‘Look, I was thinking about something that would really suck,’ Dad says.
‘Breastfeeding babies really suck. Was that what you were thinking about?’
‘What would you say about a visit to Perth next month?’
‘At what point between me being born and you moving to Perth did you forget everything about me?’ I say, and hang up.
Okay, I don’t hang up. I want to hang up. However, hearing Dad’s breath on the line, with its echo of desperate cheeriness, I can’t quite bring myself to do it. But I don’t say anything for a really long time and it’s a very uncomfortable silence.
Instead I wait for Dad to say something else. He doesn’t say anything. He’s still there, though. There, in Perth. Not here in our microscopic unit, where the shelf above the fridge holds his half-empty Johnnie Walker bottle even though he’s never lived here, and his Woody Allen movies are lined up in their anniversary box set on the bookshelf.
The box set makes me think of something.
‘Hey, Dad?’
‘No, Will?’
‘Remember that movie you made me watch the year before last, the one about the guy who finds out his whole life is a hoax?’
‘I forget it in vivid detail.’
‘Do you know any movies that work the other way around?’
The doorbell rings. Mum squeezes past me to grab her purse from the kitchen bench. Her bathrobe is off, revealing a green dress I’ve never seen before, which she’s matched with a pair of extremely high platforms. I put a hand to my mouth in a performance of acute surprise. She squeezes back past me, blowing silent kisses in my direction, then pulls the front door closed behind her.
‘Movies that work the other way around? I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘A movie where it’s not the world that’s the hoax, it’s the person who’s the hoax.’
‘A movie about a person who isn’t real?’
‘That’s it.’
Dad breathes into the phone. ‘What about Victor/ Victoria? Julie Andrews pretends to be a man to land a gig as a female impersonator.’
He isn’t getting it. ‘I’m talking about films with characters that don’t actually exist.’
‘I can’t think of any films, but remember Mr Snuffleupagus from Sesame Street?
I snort. ‘Is that all you’ve got?’
Dad pauses. ‘Have I ever told you about Nat Tate?’
‘I don’t think so.’
At the other end of the line I hear a fridge door open and the rattle of an ice tray. ‘Nat Tate was an American abstract expressionist who committed suicide by jumping off the Staten Island Ferry,’ says Dad. ‘Only he wasn’t. And he didn’t.’
‘Huh?’
Ice hits the bottom of a glass. ‘He was pure fiction.’ The fake cheeriness is gone; he’s genuinely happy now he’s managed to shift the conversation from film to visual art. ‘Nat Tate never actually existed. David Bowie – you know, who sang Space Oddity?’
‘The “Ground Control to Major Tom” song that was on your fortieth birthday party playlist?’
‘That’s the one. Bowie and a British author called William Boyd made Tate up. They published his biography in the late nineties and fooled the New York art world into believing he was an actual artist. They had quotes from famous people who claimed to have met him, reproductions of his surviving paintings, even photographs of him and his family.’
‘Where did they get all that stuff?’
I hear the sound of a drink being poured. ‘Boyd did the paintings – they were pretty terrible – and he used anonymous photos he’d found in junk shops for the family photos. He and Bowie asked famous people they were friends with to make up quotes about him, too.’
‘Which meant telling them about the hoax, I suppose?’
‘Exactly. It was their big mistake. They let a few too many people, including a journalist friend of theirs, in on the game. The journalist published a scoop about the truth behind Nat Tate just a week after the biography came out.’ Ice clinks against the glass again. ‘Game over.’ Dad’s lips make a smacking sound. ‘Shame, really. They could have kept the hoax going for a lot longer if they’d kept it to themselves.’
‘The moral of the story, then,’ I say slowly, ‘is to never trust a fine-arts journalist. Got it.’
‘Ha, ha. So what do you say, kiddo?’ says Dad. ‘You, me, the Swan River? I could book your flight right now.’
‘I’m busy that weekend.’
‘But we haven’t even talked dates yet!’
‘I’m busy every weekend this year. Mum’s just made dinner. Gotta go.’
At lunchtime on Monday I discover, to my great misfortune, that Principal Croon is back from Japan. I’m tossing an apple core into the nearest bin as she rounds a corner. Unfortunately, I miss.
She stops in front of me.
Here’s the thing about our principal: you know she’s the devil incarnate, but when you’re taking in her silk shirt and sheer stockings and breathing in her French perfume, you get sucked into an alternate universe where all you want to do is please her.
‘Wilhelmina Everhart.’
‘Oh! I didn’t see you there. How’s it going, Principal Croon?’ I say, glancing between the apple core splattered on the floor and her impeccable teeth.
She flashes me a blinding smile. ‘The bins are strategically placed to ensure we can find one when we need one,’ she says, holding my gaze with the steel of a thousand girders. ‘We therefore have no excuse for tossing rubbish up and down the corridor, do we?’
I blink. Like the synchronised proclamations of a Greek chorus, Croon’s words are always a kind of hypnosis.
She taps her foot.
‘No, of course not.’ I pick up the apple core.
‘I had a conversation with Miss Fowler about you recently.’
‘You did?’
‘We need to talk about your recent English marks. Say Wednesday next week? Come to my office at lunchtime.’ She dazzles me with her smile again and moves away down the corridor.
The second lot of crap descends just before the pre-lunch announcements finish. That’s when I become aware of a
