Sample Dialogue 1
I’m standing at the checkout in a Collingwood supermarket. Before she begins to scan my groceries, the woman serving me, a squat, bell-shaped granny, each lens of her spectacles the size and thickness of a master detective’s magnifying glass, pauses, tilts her head to the ceiling, and says:
‘Can you hear that?’
I can hear nothing, aside from trolleys squeaking, scanners beeping and Jono Coleman on Gold FM daring to drag out the old joke about sucking a Fisherman’s Friend.
‘What?’ I say. ‘What am I listening for?’
‘Thump thump thump. You can’t hear that?’
‘No.’
I can’t, and neither can the equally confused person behind me in the queue.
‘Thump thump thump?’ she offers again.
‘I can’t hear it.’ She either has super hearing or it’s happening in her mind.
‘Oh well,’ she sighs, and begins wearily to process my shopping. ‘I guess it must be my big ol’ heart.’
Not big enough to pack my shopping for me, I notice, and start loading up the bags myself. At this point, a young woman in the full Muslim gear leans in and asks her if they’ve got any breadcrumbs. The granny rasps out the required instructions, and the woman glides off … in the opposite direction.
‘Hey, love! It’s down there!’ barks the granny, and the burqa rotates and alters its trajectory. Then the granny turns to me and says, ‘I hate it when they pretend they can’t understand what we’re saying.’
There’s that big ol’ heart again.
***
I’m angled back in one of the many chairs at the Blood Bank, having this quarter’s pint of iron-heavy blood siphoned from my body by that small machine that resembles a kitchen scales doing the Mashed Potato. The woman overseeing this all-too mundane business looks like she’d rather be anywhere else. She’s an older broad and tough as nails. I think she might be the department supervisor. She casts a continual disapproving gaze around the room, and occasionally tells off one of the other nurses for some minor procedural infraction. She nods occasionally but is clearly not listening to any of my conversational banalities.
‘Is 2009 the Year of the Blood Donor?’ I ask, indicating a large poster across the room.
‘Apparently,’ she yawns, scanning the room for further misbehaviour.
‘So, what was it last year?’ I ask, and for the first time she looks me in the face, and almost smiles. ‘I don’t know,’ she says with something approaching amusement. But then her eyes narrow and drill me with newly aroused suspicion. ‘Oh, nice pick-up line,’ she says, nodding her head like she's got my number.
But I hadn’t. I didn’t. I wouldn’t. Not here.
‘Damian!’ she shouts. ‘Can you take over this one?’
***
I’m a scarf-wearer. I understand that, to many people, this marks me as a twat. No matter; you gots to look after ‘the pipes’ in my line of work (even when there is none).
This is the fifth time I’ve been back to the café where I left my favourite scarf, just before Christmas. The place had been shut for six weeks, but when I’d called them they’d said yes, we found that one, come in and collect it anytime. But upon arrival the first time, I’d been informed by one of the waitresses, an intimidating Goth in shitkicking boots, that she’d taken it home. ‘You want that back?’ she’d said. ‘Really?’
It had been a present, but I didn’t want to say that, as I knew it would have attracted one of her patented sneers. ‘Do you mind?’ I’d said.
‘All right,’ she’d replied, annoyed. ‘All right. Christ.’
But three more visits over three more weeks and she still hadn’t brought it in. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get it,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Christ.’
But this time, she says she’s got it out the back. ‘Don’t panic,’ she says, and then she leans closer and adds, ‘I’d given it to my dad.’ On this, she turns and stomps off, leaving an ‘I hope you’re happy’ vibe hanging in the air. Seconds later she returns and dumps it on the table, saying, ‘It wouldn’t have cost you anything, I’m guessing,’ before managing an even haughtier exit than before. The people on the next table have all stopped mid-mouthful and are staring at me with vague distaste. Outside, it’s forty degrees. Why all the fuss about a scarf?
***
I’m at another café, this one staffed by a man whose musical Italian accent and flamboyant ice-cream vendor’s moustache are so cartoonish, I’ve started thinking of him as ‘Mario Gelato’. The first few times I’d eaten here, he’d addressed me as ‘Andrew’, and it was weeks before I realised that he thought I was Andrew Denton.
‘Same as usual, Andrew?’ he’d say, until, one day, this stopped. One of his co-workers had disabused him of my Dentonship, but rather than clearing the air, this somehow seemed to piss him off. He’d slam my lunch down in front of me, like I’d been deliberately misleading him all these weeks. You bastard, he seemed to be saying, why can’t you be who I thought you were?
Today I’ve ordered a pie and salad. First he brings me a plate with just the salad, and a space for the still-being-warmed-up pie. ‘I thought you might want to nibble on the salad while you wait,’ he says.
