Thirty Thousand Bottles of Wine and a Pig Called Helga Read online

  Leroy the cat had attacked one of our neighbour’s grandkids so we knew from the outset that he had behavioural problems, but I’d also taken on Jeff so another family member with issues didn’t daunt me. Although most of the time he was the sweetest cat ever, over the years he did attack us and some of our friends . . . more than we’d care to number. A couple ended up on antibiotics. It was as if something switched in him: his eyes went big, black and vacant and he just ripped into flesh, prompting my idea for a horror film called Claws – but that’s probably been done before.

  In Annandale he quickly became the king of the street. As soon as he moved in with us he set about firmly cementing his position at the very top of the feline ladder.

  One day a neighbour said, ‘Is that Leroy? He broke my cat’s tail and it cost me a bomb to get him fixed up.’

  Another neighbour: ‘Is his name Leroy? I woke up in the middle of the night a few weeks ago and he was sitting at the end of my bed, just staring at me.’

  And yet another: ‘Leroy’s an absolute legend. We love him! He chases my wife around the house whenever she wears her fluffy slippers and we can’t get enough of it. He’s always so gentle and loving.’

  And finally (overheard): ‘Oh look, isn’t that cat cute? She must be very heavily pregnant.’

  Post-renovation, the pristine, sterile and mostly white house straight out of the pages of Home Beautiful where an unpredictably vicious cat lived was not exactly a comfortable environment for any parent visiting with young children. In hindsight, it wasn’t a comfortable environment for anyone, so perhaps that’s why friends stayed away in droves from our Annandale designer home.

  The three-month renovation stretched on to eleven months but it sure gave us something to focus on other than our respective jobs. For Jeff, there were always fixtures and fittings to shop for, new instructions to give to the builders, daily inspections of the work and our fast-dwindling savings to obsess over. I suppose the chaos we were living in also gave us something to bond over – the lack of running water, privacy and security; frustration over the neighbours’ junk filling up our skip bin. Because we had no shower, we were running into work to shower there every weekday. We avoided going home to our one room if we could and, whenever we did, the only thing that dulled the stresses of an over-time, over-budget renovation was eating fast food and drinking too much booze. It was a gruelling (yet exciting!) eleven months, but then, when it was all over, it suddenly felt like we had nothing to look forward to and dammit if we weren’t plain bored. Our feets was gettin’ real itchy.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked Jeff as he got his bike ready one day.

  ‘I can’t just sit around here all day; I need to get out.’

  ‘Get out where? Am I that repulsive?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m going to buy some cushions.’

  ‘More cushions? For where? It’s because I’m fat and ugly and you don’t love me any more, isn’t it? Isn’t it, Jibbuz?’ (Jibbuz is a nickname I’d invented for him; just as ‘Leroy’ changed to Roy to Roybert to Bert to Bertram to Bertie to Bertolucci so ‘Jeff’ went to Jeffy to Jiffy to Jibby to Jibbuz . . .)

  He ignored me, and rightfully so.

  ‘I just need to get out,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Wanna come?’

  Finding more cushions to squash into the house wasn’t exactly my idea of fun. Did cushions really need to appear on every chair? On every bed? On top of bookcases? Any available space on the hardwood floor was already piled with cushions. Fuck me if those things weren’t breeding while we slept and now he wanted to go and buy some more? I let him go out shopping alone and stayed at home to . . . fester.

  We may have had the perfect house and the perfect relationship but my blinding love affair with my job at eBay was on the wane. I had traded my love of the customer and the core idea behind the product for a desire to earn more and take on more responsibility but that ended up making me feel like a soulless sell-out. Some people thrive on becoming a part of the management team, but clearly I wasn’t one of them.

