Zigzag Street (7 page)

So I am the one designated to invent the alternative clauses that will make everyone happy.

Hillary reassures me that I'm
just the boy for the job
, and I tell her I shall take my obvious surfeit of happiness and direct it to this important purpose.

I try hard to focus on the screen, but I keep finding myself thinking of other things, or quietly whining my way through the infectious melody of ‘Rose of Tralee'. My Can of Worms screen saver emerges and chews its way through my document. I tell Hillary this will all take careful consideration, as there are several competing interests and I must achieve a delicate balance.

And she says,
Good
, but warily.

I stay till six-thirty, but I'm not sure that I get anywhere. Perhaps all I create is confusion. I go home, as though there's any less confusion there.

Greg's fleas are going crazy, multiplying at a quite unsustainable rate but appearing to sustain it so far. I actually wonder if there's any of Greg left in there at all, or if the fleas have hollowed him out and are now operating his limbs in order to maintain the pretence of a cat. I take him to the vet. The vet is not impressed.

He should probably have come in a while back
, she says.
He's not looking good
.

I realise it would be stupid at this point to say I've been busy, as I would only end up getting an oblique
lecture about the responsibilities of pet ownership. Then I'd have the choice of taking it on the chin, or explaining myself as a victim of circumstances. That it took a death and a trashing to bring Greg and me together. My theory, that every conceivable interaction has the potential to lead back to the trashing, holds. I choose to say nothing, and I try to look contrite.

He's really quite infested
, she's saying,
and he's reacting and he's starting to scratch. Have you noticed the scratching? You must have noticed it. He starting to break skin
.

I nod.

Have you noticed it
?

Well, I'm out during the day.

This is clearly more like a confession of neglect than an answer, so I am compelled to go on.

He's my grandmother's cat, actually. And she hasn't been well lately, so I'm helping look after him. It's not ideal, but hopefully things'll be back to normal soon.

The problem with this is that every time I go the lying option, I tell a different lie. And I don't keep track of them. I'm scattering lies all over town to avoid talking about the trashing, and I expect this will backfire soon enough.

The vet, of course, displays compassion when she hears the lie, and this only reinforces the likelihood that I will lie again.

She says we will need to use a strong flea wash and if that fails, or if Greg keeps scratching himself, we may need to cut an ice-cream bucket and fit it around his head while we apply something else.

So now I am turning the cat into a loser too. A month or so ago he was entirely functional and flea-free. In a week's time he could have patchy hair loss, widespread self-inflicted wounds and an ice-cream bucket around his head. And they say people grow to resemble their pets. I think I'm dragging him down.

The vet says,
You might find that even if this works
he may have a few fleas left. Probably the easiest thing to do if that's the case is wash him with some dilute Martha Gardener's Wool Mix. But give it a few weeks first
.

Wash him with what?

Wool Mix. You know the stuff? Just make sure it's mixed in with a lot of warm water, and rinse it all off after you've washed him
.

I take him home. I explain to him the importance of the flea bath and how calmness is essential. I tell him this is for his own good.

At first he fools me by crouching down low and giving a long whining growl. This intensifies when I drench him and rub the liquid into his fur. I tell him how good he is, how well this is going. I start to wash it off. He loses it.

Every one of his muscles spasms at once and he rips up my arms like a fearsome wet gremlin and over my shoulder, landing on the floor with an inelegant splat. He runs for the door and out into the backyard. I chase him, but he's gone.

I am standing in the dark, quite alone, with no cat sounds apparent in the relative quiet. When I go back into the light and see the mess, I realise that the sensation I took to be water running down my arms is in fact blood. I have several slashes to each forearm, running from my wrists halfway to my elbows. I rinse my arms under the tap and the bleeding continues.

I sit on the steps for about twenty minutes with each forearm wrapped in an old towel. The moonlight reveals a recently cut lawn but not a hint of cat.

When I check my arms again they are still oozing blood. This is really pissing me off. I realise I can't go to bed like this. I can't do anything until this is properly sorted out.

I find my Medicare card and walk down the hill to the medical centre, the towels wrapped again around my forearms.

I explain my predicament at the counter and I'm taken straight into the treatment room, where I sit for more than half an hour listening to the waiting room TV through the wall and bleeding patiently. Just after the third time that I'm told,
It won't be long now
, a doctor walks in.

He says,
Hi
. He says his name is Greg. He has profoundly orange hair.

