Low life | 20 August 2011

I open my eyes. I’m on my back looking up at the neat joinery of a wooden roof. Resting between two of the cross trees is a row of handmade longbows. Green daylight filters through bushes and trees outside the window. I’m half in and half out of a sleeping bag on the floor of a cabin, next to an old-fashioned pot-bellied stove. I don’t know how I got here, or exactly where this is. But I’m assuming it can only be Ted’s place, the hideaway in the woods where he practises and teaches survival skills and makes love to all the ladies who continuously parade through his life.
I only know Ted from standing next to him at the bar sometimes, and usually when we speak we keep things on a purposefully superficial level. His preferred topic is always women. He generally arrives fairly late and carefully studies the clientele to see if there are any females with whom he might have a chance of success. He is often surprisingly unfussy in his choice of victim. Ted is in his forties so you’d think he might be past sexual promiscuity by now. Far from it. He’s fanatical about it.

Is he handsome? Well, he’s not got much hair, but his face is alive and forceful and perhaps handsome in a roguish kind of way. Occasionally I look at it when he’s scanning the crowd and see something beyond roguish — something goatish or even Satanic about it. It’s also a symmetrical face, bearing out university research results I saw published last week in a tabloid newspaper that people with symmetrical faces are more selfish than the rest of us. Apparently this is because attractive people are more self-sufficient and therefore have less of an incentive to co-operate or ask for help than us munters. Ted’s self-sufficient all right. He even teaches it. He teaches self-sufficiency and survival skills to pupils from the local progressive secondary school, whom he contemptuously calls ‘Tarquins’. He’s also the only man I know who thinks he can wear a buckskin Stetson with one of its sides turned up and get away with it.

I hear a cough and someone turning over. Tilting my head towards the noise, I see a lump that could be him lying on a sleeping platform up near the roof. ‘Ted?’ I say. ‘Yes, mate,’ he says, immediately wide awake like the old bushman that he is. ‘Where are we and how did we get here?’ I ask him. Ted names a village, says we’re not far from it, but he doesn’t know how we got here. Then he coughs his lungs up. Then he climbs down the ladder, fills the kettle, goes outside and makes water like a staling cow.

When the kettle has boiled we sit outside his cabin on plastic chairs with mugs of sweet tea and try to remember. I recollect that at closing time Ted had sought me out as an accomplice. He’d arranged to go back to ‘these two birds’ place’, casual sex guaranteed, and had asked me if I’d like to make up the numbers. My recollection strikes him with the force of a revelation. ‘That’s right!’ he says. ‘What happened?’ I tell him sadly that he’d led me to an artist’s studio, full of gigantic canvases of seascapes, where a lot of very stuck-up arty types were sitting around sipping red wine. ‘No up-for-it birds?’ he says. Not a single one, I say. It was mostly blokes, terribly anxious that I didn’t damage their canvases.

Then I change the subject. ‘Got any kids, Ted?’ I say. I ask Ted a personal question on average about once a year. Last year I’d asked him if he was ever married. ‘Yes, mate,’ he’d said. ‘For a week. Worst week of my life.’ About kids, he says, ‘Yes, mate. Loads.’

And did he see any of them? ‘I acknowledge only two,’ he says. ‘But there’s loads of others. Loads, mate. Only the other day this bird sent me one of those scan photos of a six-month-old foetus.’ The presumption of this woman scandalises him. ‘I can show you the letter. The silly cow said she had taken the decision to have it. She wouldn’t badger me, she said, but if I wanted to see the child when it was older, and without obligation, she’d be glad for me to do that. She said she loved me. I’d only slept with the tart once.’

‘I think you’re horrible, Ted,’ I say, and he laughs.

Then he’s silent. After a while I turned to look at him. He’s looking away, absorbed in thought, and I notice, from this angle, and in this early morning light, that Ted’s face has that goatish, Satanic look again.