  It ate away at my energy levels and by the time the weekend rolled around I was mentally exhausted and therefore quite content to sit at home in our large empty house fuelling my own new addiction: I just couldn’t stop buying cookbooks. I flicked through most of them only once and rarely cooked from any, but gee they sure did look pretty in colour-coded order on the shelves in our unused dining room. Having a separate dining room had long been a dream of mine as I’d envisaged scores of friends night after night being served amazing morsels from my sparkling white kitchen, with the help of my brand-new KitchenAid mixer, Smeg oven, and five-hundred-dollar Japanese knives. But though Chez Todd was definitely open for business, the bookings were few and far between. I suppose cookbooks became my way of imagining what might have been if I lived in a world where all our friends were available for extravagant dinner parties that lasted until the wee hours of the morning, and I had the energy to host them.

  I had been promoted to a stupidly paid director position at eBay and was being groomed as the 2IC but I wasn’t able to give the company the half of my soul it demanded. Perhaps a part of me had been left behind in the Barossa earlier in the year and was refusing to join the rest of me in my corporate life. It was toward the end of 2010 that I realised something had to give.

  ‘I don’t think I can do this any more,’ I said to Jeff one evening as we cracked open the second bottle of wine.

  ‘So quit,’ he said, deadpan.

  ‘Are you mental? And do what?’

  ‘Whatever you want to do.’

  ‘I’m shit-scared . . .’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What’s the worst thing that could happen?’

  ‘We lose everything . . .’

  ‘Exactly! But as long as we have each other, we’ll be okay. So quit. Go on, I dare you.’

  A few weeks later, I took up his dare. It was a slap to the face my boss hadn’t been expecting. Bless her, she refused to accept my resignation and asked me to give her a few days to think things over. Eventually she came back with a proposal – I could choose how many hours per week I wanted to work, and base myself anywhere.

  Working Tuesday to Thursday meant I found myself with a four-day weekend. It was utter bliss and for the first time in about twenty years I felt I had the time to do something for myself. I spent my time running, writing, reading, walking and preparing amazing meals for Jeff. We adjusted to the fall in income by spending less money on eating out and other frivolous expenses and this, coupled with my newfound clarity of mind, prompted us to stop drinking. At the end of 2010 we simply went cold turkey.

  So if pristine perfection was keeping friends away, then our newfound sobriety with its quiet meals (and no more Cher impressions and the like) and hosts ready for bed by 9:30pm (just like Cheryl!) didn’t help attract many visitors either.

  My mind turned again to that feeling we’d shared in the Barossa. I drooled over South Australian properties on the internet, showing Jeff the most interesting ones. At that point I wasn’t all that serious about giving our whole life away; I suppose I just wanted to be back on that holiday with three of the people I loved most in the world. But maybe lurking in the back of my mind was the gradual realisation that whatever Jeff and I had imagined our quaint little life together would be like, it was starting to throw us a few curveballs. You can’t be a childless gay couple in suburbia and not see your straight friends’ lives heading off in a different direction.

  But with me working part-time and the standing offer to work from anywhere in the country, suddenly the prospect of a tree change didn’t seem so beyond our reach, and our searches for the perfect property intensified. My boss had granted me the ideal stepping-stone between the corporate world and one far, far away.

  Maybe Jeff Needs a Change, Too

  While I kept showing Jeff potential properties to buy for our tree change, I needed to make sure he was as excited
by the prospect as I was. During the renovation, I’d seen a spark in Jeff I’d never seen before. He genuinely loved speaking with the builders, talking them through his ideas and ensuring each came to realisation as accurately as possible. Then after they’d left us to do the finishing touches, day after day Jeff painted every raw plaster wall in the house four times over. If you ask me, painting walls is what they give you as punishment in hell, but Jeff loved transforming the building into our home. He designed the interiors and spent hours scouring the internet and local shops for pieces that would take a run-down terrace and turn it into a thing of beauty. We flew his mum, Millie, out from England to inspect our handiwork and she couldn’t believe the transformation – no one could.

  I imagine it’s like being an actor at the end of a film, after they call ‘it’s a wrap!’ and the party is over and everyone goes on to the next stage of their life. There was an emptiness in the house that distracted Jeff, and to add to his dissatisfaction the company he worked for was becoming more corporate and Jeff increasingly felt like a fish out of water, ill-versed in the new language and the rules of the game.

