Desperate Husbands (5 page)

He sprawls in front of the TV, an apple in his hand, and warily contemplates a small bottle of Coke. Some day soon he will be pleased to be home, but right now he still has the tastes of a rural German traditionalist—and a ruddy, frostbitten complexion to match.

Jocasta shakes her head. If only she’d insisted on that Chapstick.

A couple of decades ago, when Jocasta would go interstate for work, the result was a big upswing in my standard of living. When the neighbourhood women discovered she was away, they would bring me food. Spanakopita, Monday. A nice Italian casserole on Tuesday. Portuguese Cozido on Wednesday. Jocasta’s now been in Melbourne for two weeks and nary a casserole has appeared. I’ve sent The Space Cadet out onto the pavement looking hungry, without so much as a flying kebab in response.

These days, you are meant to cope. In fact, I’m not even allowed to mention that it’s been a bit of a challenge.

‘Melbourne? Lovely. Two weeks? Super. I’ll hardly notice you’ve gone.’ This, I think, goes for both men and women. Since housework and childcare is such a contested area, you can never admit the crucial nature of your partner’s contribution. ‘Getting the children to sport on time? Oh, that
was no trouble at all. And isn’t it pleasant having that hour walking around the park in the bracing air while you wait for them to finish?’

Normally, I do the washing and ironing during the week and she does the weekday cooking. That way we’ve got plenty of time on the weekends to have a stand-up row about the cleaning. Now I have to do all three plus argue with myself about the state of the kitchen. Lord knows how single parents cope.

By Tuesday, the kitchen floor already features eight dead cockroaches plus a patina of dropped food. By Thursday, there are fifteen dead cockroaches, who appear to have organised their bodies across the floor to spell out the phrase ‘Sweep Me’.

The parenting quandaries soon multiply. First problem: the phrase ‘Mum would have let me’. Even when we are
both
in the house, The Space Cadet knows how to play one against the other. Better, if the other is 800 kilometres away. And so he makes the claim that, after soccer practice, Jocasta showers him with junk food. This seems unlikely. I deny the request and instead offer a drink of water. The Space Cadet says I’m being ‘harsh’—so falling in love with the word that he starts calling me ‘Mr Harsh’ and ‘Inspector Harsh’ and ‘Professor Harsh’ and ‘AA Harsh’ and ‘Mrs Harsh’. It’s a joke that lasts all fortnight. My new name, in some creative variant, greets my every parenting decision.

And if The Space Cadet thinks I’m harsh, Batboy believes I’m incompetent—blaming every household problem on the fact that I’m running the show. Bringing us to the rule: the further away the other parent is, the more wonderful they become.

For the last couple of months Batboy has been learning to referee soccer games in the belief that he’ll earn twice what they pay at Kmart. Already he’s been issued with his official red and yellow cards. ‘You’re gone, mate, gone,’ he says producing the yellow card with a flourish. ‘Mum’s been away for four days, and look—there’s no bread and there’s no milk.’ He seems delighted with this observation. I offer him cereal with a splash of water and mumble that things aren’t so bad. Batboy stares me down. ‘Are you telling me I’m wrong? That’s breach Y16. Dissent against the ref by word or deed. That’s a red carder.’ I take a silent vow. I will find the person who thought it was a good idea to give a high-school student a sense of power. Then I’ll kill him.

Jocasta, I notice, dropped large amounts of laundry into the basket just before her departure. She also did ‘a clean-out’ of the fridge—throwing out any food past its use-by date. This, of course, is precisely the sort of food that can sustain a family through a crisis. I conclude she has a hidden plan to make the house fall apart during my stewardship, thus proving her contention that she does all the housework and I do nothing. I resolve to defeat her.

