Perilous Adventures
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Jeremy

Carly Nugent
 

He doesn’t do that thing with his tail anymore. That wallop that floods the patio and drowns the geraniums. He hasn’t walloped for weeks. He just lies there, with his eyes in the algae, staring.

I’ve been at the window since nine o’clock. I took a break at lunchtime for a grilled cheese sandwich, and I went to the bathroom a couple of times. But otherwise I’ve been here, with the coffeepot and a pack of cigarettes. I haven’t spent a lot of time looking at the backyard from this angle. There’s something nice about the way the white flowers look beside the stairs, and the pool seems bigger, somehow, from up here. I can see into Phil and Kathy’s yard, too. They’ve got a swing-set. I never noticed that before.

I bought Jeremy a whole pig yesterday, with the cheque they sent me. But he just came up and stared at it, then submerged himself. He looks too green. Maybe it’s the water.

I had enough money left to fill the fridge. Ham, tomatoes, baguettes, a few bottles of Sauvignon Blanc, some fancy soft cheeses, sausages, sundried tomatoes, asparagus, chocolate, ice cream. Then this afternoon Grant came over to tell me he wasn’t going to be here for dinner.

“We have to break up,” he said, “I’m not happy.”

I asked him if he wanted any soft cheese. He said he was sorry, but he had to go. It surprised me a little bit. I thought he really liked soft cheese. We’d been together for a year, and I never really wondered whether we were happy or not. I guess we weren’t.

Kathy said to me on the street today, in that serious voice she has, “Marilyn. You’ve got to get rid of that crocodile. He’s obviously not happy.” I said how could she tell if Jeremy was happy or not, and she said, “because he belongs in the wild.” I said he’d never lived in the wild as an adult, and he wouldn’t know what to do. She just said it again: “You’ve got to get rid of him”. I didn’t know what else to say, so I went to the grocery store. The fridge was stocked up, but I had nothing else to do, and I can spend a lot of time going up and down the aisles. I didn’t want to buy anything else that would go bad, so I got shoe polish and dog toys. I think Jeremy might like the dog toys, but I don’t know what I’m going to do with the shoe polish. I might go out tomorrow and buy some shoes that need polishing.

I think my parents thought if they named me Marilyn I would be famous. Like Marilyn Monroe. And if I was famous I would have lots of money, and friends, and a fulfilling career, and so on. And then I would be happy. That’s all they wanted, really. For me to be happy. Because they’re not. I don’t know why. Maybe they shouldn’t have married each other. Maybe they didn’t have the careers they wanted. Maybe they wished they had taken more risks, smoked more pot, travelled to more countries, slept with more people. Before they had me. But they didn’t, and so they weren’t happy, and that became my responsibility. I don’t think it’s fair, really. Because I’m not Marilyn Monroe, or anything like her.

They’re still not happy, and I’m sorry about that. They were sort of content for a while, when the book first came out. I took them out for dinner a couple of times, and they smiled and looked proud, and Mum wore those pearls from the top drawer of her bureau. But it didn’t last.

They wanted to know what I was going to do next. How I was going to keep being happy. I said I didn’t know. I said I might get a job in a restaurant. Mum didn’t wear her pearls again after that.

*

Grant came over this morning for a cup of coffee. He wanted to show me a letter from his new girlfriend. He’s never met her. She’s writing to him from prison.

Hey honey, it said, like in the movies. Hey honey, I’m picturing your face. The way you write makes me think you’ve got a really nice face. Soft and young. I like that. Grant doesn’t have a soft face at all. It’s quite strong at the chin, and it’s usually covered in sharp stubble.

I’m thinking of you a lot. After all the things I’ve done, after all the things I’ve been through, hearing your voice in your letters is like a breath of fresh air. It’s really helping me get through the days. It’s hard for me to talk about this, but I want to be honest with you. I really value our relationship, honey, and I want you to know what I’ve done. So I’m going to tell you. I killed someone.

That was all it said, except it was signed ‘Alice’. Maybe her parents wanted her to turn out childlike and curious, like Alice in Wonderland. Only it backfired, and she turned out more like Alice Through the Looking Glass. Warped, and a little frightening. I guess it’s hard to predict what a name will do.

“Did you read it?” Grant was leaning across the table, staring at me while I held the letter. “Did you read the last part?”