  After the renovation ended and there was no longer that seemingly endless to-do list, it felt as if our lives had no meaningful purpose, so Jeff did what any reasonable man would do – he transformed into Forrest Gump. If Jeff wasn’t buying yet more cushions, he was off running. (Saturdays were running days; Sundays were for cushion shopping.) His little legs carried him on and on and on. We’d do the Bay Run, a nearby harbourside track, ‘together’ and as I plodded along on my I’m-not-a-runner legs, he’d disappear into the distance, lapping me well before I was even close to my seven-kilometre goal. It was as if Jeff ran on a turbo diesel engine and I had to rely on crappy rechargeable AAs that barely worked. Jeff set himself the challenge of finishing a marathon and, unlike normal people who’d just be content to run forty-two fucking kilometres in whatever time it took, he insisted on getting it done in under three and a half hours. My own goal during that time was to make ten kilometres without vomiting, dying or shitting myself.

  Jeff downloaded a marathon-training program and for three or four months he stuck to it like a fly to a horse’s rump. (More astute observers may be beginning to get the picture that Jeff can be just a little obsessive.) A run of one hour to start with, then another twenty minutes, then two hours and by the end of his training, he could run for three straight hours without stopping. One Saturday he asked me to pick him up in Rose Bay, so I sat at home perusing cookbooks and listening to Cyndi Lauper till his text came through. At the designated pick-up place I’d expected to find a ravaged man – a mere shadow of his former self – but there he was, sipping on a coffee, a sprightly spring in his step.

  ‘Did you not just run, like, thirty-five kilometres or something?’ I asked in amazement.

  ‘Yeah. Why?’

  ‘I just expected you to look exhausted. You look like you’ve been for a stroll around the block.’

  ‘Nah, I really caught the bus here,’ he joked. ‘But I didn’t have enough money to catch one back home.’

  Come the day of his marathon, I was a bundle of nerves; Jeff was calm and excited. I don’t know why, but when I dropped him off on the other side of the Harbour Bridge, I felt like I was dropping my kid to his first day of school, a school where the ritual was for the newbies to be hung and quartered. My stomach was in knots. He’d practically run the distance in training already; he could easily do it again on race day so I had no reason to fear anything. But sending your partner off to push his body to its absolute limit is not exactly something you want to do on a daily basis.

  I drove home and looked at some more recipes. Maybe I’ll make him a special carb-laden dinner tonight to celebrate, I thought. He texted me at the half-way point, roughly on-target for his three and a half hours, so Mum, Dad and I made our way to the Opera House to watch him finish. We were going to have beers by the harbour afterward with our friends Hamish and Mel.

  As the first finishers started to cross the line, the crowd of onlookers cheered them on with genuine awe and excitement. It was very emotional to watch these runners conquer one of the greatest endurance tests of the human body.

  The race clock told me three hours and ten minutes had elapsed, so I knew we still had about twenty minutes to wait for Jeff. But a few minutes later I thought I glimpsed his cap through the crowd. No, surely not. I looked at my fancy Ted Baker watch and double-checked the marathon clock. Three hours and fifteen minutes. And then I saw my very own Forrest Gump come running around the bend.

  But something was wrong. Jeff was running – well, staggering – and his lights were on, but the people inside had moved out about a decade ago. Vandals had smashed the windows and they were now boarded up with cheap pine. His face was blank. I leaned out over the railing and made eye-contact, but there was no recognition. And come on, if anything is going to bring an exhausted person to their senses, it’s this face. I could hear the blaring of the music through his headphones, the crowd noise was swelling once more and I realised then they were cheering for Jeff . . . who looked like he was about to die.

  ‘Come on Jeffy! You can do it! You’re nearly there!’ I screamed at him as loudly as I could. But again, there was simply no sign in his face that he knew who I was, where he was, or what he was supposed to do.