He looks at my arms and I tell him a cat did it to me, and I almost tell him more. Greg, the orange cat, the cat I am sure is named after him, my grandmother's cat, etcetera. But that would only lead me back to the trashing. So I just tell him a cat did it to me.

Some cat
, he says.
What were you doing to it
?

Flea bath.

He fiddles around, washes my arms with a pink solution, seems not to mind about the on-going bleeding. He talks about sutures and says he thinks we can get away without them. He closes some parts with strips and calls the nurse in to give me a dressing with some pressure. He talks about the possibility of an infection and says I should come back tomorrow or the day after to have the wound checked.

And he's looking at me as though he's trying to work something out. As though his mouth might be saying something mundane and procedural, but his brain is off on a tangent. Just when I'm assuming he's feeling the end of a long day and his mind is merely elsewhere he says,
So how are you? Other than this I mean
.

What?

How are you feeling? How are things? Generally
.

Fine.

Good. That's good. So, no other problems then? Nothing else you'd like to discuss while you're here
?

No. I don't think so.

You're not … you're not depressed at all
, he says, as though this can masquerade as casual enquiry, or anything?

Well … no. I'm fine.

But I blew it. I paused and I blew it. If I was fine there would have been no pause. I would have laughed. And now we're both looking at my forearms as though the bandages are hiding wounds far deeper than cat scratches.

Well, look, you really don't seem very happy to me. And I'm a bit concerned
.

What do you mean?

I know what he means.

Well, those wounds. If they weren't caused by a cat, if it was something else, that'd be okay. We could talk about it. Things can be sorted out you know, even when they don't look good
.

It was a cat. It was a cat, really. You want me to bring it in and show it to you? We can do the forensic thing and get the skin out from under its claws. Except I think it's run away. We could have done that if it hadn't run away.

So there's no cat now
?

There's no cat now. Now. But there was a cat earlier this evening.

So these wounds were caused by some kind of temporary cat
?

No, no. A cat. A regular cat. A cat who didn't like the flea bath, and I think he's gone now.

Okay
. He pauses,
I have to ask you something, and I don't want you to be offended, and I want you to answer honestly. Regardless of the cause of these injuries, okay, regardless, can you tell me that if I let you go home now you'll be okay
?

It was a cat.

Fine. It was a cat. And can you give me an undertaking that if you go home now you'll be okay
?

I'll be fine. Fine. I'm a bit worried about the cat though. I hope he hasn't run away.

Yes. Me too. Will you promise me that if you're worried about things, particularly if you're worried you might,
you know, harm yourself, or anything, you have to promise you'll contact me first
.

I promise. That's fine. I promise. I'm really quite okay. Okay? My life might not be at one of its high points at the moment, but I'm fine. I'm getting through this. I'm going quite well. I'm working and renovating, and it's all going fine.

Good. I'm glad. I'm very glad. And I'm glad that we've had this chance to talk. Now, I think it would be good if we could talk again. So what I'd like you to do is to come back and see me, maybe in a couple of days. And we can take a look at those wounds, see how they're going, and we can talk. Okay
?

Well, I'm a bit busy.

Cat scratches can be prone to infection. I really need to look at those wounds again
.

Okay.

Okay.

Thanks.

He smiles, but with some gravity, and he walks out of the treatment room. The nurse reappears and says,
All done in here
? as though she wants me to know she doesn't know what the talk was about. She shows me back out to the counter, where I sign the Medicare form.

Now, did you have to make a follow-up appointment
? the receptionist asks.

No. No. Everything's fine. All sorted out.

The intercom buzzes. She picks up the phone, says,
Yes, yes, okay
, and turns back to me.

Doctor says he would like you to have another appointment
.

Oh, right, I must have misunderstood.

Yes. He said a long appointment in two days time would be fine
.

Oh, good.

Now, he's working during the day on Thursday, eight to five, and the morning's filling up
.

I could be a bit busy on Thursday.

Yes. Let's make it Thursday afternoon. How about four-thirty
?

Four-thirty's fine.

She smiles, and only then lets me go.

At home, Greg (the cat) is waiting on the front steps, as though nothing has happened.

I wake every time I roll over. My arms are burning, throbbing, like a red neon light saying Dickhead in very large letters.

I turn up to work wearing a T-shirt and looking like crap. I have worn my best T-shirt, since this is work after all, but unfortunately my best T-shirt is a partially luminous Felix the Cat, given to me for my last birthday by everyone on the fifteenth floor. They made me put it on as soon as I'd unwrapped it and Hillary said,
It glows in the dark, look
, and she cupped her hands against my chest and looked through the eye hole made by her thumbs. And I had to stand quite still while seven or eight people stood around me, looking through their cupped hands at Felix the Cat and going,
Hey yeah
.