By Friday, my head is pounding due to the constant alcohol abuse. Batboy notes that his soccer referee’s uniform is still in the wash, which is ‘conduct warranting a caution’. He waves a yellow card in my direction. There are now twenty-two dead cockroaches, their bodies arranged to spell out the phrase ‘He’s Losing It’. This is when Jocasta rings in, wondering how we’re all getting on. Before answering, I remind myself: if you admit you’re not coping, it’s just another way of confessing that she normally does more than her share of this stuff. ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Absolute breeze. Getting
a lot of reading in, actually. Great to be able to cook every night. A real pleasure.’

The only problem with this barefaced lie is the chaos that surrounds me. The phone call ends and I set to work. In the days ahead, the illusion must be created that we coped effortlessly. I square my shoulders and order the children into action. I am Major-General Harsh and we shall have the house spotless. I start scrubbing at various surfaces and—to save time—cook all the family’s meals in one go: an army-sized quantity of bolognaise sauce, sufficient to last ten consecutive meals.

I tackle the ironing and by the second Wednesday every basket is empty, even the Too Hard Basket—the one full of the pleats and weird pockets. The kitchen, though, appears to be fighting back against my attempts to clean it. Spaghetti sauce is evident on most surfaces, and fifty-seven deceased cockroaches now litter the floor, their bodies spelling out ‘She’s Winning’.

By Monday, Batboy is growing suspicious. Spooning down his spaghetti bolognaise for the eighth successive night, an idea forms: ‘We’ve had this meal before, haven’t we?’

‘Maybe once or twice,’ I reply. Batboy says he feels sick. Weakly he slips his red card out of his pocket. ‘Repeated abuse of a ref,’ he says, his voice trembling.

Back in the kitchen, the cockroaches have reorganised themselves into a giant clock-face, counting down the minutes until Jocasta’s return. With the cockroach clock ticking, I work through the night, scrubbing and cleaning. I remove all signs of the town of Bologna and its famous sauce. I sweep up the cockroaches. I buy milk and bread. Panting slightly, I arrive home with seconds to spare.

‘The place looks great,’ says Jocasta, walking in.

‘Oh, does it?’ I say, glancing up from the newspaper. ‘I hadn’t noticed.’

The scene is perfect save for Batboy, who is lying by the back door holding his stomach and groaning. Looking quite red in the face, he keeps mouthing the words ‘the bolognaise’.

‘Is he all right?’ Jocasta asks.

‘Oh, yeah,’ I say. ‘Just feigning injury. Taking a dive. It’s offence Y35. He better watch it. He’ll be up for a yellow card.’

She looks worried but
I’m not too concerned.
The children are alive. The
house has not burnt down.
There have been no major
outbreaks of disease.
Frankly, I think I deserve
a bloody medal.

On holiday in Germany, I’d been standing in the queue of tourists outside the new Reichstag. Along with everyone else, I was becoming increasingly testy about the prim German
Madchen
in charge of the doors. She was allowing only a few people to wait in the spacious warmth of the foyer and seemed to be enjoying the power trip of watching the rest of us freeze in the snow. ‘
Ungefickt zum Dienst
,’ muttered my German friend through chapped lips, and others nearby agreed. ‘
Ungefickt zum Dienst
,’ they chorused. My friend translated: ‘It means someone who’s doing a boring job but also hasn’t had sex recently, and is therefore taking it out on everybody else. You would say she is “unfucked for work”.’

It’s a fantastic concept and in the weeks that follow, it warms my heart to be able to understand the true cause of any bad and snarly service that I might receive. And yet, for the
most part, in the battle between me and the German language, I am nearly always the loser. In the Munich cafe on the first night, I summoned the waitress and demonstrated my skill in speaking German. ‘My wife will have the chicken, my younger son will have the sausages, and your son, I think, will have the schnitzel.’ Perhaps she’s used to tourists advising her what to feed her children. I don’t know. She didn’t say anything but looked a little grim. Now I come to think of it, I may also have demanded a large beer be immediately served to her husband.

