Zigzag Street Read Free Page B

with my half a cup of coffee and my stack of documents. She’s great. And she’s worried about me. She’s confident, she’s smart, and she’s a babe, really. She’s married, she’s my manager. I can’t understand some of my thought processes. They seem as though they’re out to harm me.
    She’s confident, she’s smart and she has a perfectly normal nice-person’s interest in my wellbeing. That’s it. That’s what’s happening.
    I sit staring through a powerful blankness at the calendar that runs down the edge of my 94/95 financial year desk planner, and I tell myself to put the crap of the last six months out of my head, and to get back to the job I’m here for.
    Fin Year 94/95: the first two quarters, a summary
    The Dow climbs towards 4000. The AUD struggles along in the mid-seventies against the USD, which cops a hiding from the Deutschmark. Hillary goes on parental leave. The pressures of work increase exponentially. I do not cope well. Anna Hiller, my residential partner of several years, unilaterally decides that the course of my life will differ markedly from that which I expected. She tells me she’s leaving. One night, like many other nights, we buy takeaway on the way home. We eat it and I can see she’s tense and I ask her what’s wrong and she says that she cares for me deeply and that I should understand that, but she’s leaving. I beg, plead, cry, etcetera. If it’s desperate and seems worth a shot, I do it, all that same evening. But to no avail. She tells me she has a new job in Melbourne, starting in a couple of weeks. She organises the division of property, the termination of our lease. So very soon I live with my parents. I call her in Melbourne, in the end probably far more often than a normal person would. She stops taking my calls. My grandmother, to whom I am veryclose, dies. I can’t stand living with my parents. They eat dinner at five-thirty. When I go out at night they don’t sleep at all. They worry that my failed relationship reflects their own inadequacies. My mother moves into crisis mode. I have to leave before I start wearing bow ties to birthday parties and slicking my hair down and we all know what that means.
    And it’s almost impossible to sleep in a bed alone, when it’s not what you’re used to any more. Any bed now wakes me with emptiness. Leaves me lying there thinking, if you care for me deeply, why did you leave?
    The power station thing. That’s what I’m here for. That’s what I’ve got to get to now. I should call New York.
    I should call New York but it’s Sunday evening in New York.
    I turn on my computer and open Sammy the Snake.

4
    And so passes another day of minimal accomplishment.
    I make limited progress with the power station thing, and I’m secretly hoping someone else will find a reason to trash it before I have to understand it fully. Secretly wishing the US dollar ill.
    When I get home there’s a message on the answering machine, and I can tell just how well I’m coping when I still have to deal with the fleeting hope that it’ll be Anna, telling me she got it wrong.
    But it’s my mother, telling me she drove past today and didn’t notice much renovating, Richard (note the use of the full name for disciplinary reasons), and the garden’s beginning to look like a jungle .
    I give Greg his dinner and while he’s eating I wonder if he’s bored all day, now that he lives with someone who goes out to work. I wonder if I’m being as attentive as I should be, or could be.
    So, telling myself it’s a small step on the road to renovation, I perform a minor task of tidying with him in mind. I clean out my sock drawer. I take all my old socks and I stuff them into one and I knot the end. I find a fat green Nikko and draw a face on the sock, a smiling, simpleton’s face with a lazy snake tongue, and I take it to