THE LAST MEETING OF THE FALLING OFF THE PERCH CLUB
This is about five people.
Five people with little else in common other than their forty-to-fifty age group and that their respective life dramas happened at roughly the same moment in time. Which is how, for a short while, these five and a corner table in a city café acquired a certain air of – exclusivity. And I’m one of them but I’m not saying which one.
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Tony. The café’s owner.
Tony was about forty-five and had been recently caught doing the hanky-panky with his wife’s much younger half-sister. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it hadn’t been long since his wife discovered that she even had a half-sister, who she’d lovingly taken into the family fold because she thought her ‘just adorable’, and with her big sad eyes and legs to die for, said she looked as pretty as she herself did at that age.
Between themselves, the rest of the group thought her scatty and a chancer and a compulsive hair-flicker who played all the girly-games with her eyes, and weren’t surprised to hear that it’d taken no more than six weeks from first sight for her to stab Tony clean through his midlife heart then helped him fall clean off his perch.
But the best Tony could come up with was that he couldn’t help himself, told them it was like running into his wife all over again. When he was twenty. Which was also how he explained it to his wife. But she still moved out, and to get even, ran off with his best mate. Best mate since school days.
His teenage kids took their mother’s side and wouldn’t speak to him, he couldn’t find a buyer for his ridiculously over-capitalised house, and the café had long been struggling under the weight of its bank loan, while the siren half sister just dizzied off out of their lives to get on with her mini-series length on-again off-again divorce.
It was chaos all round.
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Phil. The Businessman.
Phil was also in his mid forties but never elaborated on what his business was, something to do with moving money around. Not that any of them ever talked shop. It wasn’t what they were about.
Phil had a bipolar son and if that wasn’t bad enough the lad had become unemployable as he’d begun to struggle with the demons in his head. Demons of the schizophrenic kind. When the boy was just ten years old his mother had apparently recognised the future that awaited them and had left Phil to grapple with his burden and his sadness and his loneliness and was never heard of again. Phil always had the look of Atlas, carrying the whole world.
Recently his son had somehow managed to buy Phil a fairly new BMW four-door on time payment, leaving Phil to have a major ruck with the used car yard and the finance company, and only the threat of lawyers and the media finally put it about 90% right.
Then the lad decided to do his father a favour one day while he was at work and clean up the back yard for him. Which he did. And it was spotless too. Except that everything was over the fence in the next door neighbour’s place. A lot of it in their swimming pool.
No wonder then, that by the time the five of them came together, Phil had a worry-driven aura about him that was turning just a touch manic and he didn’t look as though he could cope much longer as his son had already had two goes at ending it, and all of this only came out when Phil put a parcel of pills on the table one morning and told them he had to keep his son’s meds on him at all times because he feared that he’d take the lot if he left them home.
It was at that point he’d put his chin on his chest and made a soft chugging noise that was simply an unassailable grief.
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Malcolm. The Lawyer.
Malcolm was a mediocre lawyer and what some would unkindly call an ambulance chaser. But he knew he was a mediocre lawyer because he admitted he had no killer instinct but lawyer-ing was all he knew and as much as he hated his job and his boss he believed he was too old to change careers.
Malcolm and his wife were card-carrying Christadelphians and normally Malcolm would not say boo to a goose but recently came in wearing a pair of socks that caught Melanie’s eye and put a large question mark over the sincerity of his churchiness.
From where she was sitting she could see a flash of something in a lurid shade of pink, and just had to butt into the conversation to ask what was on his socks. Malcolm slung one leg up onto the table, hitched up his pantsleg, and there was “FUCKEN 40!” up each side.
It was only then they found out that Malcolm, normally the quiet stalwart of the group, was at his own wit’s end.
He told them he didn’t realise his life was suffocating him until he was caught by the police in his neighbour’s backyard at one o’clock in the morning, cutting open their bird cage. Told the coppers he couldn’t stand the sound of their large parrot another day, the plaintive sound of its cries for freedom. Said he just couldn’t believe that the parrot had done something so bad to warrant being sentenced to solitary confinement for life.
And then he found that his pure and Jesus-loving wife had mysteriously taken up shoplifting. Said he discovered she was beset with sadness and confusion, had cupboard drawers full of tap washers, instant noodles, toilet fresheners, paper plates, and condoms. And he couldn’t think quite why it was the condoms that upset him the most.
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Melanie. The Counsellor.
Melanie was in the business of fixing people’s problems but after eighteen years of it she was saturated and burning out, had lost the capacity to keep all of her clients’ stories in her head.
Especially the kids’ stories.