It’s some kind of gesture of reconciliation, I see that, and I thank him. Still, I’d rather wait for the pie. I’m not someone who likes to eat a plate of food on the instalment plan. But when he returns, balancing the oven-fresh pastry on a proffered fish slice, he immediately notices that his generosity has not been acted upon.
‘You haven’t started on the salad,’ he says, his eyes aflame with offence. ‘I might as well have not bothered.’
At this moment, I wish I were Andrew Denton. At least then I could sit him down, place a gentle hand on his knee, and say, ‘Tell me about your relationship with your father.’
***
I’m buying some padded envelopes at the post office. Three of them. And when the woman behind the counter sees this, she says ‘Do you buy a lot of these?’
‘Yeah, I guess I do,’ I respond.
‘Do you realise that if you buy a pack of a hundred, you get ten per cent off?’
‘Really?’
Sure, that’s a good deal, but a hundred? It’d take me ten years to get through a hundred padded envelopes. When I’d said yes to ‘Do you buy a lot of these?’, I’d meant that I probably use between five and ten a year, not that I was running a mail-order company out of my house.
‘So, it’s a hundred then?’ she says, looking poised to summon a forklift.
‘No, look, I don’t need that many. I’ll just take these three.’
‘Fine,’ she says, with out-of-nowhere fury. ‘I was only trying to save you some money!’ Everyone in the queue is looking at the ground.
‘I know,’ I say, gathering my stuff and turning to leave. ‘Have a nice day,’ I offer, with little conviction.
‘Yeah, right,’ she says. ‘Like you care.’
I think a pattern is starting to emerge.
***
I’m sitting in a friend’s second-storey flat, waiting for the deliverymen to arrive with her new kitset bookshelves. She’s at work and I’m here to let them in. The buzzer sounds and I bound down the stairs like a goose.
‘How many flights up are you, mate?’ says the beefy first one, stripping the pink copy from his clipboard. The weedier second one is wearing mirrored Shane Warne wraparounds and stares at me like he doesn’t care for anyone who needs this many bookshelves.
‘Second floor,’ I reply, experiencing, for the first time, the guilt of the person who lives above the ground and has heavy things delivered.
‘Well, we don’t go any higher than three flights.’
No problem there. The flat is, as far as I can see, only two flights up.
‘But what happens if it’s an old lady and she lives on the fourth floor?’
‘Not our responsibility.’
‘So, do you tell people that, at the shop?’ I realise it's the first I've heard of such a policy.
‘Wouldn’t know, mate. Not from there. We’re just an agent for deliveries. Doesn’t matter who it is, there’s a three-flight rule.’
I look across the street and observe that, even though he claims not to be from the shop, his delivery van is covered in their signage.
‘But the truck has… Do you have to change the signs on the truck for every deliv…?’
They both look ready to punch me. I change tack.
‘Come on in, then.’
The stairs rake up to a mid-point between the ground and first floors, then they angle back in the other direction, zigzag style. You know, like the stairs in every single block of flats in the world. But, as the deliverymen, each lugging a pair of flat-packs, reach the between-floor midpoint, the first one says, ‘That’s one.’
‘One what?’ I say.
‘One flight.’
As we hit the first floor landing: ‘That’s two,’ and then, at the halfway turn, between the first and second floors: ‘That’s three. Sorry, mate, this is as far as we go.’ The second one starts stacking the bookshelf components against the stairs, just three metres down from my friend’s front door.
‘Hang on,’ I say. ‘This isn’t three floors, it’s only one and a half. We’re almost there!’
‘Not floors, mate,’ he replies. ‘Flights. That’s three flights.’
‘No, it’s not. It’s one and a half flights.’
‘No, it’s three.’
‘So you’re saying that each time we zigzag, that’s a new flight?’
‘Exactly.’
‘So, according to you, the first floor is two flights up?’
‘Not according to me, mate. That’s just how it is.’
‘So, a forty-storey building has eighty flights of stairs?’
‘That’s it.’
‘But if you said you’d run up eighty flights of stairs, most people would assume you’d gone to the eightieth floor, not the fortieth.’
‘Then most people would be wrong.’
End of discussion. They turn back, leaving the heavy boxes of shelf stranded between floors. I trot down after them, still perplexed.
‘But hang on, if what you’re saying is correct, why does your company have a three-flight policy?’
‘How do you mean?’ They’re speeding up, well sick of this line of inquiry.
‘Given that three flights is always going to leave you stuck between floors? Wouldn’t either a two- or four-flight policy make more sense?’
At this he pulls up, determined to put a full stop to the whole affair.
‘Mate, will you just drop it!’
They buzz themselves out and I climb back up to the abandoned boxes. And, as I stagger up the remaining ‘flight’, buckling beneath the unassembled shelves, I resolve to spend more time saying less.
It’s probably best for everybody.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). He is currently directing new episodes of ABCTV's ‘The Librarians’.
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