Christ Rick
, Hillary says when she sees me,
what's wrong
?

Nothing, really, nothing.

It doesn't look like nothing. What have you done to yourself
?

Nothing. I have done nothing to myself. I want that to be totally clear. This is not something I've done to myself.

Okay, okay
, she says, backing off almost physically.
I just meant it like Hey, what have you done to yourself, you know? What's happened to you? That kind of question
.

Sorry.

Okay, so we'll try it again. This time you answer, like a really calm, normal person. Hey, Rick, what have you done to yourself
?

And she's making gestures, as though this is a role play.

I gave the cat a flea bath.

She laughs. I can't help but smile myself.

It's a very tough cat.

That's it? Really? A flea bath
?

Yeah. That's all there is to it. Well, the cat did get slightly upset. I have to leave early tomorrow afternoon for the doctor to check things, if that's okay. He said cat scratches get infected easily.

Sure
.

After some more reassurance that from the elbows up I'm no better or worse off than yesterday she lets me go to my office to start work. I can see I now have a new dimension to the trashing story, as it has become complicated by the need to deny any suicidal urges. This is not what I was looking for.

And coupled with badly broken sleep it makes today feel less real than usual. I rest my arms in my lap and my chin on my Felix the Cat T-shirt and I lean back in my chair and sleep fitfully for nearly an hour.

I meet Jeff for coffee. He laughs for quite a long time at the chaos that seems to have swept across me overnight, the random hair, the bandages, and he refers to my wounds as a characteristically pitiful gesture of selfharm.

It was Greg, I tell him. I think he was trying to effect a mercy killing.

And I have to tell him the whole story, including the other Greg and his obvious concerns for me.

The Night of Two Gregs
, he says.
What an evening of distinction. I think only you could have an evening like that
.

Sometimes I surprise even myself. I think I've come up with the gold standard for crap and then, out of the blue, another personal best.

The Bradman of crap
.

The Bradman of crap. I always knew there was something Bradmanesque about me. I just had to find my calling.

So does this mean you're out of tennis tonight
?

Yeah. Yeah, I think it does. I think I'd burst open and bleed and my friend the GP would probably take me for a breaker of promises and put me away.

My arms begin throbbing again in the hot sun on the way back to work. People watch me as I walk through the mall, watch me as though they are watching one of the mall's resident mad people. They stare as I walk past, as though I'm so mad I won't even know, and I want to stop and say to them, Look, I'm not mad, I'm a legal counsel for a big bank you've never heard of. And then I think, why does this make me any better than the mad people? Why should I want to be separated from them because I'm going to an office now and not staying in the mall, finding my place in the shade and staring intently at passers by?

Back in the toilets at work I look in the mirror, and my hair is like the nest of a confused bird. I want to go into the mall again and explain to everyone that, supportive as I am of the resident mad people, I happen not to be one of them. I happen simply to have a temporary combing problem. But this, like all other stories, works its way back. Combing problem, forearm pain, trivial injury while flea bathing, grandmother's cat, grandmother dead, trashed. So I'll just have to live with it.

My hair has never been easy, but usually its disarray has signalled nothing more than slackness, a windy day, a lost comb, a big night. And I can live with all of those. It's only today that I'd like things to be a little different.

Today I would happily settle for anything styleless, anything automatic, probably any hair other than the madness on my head. Any kind of hair at all that has no association with trashing.

I make myself another cup of coffee and talk to people in various countries about the Thai project, with the aim of achieving the delicate balance I have promised Hillary. And I talk to them like a man in a dark suit, and they have no idea that things are less than perfect. On the other hand, this is the first time it has ever occurred to me that my understanding that they are darkly suited during all our conversations is merely an assumption.

I wonder if I should say to them, I'm wearing a Felix the Cat T-shirt, I have hair like the nest of a confused bird and I'm bandaged from my wrists most of the way to my elbows and I was just wondering how you were looking today. And Harvey, the American expat in Singapore, says,
Well it's funny you should ask me that Richard as today I'm wearing only a cowboy hat and a garter and I think I just lost a grapefruit in my rectum
.

But they all talk like the darkest of dark suits, like men who are very serious about work, garments and fruit. And I can match them in this, every step of the way, as we talk with an unnecessary earnestness about the kind of document that will make us all happy.