Broken kids and hopeless parents were starting to endlessly parade through her brain each night at a time when her vulnerable middle management husband was in the throes of a messy corporate takeover that constantly threatened redundancy. He was eating his heart out and seemed to spend all of their talking time agonising over their mortgage and superannuation rollovers and endless taxation implications and age cutoffs. There was never any space left for Melanie and she was not getting any younger and was feeling it.
Melanie actually didn’t look her age. This only came to light when Malcolm had presented his FUCKEN 40! socks to them and set about spilling his domestic beans. Melanie had said - “Hey there’s worse things than turning fucken forty Malcolm, there’s turning fucken fifty!” – and looked just a touch chuffed at their “Phwaw never!” and “No way you’re fifty!” and the inevitable “You don’t look a day over forty-nine.”
Melanie had recently come back from two weeks’ abrupt absence that involved one mysterious airline ticket and a distressed husband swinging by the café with difficult questions.
It had been around then that she realised she was good at fixing the world but couldn’t fix herself or her own loved ones. She instinctively turned to group therapy.
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Leonard. The Fruit’n’Veg man.
Leonard had his shop in the same complex as the café. He’d inherited it from his dad and had never known anything but peddling Fruit’n’Veg. Leonard was also in his midlife. Midlife was like a contagion amongst them.
Leonard had a rumbling prostate and a dying dog and an aggressively vegan wife and couldn’t make up his mind which of his three burdens was the worst.
Her parents had died two years earlier and within three months of each other, both from stomach cancer even though they had been dedicated homeopathic vegetarians all their lives but she refused to entertain any possibility of a connection, acted as though they simply hadn’t been dedicated enough.
At home Leonard lived on endless green and brown vegan-y stuff that was supposed to be things like kale and broccoli and mung beans off his very own stall but had recently become tasteless gunk but nothing got past her without it being certified by Google. Now she had taken up making her own soap, would only drink hot water, and was down to about fifty-five kilos at best.
“One day she’ll go to the letterbox, have a heart attack right in the middle of the front lawn with the mail still clutched in her hand, and will lay there dying of nothing”, and he was as angry as hell when he said it.
Any morning that Leonard knew for sure his wife was at least five suburbs away, he had a toasted egg-and-bacon-and-cheese sandwich and a double-shot Irish coffee. Admitted to them he would also have a double wagu beef cheeseburger whoppo for lunch. Fries on the side. Made no excuses. Also admitted his teenage kids kept looking to him to make things better but Leonard simply didn’t have the balls to face his wife down and the eldest daughter looked like any day now she’d say as much and then wheels would surely start coming off and Leonard had no idea where that may go.
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It was these five people that sort of fell into the habit of crossing each other’s path at Tony’s café, in the very beating heart of the city, most Thursday mornings around eight. Before the hullabaloo of their various worlds descended on them. No design to it, just coincidence and the natural forces of passing human misery. Not always all five, but usually at least three.
At the start it was just Tony.
They each knew Tony quite a while before they knew each other. It was his café after all. It’s how good cafés should function – ‘Hiya Tony, Hiya Malcolm, How’s things, Yeah great mate’ – even when your wheels are wobbling and your perch is swaying.
Tony liked most people. But he seemed to like these four just that bit extra. For quite a while he’d been having a coffee with one or another of them. When it was quiet. Which was more and more often.
Then Leonard and Melanie.
Melanie passed Leonard’s Fruit’n’Veg regularly, sometimes bought a lunch banana or two, but they never clicked. Until the morning she was bringing a replacement desk phone from the Court’s Stores, as hers had been pinched, not by a some toe-rag of a client but by some toe-rag in another Department who’d been too lazy to do the paperwork then walk around to Stores. Most of them were up to it. The theory was that there was always one less phone that there were offices. On purpose. No idea why. Sooner or later you managed to pinch your actual own phone back. It was bullshit but that’s how it worked.
But Mel was a no-bullshit sort of person. She filled in the form, hoofed it around to Stores, walked back through the arcade. Leonard saw her in passing, telephone under her arm, raised his eyebrows at it and smiled half a smile, and without even breaking stride, Mel said – “Yeah, every other bastard gets a pager!”
They had their coffees together the next morning. At the round table in the corner. Mel the Counsellor asked (intuitively – it’s her gift, both a blessing and a curse) – “And how’s life with you then?” and for openers got the prostate and the dog. The vegan wife came later. Barking prostates and dying dogs generally lay about near the surface, but spousal tensions are kept much deeper. They coffee-ed together after that.
Then Phil and Malcolm joined up.