  His legs began to give out and he faltered. John frigging Farnham was blaring over the loud speaker (and I’ve fucking hated ‘You’re the Voice’ ever since). Jeff stumbled and nearly fell. Two officials ran to guide him (it’s against the rules to carry or bear any of a marathon runner’s weight) and then he was out of my sight – I couldn’t see the actual finish line as people beyond me had leaned far out over the barricade to cheer him on.

  I threw the house keys at Mum and Dad and yelled at them, ‘Go home! I’ll call you! Sorry about the beers!’ Do not cry do not cry do not cry, I chanted internally.

  It took me ages to get to the finish line because the crowd was thicker there. When I did, I was just in time to see the paramedics swoop on Jeff, who was now lying motionless on the concrete. My heart sank. This is it, I’m losing him. They placed an oxygen mask on his face but he was still not moving.

  ‘Can I come?’ I asked the driver of the ambulance they’d hurriedly stashed him in.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m his . . . housemate.’ I don’t know why I couldn’t say partner or boyfriend . . . I suppose I didn’t want to look like a pathetically worried lover, though I have to admit I was feeling every inch Jackie Kennedy in the front of that ambulance once the sirens started wailing.

  I turned around to catch a brief glimpse of what was going on behind me. Jeff was finally moving but the paramedic with him in the back of the ambulance looked worried. Jeff was murmuring something but we couldn’t make sense of what he was saying through the oxygen mask. The guy placed ice packs under Jeff’s arms and in his groin and I saw him give Jeff an injection of something. At least he’s still alive, I thought. There’s no need to keep fearing the worst. God, I wish I was wearing big black sunglasses, I couldn’t help thinking as well.

  ‘Is he going to be all right?’ I asked as unworriedly as I could.

  ‘Hard to say,’ came a voice from the back and then it proceeded to ask me Jeff’s name, date of birth, medical history, and so on. For a ‘housemate’ I sure did know a lot about him!

  Jeff mumbled something again. The paramedic in the back still couldn’t understand him and encouraged him to stay quiet and conserve his energy.

  ‘You’re okay,’ he was saying to Jeff. ‘We will be at the hospital soon. You’ve collapsed after the marathon. Remember?’

  But Jeff just kept mumbling and maybe it was because the paramedic and the driver next to me weren’t used to his Brummy accent but to me what he was saying was as clear as Barbra Streisand’s upper register: ‘Tell Toddy I love him.’

  Jeff was alive and that was the main thing. We would deal with any health issues o
nce he’d been given a thorough check-up at the hospital. I just wanted him back inside himself; I wanted to be able to talk to him, tell him I was there with him and everything was going to be okay.

  We got to St Vincent’s Hospital and they asked me to wait while they got him out of the ambulance. Then something very strange happened. When they wheeled him on the gurney toward the emergency doors, he saw me and said with great surprise, ‘Well, what are you doing here?’ and it was clear he was Jeff again.

  ‘What the hell happened?’ I asked him, after all the tests had been completed.

  ‘I was doing fine!’ he insisted. ‘I even remember asking the woman near Circular Quay how far it was to go and she said, “About a kilometre; you’re nearly there!” and I remember seeing the people on the sidelines cheering. But then there’s this little platform thing and I thought I’d finished but then everyone yelled, “No, keep going!” and then I guess my body just gave out thinking it was done, but needing to find more energy to get to the real bloody finish line.

  ‘So how did I look?’ he went on. ‘Stupid?’

  ‘Oh no, it was very dramatic!’ I relayed the whole scene to him, then asked: ‘Did you know what had happened to you?’

  ‘No! I really thought I’d been hit by a car. I thought I was badly injured and maybe I was going to die.’

  ‘You couldn’t just finish like a normal person, could you? You had to make me run after you, bawling my eyes out, screaming out your name, chasing the ambulance down the Opera House forecourt waving my black lace hanky . . .’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said dismissively. ‘But what was my time?’