I nodded.

He leaned back, with a sort of satisfied I-told-you-so smile on his face. I wasn’t sure what he was trying to tell me. “I’m in love,” he said. “She makes me so happy.”

*

I called Jeremy Jeremy because I don’t know anybody else with that name. I wanted him to grow up to be whatever he was going to be. Maybe I thought that would make him happy. Maybe I shouldn’t have given him a name at all. Maybe I shouldn’t have picked him out of the estuary that night, when Audrey and her friends were drunk and shooting at crocs with their rifles.

My parents named my sister Audrey because they thought it would make her into a movie star. She works at a slaughterhouse in Darwin. She’s in charge of checking the cow guts for liver fluke. She likes it, I think.

A film crew came by once a couple of years ago to make a documentary about Jeremy. It was pretty weird, they said, to keep a crocodile as a pet. They wanted to know what I fed him, and what he did all day, and if he was happy. I said he mostly ate pigs and sat in the water. I said it was hard to tell if a crocodile is happy or not. They nodded seriously. One of the cameramen said that was the nature of reptiles.

*

When I was twenty-five I wrote a book that sold so well I probably won’t have to work again, if I don’t want to. It was called Forty-Two Things You Need to Be Happy. It was just a list, really, of things that made me feel good at the time. Sex, friends, exercise, wine, soft cheeses. I wrote it because somebody in my philosophy class told me it was impossible to write a book about happiness. He said he would give me fifty bucks if I did it. He never gave me the money; he said my book wasn’t really about happiness, but about ‘momentary sensual pleasures’. It didn’t matter, because a lot of other people were happy to pay money for that book. The publishers gave it a nice hardcover with red embossed letters for the title, and a picture of a baby and a bottle of wine underneath. One magazine said it was ‘the most refreshing self-help book of the twenty-first century’. Another called it ‘an intelligent postmodern look at the simple joys of humanity’.

I think a lot of people bought that book because they thought it would make them happy. I’m sorry about that.

It turns out Grant’s new girlfriend is in gaol for killing her baby. She wrote him another letter and told him, in detail (because I want to be really honest with you, honey) about how she shook her newborn to death because it wouldn’t stop crying, and about how she had been so tired, and afraid, and confused. The doctors said she had been suffering from post-natal depression, but she had to go to gaol anyway, for a little while.

Grant seemed disappointed.

“I thought she’d killed someone in a bank robbery or something,” he said. He couldn’t understand, he said, how someone could be so unhappy about their baby that they would kill it.

I asked him if he wanted to stay for dinner, but he had to go to a yoga class.

“If I don’t go tonight I won’t feel right all week,” he said. So I ate some risotto and some strawberry ice cream, and went on the computer for a while.

I got a vet to come and see Jeremy, but they couldn’t find anything wrong with him.

“Do you think he wants to go back to the estuary?” I asked.

The vet, whose name was George (though he looked more like a Trevor), shook his head. “It’s hard to tell with crocodiles,” George said, “but I don’t think he really minds.”

Audrey came over with two lamb carcasses, and Jeremy blew some bubbles up at them.

Audrey shrugged. “He’s just in a mood,” she said. She had some blood under her fingernails.

I shook my head. “It’s more than a mood,” I said. “He doesn’t wallop anymore.”

“Who knows with crocodiles,” she said. “What have you got to eat?”

We cooked a stir-fry, drank a bottle of wine on the balcony, and talked about Mum and Dad. Jeremy lay just below the algae the whole time. He might have been listening, but I wasn’t sure.

*

One of the girls at the supermarket used to go to my high school. Her name is Rose, like the flower. She’s not very pretty, but she smells nice. She packs the groceries really slow and neat, and she smiles at the bag when she’s finished.

“There you go, Marilyn,” she says, “have a nice day.” She asks me about Jeremy, too. She gets this strange look when she talks about him, sort of mysterious and far away. Maybe she’s frightened of him, but he’s harmless. You wouldn’t think it, since he’s seven feet long and his skin is all craggy and jagged like a dinosaur, but he would never hurt anyone.

Not unless he had a really good reason.

*

Grant got another letter from Alice. She’s getting out of prison on Friday. He came over all red faced and stressed. I don’t think he made it to yoga this week.

“You’ve got to help me,” he said.

“I thought you loved her.”