They had a ‘preliminary informal’ over early coffees one morning, about the likelihood of Phil getting out of his son’s Time Payment contract on the Beamer. Seemed to hit it off.
They’d gone into a huddle to the side at first, but Melanie had recently done Malcolm a quiet favour involving his condom-pinching wife and the owner of a small suburban pharmacy. So he came over afterwards, brought Phil with him. Did first-name-only intros, didn’t elaborate. Because that’s how it’s done. In fact, the only surname any of them ever knew was Tony’s, because it was over the door. It was the sort of innate respect each had, which quickly made for mutual trust and comfort. They knew that anything said at that table would stay at that table.
Tony looked over, organised five fresh coffees, and sat in.
Tentatively at first, but measure by measure, they shared, and became bound by, the episodes of their temporarily hapless lives, and by their individual need to hang out once a week with someone similarly beset. And godknows the rest of their immediate worlds either wouldn’t listen, couldn’t understand, or didn’t care. It even got to the point after a while that Tony would quite regularly shout a round, because it was “cheaper than a psychologist”. Said it was only them that was keeping him from falling off the perch entirely. They all nodded knowingly.
So it soon got to be that Thursday mornings at the round table in the corner was helping each of them keep going for one more week. But there was another thing that mortared this group together. They would somehow help each other find a little black humour in their burdens.
It was Melanie who started it. It was the week after Tony had spilled his insides about the hanky-panky. His and his wife’s. Then his cherished Austin Healey 100 sports car he’d bought as a present to himself the day he’d turned forty developed an expensive knock in its big end. Not that Tony had the vaguest idea what that meant. But it was like a last straw. He was just about at his limit.
“Right now I’d strap myself into it and drive off a bloody cliff if I didn’t love it so much”, he mumbled on confession day and the rest of them could only nod. Supportively. Because none of them judged. It was one of the unspoken rules. But Melanie – well, Mel was Mel.
“I’ve got a husband that’d be only too happy to chuck you off, if he could keep the car...”
Silence. About two second’s worth. Then Tony cracked. Started laughing, that face-ache sort of unplugged angst laughing that’s at least half crying and it infected the rest of them and soon all the black gunk that they’d each been carting around with them was bouncing off the walls of the café, interrupting nearby cappuccino’s and eggs benedict and all normal conversation, finally subsiding into teary sniffles and a “Bugger ME I needed that!”
That’s about when the weekly corner table acquired a certain reputation. And from then on always had a “Reserved” notice on it each Thursday at opening time.
But it was the cartoon that really gelled the whole “club” thing. It was about two months in.
Mel found it in a magazine. It showed five sad souls, standing in a queue in Hell, flames licking up, unspeakable torments going on all around, Old Nick with horns on head and pitchfork in hand, gleefully waiting to assign them to their official miseries that would last for eternity. One of the five sad souls in the line turns to the other sad souls and says...
“...AND the coffee’s cold!”
...so she cut it out, printed it off, and wrote on the bottom...
“THE LAST MEETING OF THE FALLING OFF THE PERCH CLUB”
...and brought it in, showed it to Tony.
Tony – mostly because he was by then an emotional mess - laughed till he cried all over again, stuck it on the wall by “their” table. Couldn’t wait to see the others’ reactions. Guffaws all round, and that Thursday morning they toasted “The Falling Off The Perch Club” with their coffees.
At least twice a day after that customers would saunter by, check out the cartoon, have a smirk, ask about it. But Tony would simply toss it off, say it’s a private joke, but was secretly just a tiny bit smug to leave them flat-footed with curiosity.
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The Falling Off The Perch Club went out on a high.
It’s actual very last meeting – like their coming together it was powered by complete coincidence and the vagaries of Life and Luck – began like any other of their Thursday mornings. Coffees all round. News of the week.
Tony said his wife still hadn’t come home and while his kids had never left they still weren’t talking to him anyway. But he thought he had a buyer for his house, said with a bit of luck he’d about break even on the mortgage and the fees. Which meant the café was now hanging by a thread. He just shrugged and went a touch pale when the Austin Healey’s big end was asked after. It was like he’d gone into overload.
Leonard boofed into an egg and bacon toasted foccacia topped with fried onions and barbecue sauce with the zeal of a street protester but he looked like he was struggling to get the last half down. His rebellion was losing momentum. But at least his dog was still with him. Waiting one more day for Leonard to find enough emotional capacity to okay the vet’s blessed needle.