Another problem. It’s our first trip overseas for twelve years: my knowledge of all the languages has fallen apart, and so has the binding on our travel dictionaries. I discover a whole chunk of the German one is missing—everything from ‘cheap’ through to ‘thing’. I can ask for directions to the art gallery or the zoo but not much else. A visit to the cinema would have been nice…but I see we’ve missed out by just one or two pages. And how strange to discover that all the very best food and drink lies somewhere in the middle of the alphabet. I know the kids want hot chocolate or Coke with their meal, but wouldn’t apple juice do? Or maybe some tonic water? And what to eat? Their choice: anchovies, artichokes, veal or vension.

The dictionary probably fell apart on the plane while I made my last-minute revisions. Some other Qantas customer is, no doubt, travelling Germany right now armed with a chunk of my book, gleefully attending football matches, ordering cocktails, gulping down mugs of hot chocolate and asking directions to the mixed nude sauna. I hope he’s having a good time, the bastard.

Disgruntled, I purchase a cheap German phrase book. This one is intact, but reflects a somewhat dodgy morality.
There’s a whole section on dating, for instance—‘Are you free this evening?’, ‘Are you waiting for someone?’ and ‘Can we go back to your place now?’. It all seems a bit forward since, by very use of the book, you’re admitting you can’t understand a word she is saying. As you haltingly read these phrases from the book in the middle of the nightclub, will she really believe your main interest is her mind, her passion for medieval architecture and her views on global warming?

My language woes only deepen once we cross into Italy. On the train I try to memorise a list of simple phrases—‘Hello’, ‘Goodbye’, ‘How much is it?’. The trick is saying them in the right order. Arriving at the
pensione
the first evening, I stride in, shake the man’s hand and greet him warmly in Italian: ‘Well, goodbye,’ I say to him. He looks somewhat confused. No doubt when we leave, I’ll pay the bill, pick up the bags and shout, ‘Well, hello,’ as I stumble out the door.

Jocasta, inevitably, has the language down pat, and rushes into cake shops and orders this or that ‘
questa
’. It turns out this is the Italian for ‘I’ll have one of those’, but I’m left with the impression it’s the term for a particular gooey pastry. For some reason Jocasta finds it amusing when I inquire at the restaurant that night whether dessert might include any of those ‘really beautiful
questos
’.

We move on, travelling through Slovenia on the way to France, which is like going to Melbourne on the way from Sydney to Brisbane. I buy a Slovenian guidebook, and we sit down to eat. Almost immediately I realise my guidebook doesn’t include the phrase for ordering a beer. Incredulous, I flip through again and still find it missing, even from the section marked ‘emergencies’. In fact, the only thing listed in the drinks section is the local pear liquor—Hruska.
Somewhat later I discover this is also the sound you make after you’ve drunk too much of it.

For some reason Paris seems easier. Despite my complete lack of French, I discover I’m able to translate an entire advertisement about the strip club next to our hotel. It’s like a curious mystical ability: I’m a sex savant. I read the sign to Jocasta, freely translating as I go. The club features women who dance without their tops on and, later in the night, remove their trousers. Alcohol, I read aloud, is served to gentlemen at very reasonable prices. And the women are very beautiful. The place is called either The House of Pain or The House of Bread. Or possibly both. I can’t be sure. It may be that they strip off then beat each other with bread sticks. Odd, certainly, but the French
are
odd. The point is, I am able to understand nearly every word.

Slovenia aside, it’s the same with beer. Wherever we travel, I can order it immediately and in any quantity. I’m now convinced I could attend a strip club and get pissed anywhere in the world. Is this the collective unconscious of which Jung wrote? Are Australian men the only ones born with this remarkable linguistic gift?

We head home with a stopover in Los Angeles. My linguistic confusion grows all the more intense. I try to copy the American way of speaking English. It’s ‘real’ good, not ‘really’; ‘five x’, not ‘five times’; and ‘two-thousand-five’ instead of ‘two thousand
and
five’. They are so spectacularly busy they just don’t have time for those extra syllables. Even the children are flat out, forced to call it ‘math’ and not ‘maths’. They’d love to add that final ‘s’ but, real sorry, just don’t have the time. In a park, I even spot a sign advising a ‘No Thru Road’. I imagine the poor park supervisor, up to his neck in work. ‘I’m just not in
a position to muck around with letters that really aren’t pulling their weight.’

