niece Mel, who is thirteen years older than Rosie, says she’s the only child she has ever seen advance on an advancing adult; as you stride towards the three-year-old with your finger raised, she strides towards you, outraged that you would address her in such an impertinent manner. Once, when she was four, you smacked her for trying to cut off the cat’s tail and she followed you around for days showing you the red mark on her leg long after it had faded, repeating, ‘Look. Look what you done.’
While Miss Crowden Clark meanders into a monologue on the French roots of English words, you look around the restless prison of her audience hoping that someone has remembered to bring their poison darts. Rosie puts her hand up.
‘Yes, Rosie?’
‘Um, Miss, Ursula O’Brien hasn’t put her name down or anything but she was wondering if it’s too late to come.’
Later, in the car on the way home, you ask Rosie if this was a genuine question or a clever ploy to end Miss Crowden Clark’s ramblings. She rolls her adolescent eyes and looks out the window. You remember Wendy’s edict that driving is one of the few times you can dialogue with teenagers because they’re stuck in the car with you so you make a few stabs at conversation before Rosie snaps the radio on. Juan shrugs and grins at you in the rear-vision mirror and you doof-doof home.
And that’s it. An unremarkable evening appears to end uneventfully. Only it doesn’t. The evening may have ended but events have just begun. Something is happening. Rosie’s question to Miss Crowden Clark is setting off a chain reaction that will devastate you all.
At four in the morning of the day you are run down by Frannie Prager’s blue Toyota, the phone rings and you wake up thinking someone is dead but it’s your publisher calling from London. He’s just touched base with some key foreign publishers and is a little disturbed by the lack of interest in The Decline of Australian Cinema.
‘Last year they would have gobbled it up, darling.’ Your publisher, Maxx with a double x, is not gay but he calls you darling.
You try to sound light-hearted and say that the decline in Australian cinema has probably triggered a decline of interest in Australian cinema, which would account for a decline of interest in the decline of Australian cinema. Maxx chortles and you tell him not to panic yet and he goes off to a banquet.
You hang up and panic.
Maxx has paid you a small advance for the book and you’re counting on the next payment which is due on delivery in three weeks. Maxx has called to warn you that unless he makes some international sales he cannot pay the next instalment. He doesn’t actually say this, of course; he doesn’t need to because this is the subtext of your exchange. International sales are crucial to the viability of this book. And if he can’t sell this book, you can kiss the rest of the anthology goodbye. You know this and Maxx knows you know.
You pace around the house and boil water for coffee but you make green tea because it’s better for your blood pressure. You sip tea as the sun rises over the Sullivans’ house across the road and think fuuuck. You look around the house for something useful to do—work? laundry? dishwasher?—but you soon spiral into a financial funk. You’re already skating on papery ice; Wendy has mooted the idea of a third mortgage. Is such a thing even possible? you wonder. It’s your own stupid fault but you were going insane at the paper, writing articles designed to show off your intellectual prowess rather than illuminate the films you were supposed to be reviewing.
It all came to a head last Easter when a young director confronted you during a family dinner at a local Chinese restaurant.
Sobbing with rage and hatred, this guy accuses you of ruining his career and his life for the sake of a few laughs at his expense. As his embarrassed friends drag him outside, he spews this invective of abuse and you pretend you think it’s funny.
Only you don’t think it’s funny.
You go home and spend the rest of the long weekend in bed with a bottle of vodka and eleven packets of kettle-fried potato chips. Wendy sits on the bed and says, ‘What are you going to do?’ You smash your antique bedside lamp into the wall and Wendy’s voice turns icy. ‘What else are you going to do?’
Over the next few days you formulate the idea of a book. A whole anthology of books. They will be your redemption, a pathway out of the cynicism. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned and for my penance I will write a beautiful anthology, a truly illuminating anthology, a celebration of the splendid cinematic blah blah blah blah. Fuck that. It’s got to be honest. It’s got to confront the way culture has been sidelined across the globe while we all cheer madly for economic prosperity. Fuck that. It’s got to be readable. Fuck that. You’ve done readable and look where that got you.
In the end, you pitch Maxx a series of coffee-table books with lots of glossy pictures. The first will contain a penetrating analysis of why Australian movie stars are prospering overseas while Australian movies are not. The cherry on the cake, the thing that tips Maxx into the yes camp, is a series of candid photographs of various uber-celebrities in real-life situations. Uber-celebrities in real-life situations will sell just about anything.
Well, not anything apparently. Fuuuck.
Wendy’s alarm goes and you hear her making the first in a series of expeditions to wake the kids. Soon the plumbing is thumping and bumping and the house crackles with cereal and toast and searches for missing bits of school uniform so you leave the dawn fretfulness in a dark corner to be worried over later.
During the night your bitzer dog, Egg, has dragged Wendy’s cashmere coat off the sofa and made a nest out of it. Wendy frantically tries to brush away the magnetic hairs as Rosie complains that she has to leave now; she’s got an early morning tutorial. Wendy normally drops the kids at school on her way to work but you can see she’s getting frazzled so you pile Rosie and Declan into your car. (Juan remains asleep downstairs and will not emerge until midday. He’s having a ‘break’ from school and has applied for a job in a barbecue chicken shop.)
Declan, hunched in the back seat, puts a cigarette to his lips and produces a lighter. You shoot him a look via the rear-vision mirror but you don’t say anything because you don’t have the heart for a fight. He pauses defiantly and then puts the cigarette away. Rosie, mercifully, is in a good mood and hums away to her hip-hop with her headphones on. It occurs to you that not so long ago the car would have been filled with excited chatter anticipating the day’s events. You yearn for the time when Declan’s idea of a high was batting cricket balls to you in the backyard and Rosie could think of nothing more thrilling than somersaulting off your shoulders into the swimming pool. You shake your head and smile at the desperation of your nostalgia. Declan catches you doing this and decides you are laughing at him.
‘What?’ he asks.
You drop Declan at Mount Karver first, then Rosie at Boomerang. It’s still early which means you’ll make it home before the traffic peaks. You can go jogging before you settle down to the day’s writing. You decide not to worry about the money today. The day is a blank canvas. You are a free man.
These are the events as best you can reconstruct them: as Frannie Prager is sliding the key into the ignition of her blue Toyota, you are tightening the laces on your decrepit joggers and Rosie is ducking out of her maths tutorial because she has left her calculator in her locker. She doesn’t
