbish bags? Does God know what an ectoplasm is? Does HE know basic neurosurgery or how to stop my mother from threatening to abort me? Did HE discover the double helix DNA? Can HE cure baldness or satisfy the carnal requisites of most women? I’d like to see him keep going as long as my girlfriend demands I remain willing......’
Every-one at the table was, by now, sweating profusely and gazing at the ceiling waiting for God to strike the man dead.
Or at least mute.
‘...when was the last time HE did something truly miraculous? Like formulating the perfect diet, one that includes pizzas and pies for instance. Why doesn’t he do something really radical like bequeathing an I.Q. or ethics to politicians and public servants. No way. What does he do? HE does nothing! Leaves us