Of course, once I get home, I realise that it’s the Australian language which is the strangest of all. We’re a nation of underestimators. It’s the only place in the world where an atrocious act is described as ‘a bit ordinary’, while an act of genius is ‘not half bad’. The first day of spring, in which birds are trilling, the air throbs with heat and scent, and the sky is a brilliant azure blue, is described as ‘not too bad at all’.

It must be tough for American visitors, given that their usage is a little more upbeat. Ask an American ‘How are you?’ and it’s seen as a cue to deliver some advertising copy: ‘You know what? I’m terrific. I’m awesome. I’m fantastic.’ The person saying this is often slipping in and out of a coma, or lying in the gutter having been bankrupted for the fourteenth time.

This is not a problem for their fellow Americans. They simply employ the National Linguistic Deflator to the sentence, dividing all positive sentiments by 230 per cent, multiplying all negative notions by the power of ten, thus concluding that the person is ‘as good as can be expected, considering’.

In Australia, it’s the opposite. The National Linguistic Inflator must be employed. Consider the following exchange:

‘How are you?’

‘Not bad. And you?’

‘Can’t complain.’

As is exceedingly obvious, the first person has just, minutes ago, won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his first
experimental novel, while his friend has just made it into
Who Weekly
’s Most Sexy Person Alive double issue, despite his work as a brain surgeon.

Of course, every community has its braggers and blowhards, but a true Australian discussion is like a perpetual round of misère, with the aim of losing every trick.

‘Your car’s looking good.’

‘Come off it, it’s full of dents and rust.’

‘I’ve got to sell mine, it’s so lousy.’

‘At least you’re free to sell. I still owe too much.’

‘Gee, were you able to get a loan? They turned me down.’

Kerry Packer, billionaire, has ‘a few bob’. Don Bradman, the world’s greatest cricketer, was ‘no slouch with the bat’. Meanwhile, someone truly incompetent is merely ‘a bit average’. In fact, Australia is the only country in which a really evil person is called ‘a
bit
of a bastard’, while your best friend is ‘a
total
bastard’.

At least we’ve got somewhere to go, linguistically speaking. In America, it’s as if they’ve given a score of ten out of ten to the first player in the competition. If you are awesome and fantastic while slipping in and out of the coma, what do you say on a really good day? ‘Actually, I’ve just won the Nobel Prize for Literature and been chosen as one of
Who Weekly
’s Most Sexy People in the Universe. So I guess I feel even
more
awesome than I did when I was falling in and out of that coma back there.’

This may be why younger Americans have fallen right off the scale of exaggeration and had to circle around to start again on the other side. Something really good is now ‘sick’ or ‘wicked’. These words have been picked up by Australian teenagers, causing intergenerational bafflement, particularly
once the attempt is made to translate it all back into Australian.

‘The film was really sick, Dad.’

‘It was sick? So, really bad, huh? So bad it was, like, a bit ordinary?’

‘No it wasn’t that bad. It was good. Really good.’

‘How good? So good it wasn’t that bad?’

‘Aw, no, probably not
that
good.’

If Australians had landed on the moon, the speech would have gone, ‘This is two small steps for man and a half-decent effort for mankind.’ Everyone would then apply the National Linguistic Inflator to the speech, multiply everything by 173 per cent and work out the bloke was actually saying the whole thing was awesome.

It’s then the country would stand to attention and shout as one towards the moon: ‘Mate, no one likes a bignoter,’ at which point the Aussie astronaut would stomp off and sulk, and we’d be forced to look to another language for an explanation.

Who knows? Maybe he was just a little
Ungefickt zum Dienst
.