“I made a mistake.”

“Alright,” I said, “but you have to play cards with me tonight.”

We played poker with Monopoly money and drank gin and tonics until midnight, and then Grant went home.

I was a little drunk, and squeezed a squeaky rubber dog bone in Jeremy’s face for half an hour trying to get him to play. He just stared at me like I didn’t get it at all.

*

Phil and Kathy invited me over for a dinner party. They like to introduce me to their friends as ‘the woman who wrote that book about happiness’.

Their friends look at me and say, “Oh, yes, I read that,” and smile sort of tightly.

I want to tell them I’m sorry, but I don’t want to bring down the mood.

We have salmon bruschetta for starters, and then lamb with mint and sweet potatoes. Phil and Kathy are both teachers, and all their friends are busy people. Jane runs an import business and has two children. She’s named after Jane Austen. Mark is a lawyer who works in a soup kitchen in his spare time. He was named after a book of the Bible. Elizabeth is a full time personal trainer and part time painter. She’s supposed to be the queen.

At Phil and Kathy’s dinner parties everybody always talks about the things they do. They ask me what I’m doing. I always tell them I’m working on a new book. I don’t want to disappoint them. I don’t want to tell them I’m thinking about getting a job in a restaurant, or the supermarket. When they ask me what the new book is about I say, “satisfaction”.

That’s usually enough.

Everybody nods and turns to the next person at the table to ask what they’re doing.

Phil and Kathy have a little boy. His name is Arthur, after a French poet that Kathy likes the sound of. While we were eating the lamb he came out of his room quietly, in his pyjamas, for Kathy to help him blow his nose. When he blew his snot into the tissue in her hand she looked at him with the same kind of concentration Rose uses to pack groceries. Then she gave him a quiet smile and sent him off to bed again.

*

Grant brought Alice over tonight, straight from the prison. I was expecting her to be blonde and petite, and kind of timid. But she was normal sized with brown hair. She had pretty eyes. She looked like the kind of person you might see walking down the street, or working in a post office.

I served Thai spring rolls and poured Alice a generous glass of wine. I wanted to make Grant’s news easier on her.

“Look, Alice,” Grant wasted no time. He had a story ready. “I’m sorry to do this to you, but I’ve been very confused lately, and as much as I have feelings for you, it seems things aren’t quite over with me and Marilyn. We’re back together. I’m sorry.”

Alice didn’t say anything. I don’t think she knew what to say. But you could tell she felt awful. She had the look of someone whose world had just been destroyed.

“Would you like to meet Jeremy?” I asked. I thought it might distract her. I thought the two of them might comfort each other, with their separate sadness.

She went out and sat by Jeremy’s pool, holding her wine in one hand. Jeremy was lying on the bottom, a morose puddle of a crocodile beneath the algae.

“I love animals,” Alice said softly. “They make me so happy.” She reached a hand into the water.

And, finally, Jeremy walloped. He walloped right out of the pool and came back down again.

He swallowed Alice whole.

She disappeared into his seven-foot-long body, white wine and all. I didn’t know what to say. Jeremy spread himself out on the edge of his pool, digesting. He was looking at me like I should have understood all of this a long time ago.

Nobody missed Alice. Although I knew Grant felt bad about her.

“Jeremy’s never eaten anybody before,” I said to him, over and over. “How was I supposed to know that’s what he wanted to do?”

Grant and I got back together after that, because it was easier to cook for two people, and we really liked playing poker and watching TV.   

Jeremy went back to walloping almost every day. He ate the pigs and chickens I got him from the butcher, and the carcasses Audrey brought him from the abattoir. He even played with the dog toys.

I got a job in an Italian restaurant, where I get to do things like open wine bottles and shake parmesan cheese onto plates of pasta. Kathy and Phil come in with Arthur sometimes.

“When are you going to get rid of that crocodile, Marilyn?” Kathy says, usually when I put down the bread basket.

“When I finish the new book,” I always reply.

Everybody seems satisfied enough with that.

Carly NugentAbout the author

Carly Nugent is a Victorian-based writer. She graduated from the University of Melbourne in 2007, where she studied Creative Writing and Literature. Since then, Carly has written mostly for the theatre and her play Shots was awarded the R.E. Ross Trust Playwrights’ Script Development Award in 2009.

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