Melanie’s fella was still expecting the redundancy axe to fall any day. Was coming home each night with horror stories of colleagues being summoned to the Top Office and then returning with shocked faces and loud voices and a box to clean out their desk. Was sure he was on The List Of The Unwanted.
Malcolm was going up on the Law mat that afternoon, having got off with a fine and a damn good talking down to by a magistrate he hated, over a stupid bloody parrot that still squawked for its freedom anyway. If anything it’d gotten worse after coming so close to true flight, sensing its saviour was still at hand. So now Leonard had to beg to keep his licence to practice the very stuff he hated.
Phil? – well, Phil was unusually quiet. Especially when the chat sort of rotated around. To him. Everyone waited, respectfully, thought maybe Phil alone today didn’t have a need to unburden. They even looked to him for some good news. So they made small talk.
But Mel was studying him. And knew. Could read the silence.
“So, how’s things going at home Phil?” – and his shoulders slumped, a little more than usual. Then his head moved, sort of nod-waggled as he set about searching for words, and his eyes glazed over, and he had a grip on the handle of his coffee mug like he’d drown if he let go.
“The lad – the lad – he - last night - he jumped off...”, he finally said, and it was as if everyone held a single breath, and waited.
“He jumped off the Barrett Street Overpass – about five - peak hour and all – just – just – jumped - into the traffic – just – jumped off...”, and his voice wavered, but still no-one spoke.
“Silly young bugger – it just wasn’t – y’know...”, and he lifted one shoulder, like helplessness, “...it’s just nowhere near - high enough – broke both ankles, y’know...”, and a lost noise came out of his heart, and he paused again, grappling.
“Then they say he sort of – got up - kept tryin’ to stand – tried to jump under – y’know – the cars – and cars...”, and here he took a deep breath and the words began to tumble out like he couldn’t stand them in his throat a second longer, and he let go the coffee mug and his hands started making traffic zooming motions, “...and everyone was tryin’ to go round him and he was fallin’ about right off his head and drivers were yellin’ - “Get off the road you fucken PRAT!” - and the ambos and cops came and had to wrestle him down and the traffic was still goin’ everywhere and they finally got him onto the trolley and when they were puttin’ him in the back the trolley collapsed or something and he got tipped out back onto the road and he was off all over again so they had to tie him down.”
He suddenly stopped, took a long shuddery breath, “Jesus it musta been chaos”, then fell silent, eyes and soul totally spent.
“Geez...”, Tony mumbled. Then a ponderous silence. No words.
It was Mel who broke.
She tried to keep it in but it got away from her, not because she was unfeeling, just the opposite, she felt too much, for Phil, his son, her mates, herself, the whole damn world, and she just couldn’t hang onto it, and her nose gave out a loud SHNUKK! and that set off a whole face explosion of helpless laughter.
“Them - poor motorists...”, she squeaked, and that was the stone end, the other three went nuclear, collecting up Phil in the fall-out, and then it was all five of them falling about with red faces and drippy noses and hankies out with aching cheeks and tender hearts threatening to crack. In a café surrounded by statues of patrons. Scramble-egged forks frozen in mid air. Bemused stares.
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The five of us were never together again after that. Not by any design, it’s just Life. It moves on, leaves moments like ours in its wake.
Phil dropped away first, simply never came back, as the lad finally ended his and his dad’s heartache a few days after they let him out of hospital. He stepped off one of the cliffs down south, leaving his crutches on the coast walking path, but still had the fifty dollar note clutched in his hand, the one he’d drawn from an ATM an hour earlier. It was as if he didn’t want to die worthless.
Malcolm managed to keep his law licence, but left the practice soon after anyway. Then he moved out of the other’s orbit when he bought a real estate franchise in the eastern suburbs, with both his and his wife’s photoes on their website. And the last time I checked it seemed as though it was doing fairly well.
Melanie and Leonard and Tony kept on for a while, but when Mel took a long break from counselling she never came back, the circle broken. But its time and its meaning were gone anyway. Last anyone heard from her was a holiday postcard to Tony from some small town in Ireland, where ‘we’ were doing a study tour of Irish country pubs. But no elaboration on the ‘we’.
Leonard – well, he still works his Fruit’n’Veg shop, and while he doesn’t look a well man, he has an air of something about him that he didn’t have before. ‘Acceptance’ probably.
And Tony himself – well, his wife eventually came back, and about the same time the café went up for sale, and they just about gave it away, like they wanted to clear the slate. I’ve heard that they’re now renting an old farmhouse out where the city meets the country, and Tony is back to the freelance landscaping that was his beginnings. But I have no idea what became of the sports car and its big end.
© T. R. Edmonds 2018
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