The Full Ridiculous. Mark Lamprell

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.

5

      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 make it to the locker room because she finds Ursula O’Brien sitting on the worn sandstone steps of the Year 9 home room with her arms drawn around her legs and her face buried in her knees.

      Rosie likes a drama as much as any fourteen-year-old girl so she sits next to Ursula and asks what’s wrong.

      ‘Nothing,’ replies Ursula which, of course, heightens Rosie’s interest.

      ‘Tell me.’

      ‘She’s such a bitch!’

      ‘Who?’

      And out, over an obstacle course of sniffles and sobs, tumbles the story.

      When Ursula saw Maddie Peacock this morning, she was on her way to put her name down for the French tour but Maddie told Ursula not to bother because after the meeting the other night when Rosie O’Dell asked if Ursula could come, Eva Pessites’ mother told Miss Crowden Clark that if Ursula came then Eva would not be going on the tour. Mrs Pessites considers Ursula not the type of girl she wants her daughter to be associating with.

      Until recently, Ursula and Eva were best friends. A murky incident involving a silver photo frame missing from Mrs Pessites’ gift shop led to the demise of the relationship. Ursula protested her innocence and everyone except Mrs Pessites suspected Eva Pessites was the real culprit but they were all too intimidated by Eva to say anything.

      Eva Pessites looks like a beautiful doll. Tumbling blonde ringlets frame her translucent face; spectacularly long (surgically transplanted?) dark lashes frame languid green eyes; bee-stung lips, grown suspiciously plumper since Year 7, frame gleaming tombstones of teeth. Some say Eva’s smile can be seen from space.

      The Pessites fortune comes from earth-moving equipment, not Mrs Pessites’ gift shop, which she runs for fun. The Pessites donate large sums to Boomerang. The weekly assembly is held in the Pessites Auditorium. Eva Pessites understands the power she holds and up until today no one has questioned it. Not out loud anyway.

      Filled with indignation, Rosie confronts Eva in the locker room. She knows better than to go straight for the jugular so she tells Eva how gorgeous her new watch is and adds, like it’s an afterthought, in a voice pitched slightly too high, ‘How come your mum barred Ursula from the French tour?’

      Eva pauses, her eyes narrow. Other girls stop to look at her. She turns back to her locker and takes her time closing it. For a while it seems she has cut Rosie dead, leaving her question adrift in the ether. But Eva is enraged. She flicks a smile at Rosie, ‘How the fuck would I know?’ she says breezily. ‘I’m not my fucking mother, am I?’

      Her admiring audience titters and Eva turns and heads out of the locker room.

      Rosie calls after her, ‘But you could have stopped her.’

      Eva stops dead and looks at Rosie like she’s inspecting a dog turd. ‘So? Who cares?

      ‘I do.’

      ‘You should mind your own business.’

      ‘It is my business.’

      ‘Is not.’

      ‘It is if my friend can’t come on the tour.’

      ‘Ursula O’Brien is not your friend.

      ‘Is too.’

      ‘She hates you.’

      ‘No, she hates you, Eva, but that’s no reason for her not to come on the tour. Not until your mother stuck her big nose in it.’

      Eva is a second-generation Albanian and, although Rosie cannot know this, her mother had a prominent nose before surgery corrected it. Thinking on her feet, Eva decides to misinterpret Rosie’s comment as a racist jibe about proboscisly endowed Albanians and go for the outraged immigrant angle. She counters that Rosie is a ‘skanky skip’ (skip meaning someone who is several generations Australian). What Rosie’s Irish Catholic and Lithuanian Jewish grandparents would make of all this, no one can say but Rosie is so infuriated by the sudden disintegration of the argument that her synapses explode. ‘Piss off, you dumb bitch!’ she blurts uninventively.

      ‘Racist slut!’ Eva proclaims as she glides away in triumph.

      Rosie, slipping further behind in the originality stakes, fires a final projectile