“Beckham you really are stupid”
said Michael. Beckham is a rat in a cage that, apart from sleeping and eating, spends
almost every available minute racing frantically on a treadmill. This rat is
not a pet, but the focus of a high school science experiment – a compulsory assessment
task that counts towards a university entrance score.
Michael is trying his best to get
the highest mark he can to gain entry to medicine at university. Apart from
school marks, Michael will also have to be successful in an interview selection
process to determine whether he is a suitable candidate for a career in the medical
profession. To that end Jim, Michael’s father, has employed a tutor to help
polish his son’s presentation skills so that he can convince the interview
panel that he has chosen to study medicine from a genuine desire to make the
world a better place. The fact is that Michael chose medicine as his career
goal after he had researched the internet to find the highest paying jobs. The
very first Google hit was an article from a mainstream newspaper site that
listed anaesthetist at #1, internal medical specialist at #2 and other medical
practitioners at #3. Though a degree in ancient history may have appealed more
to his innate intellectual interests, Michael was sensible enough to put income
ahead of passion. He was also not silly,
and knew not to put all his eggs in one basket, so he is training very hard on
his fitness and ball skills because professional sport these days cannot be
ruled out as a profitable earner – thus the David Beckham poster on the wall behind
the rat cage and the model of the Acropolis .
Michael’s mother, Janine, is
cooking dinner in the kitchen. She is preparing a meal that won the grand final
– by a controversial yet entertaining gay couple – on television’s latest
reality cooking show. Janine has succumbed to pressure from family and peers to
“get with the program”, so to speak, and begrudgingly accepted that her standard
repertoire of meals, passed down by her mother and grandmother, is boring. The
cost of the ingredients for these fancy new meals, and the tools such as the
mini blowtorch needed for the perfect brulee, are a bit expensive, but her casual employment as an aged-care
worker, even at minimal hourly rate, does allow for some small luxuries. The
cost of Michael’s tutoring, though, is not considered a luxury; it is justified
by Jim, who wants the very best for his youngest son. Experience has taught Jim
that a university qualification is the very minimum needed to secure an income sufficient
for a comfortable and secure future. In a world that has become so much more complex
and competitive than when he was at school, cruising along is simply not an
option these days if one wants to get ahead.
Jim is a middle manager at the
local council and, despite being very good at what he does, is putting in extra
unpaid hours – just to be sure. His job
is under threat, again, due to yet another productivity assessment being
conducted by a specially-convened review panel. The panel is largely composed
of councillors who, with hands on hearts and declarations of loyal service to
the community, are local real estate agents and business owners that seem hell-bent
on rolling back the “unrealistic” pay and working conditions that are stifling
the economic growth of the council and the region as a whole. Jim cannot afford to lose his job as he and
Janine just sold their first home and moved to a bigger house up the hill. The
family story is that they moved up the hill to catch a breeze and get away from
the stifling heat down in the valley. Really though, everyone knows but dares
not say that the valley has, in recent years, become plagued by crime,
vandalism and drug activity. The valley’s relatively cheap rental properties
are the old fibro boxes vacated by the original owners who have moved on up in
the world to bigger homes on smaller blocks in those fancy new housing estates.
These asbestos-riddled shacks have been taken up by the welfare-dependent low-life
that seems to have appeared from nowhere. Jim is focussing on Michael getting into
university at all costs.
Jim and Janine’s, daughter Kylie,
only 2 years older than Michael, left school early and went to TAFE to become a
beautician. She finished the certificate but never worked because she fell
pregnant to a musician, who though is standing by Kylie, has failed to provide
any real income because he refuses, as Jim puts it, to get a real job. His long
hair and tattoos infuriate Jim, and though Janine defends him to some extent,
Kylie’s situation is a source of shame for the parents.
The eldest child in the family is
James Junior, 32 years of age and still at home. JJ, as his family call him,
like Kylie, did not do too well at school and consequently he works in retail
at the local shopping centre. He sells the latest electronic equipment and gets
a staff discount on computer games and consoles. JJ is a big gamer and is
usually up till the wee hours of the morning as he battles warlocks and
werewolves in the latest virtual world of computer games. His lack of any real
world social activity is not helped by his major indoor hobby, but a stutter
and slight twitch which he developed after a humiliating incident at a school
dance in Year 3 is the main reason that JJ keeps mostly to himself. Needless to
say he does not have a girlfriend, but he is a hard worker and is saving conscientiously
for a deposit for a home. Rents are so high that living at home for as long as
possible is a reality that Jim and Janine cannot argue with. Janine would love
to have JJ’s bedroom as a sewing room and Jim would love to be able to park in
his own driveway, but at the moment keeping the family on track and helping
them to get ahead in life is the priority. Jim consoles himself that one day he
will retire and surely by then the kids will have left home, though recent news
of an increase in retirement age has, of late, had Jim popping a few extra
anti-anxiety pills.
As the family of five sit
themselves around the dinner table, Jim performs a ritual that, despite the
occasional raised eyebrow, is tolerated by his non-religious children. They all
bow their heads and Jim thanks God for the meal and the fact that they live in
Australia and not some war-torn hell hole overseas somewhere. Jim would not
admit it but he also does not believe in God, nor does he, for that matter,
believe that Australia is the lucky country that our politicians like to keep
telling us it is. However, without an alternative vision or philosophy for a
good life, Jim resorts to old habits and does finds some solace in an imaginary
god, and he lies to himself about the egalitarian and relaxed Australian
lifestyle even if it disappearing in
front of his eyes. The meal is scoffed down in one tenth of the time it took
Janine to prepare it and there is little opportunity for her to try and discuss
when the family can all visit the grandparents, who are now in aged-care
facility two hours’ drive away. Jim and Janine moved to the outer suburbs when
they first married so that they could afford to buy a home. The price of real
estate had skyrocketed in their childhood inner-city stomping ground, and
houses, even tiny apartments, were now only affordable to cashed-up trendy
professionals or the new breed of mum and dad investors who were getting in on
wealth creation schemes promoted at seminars by dodgy entrepreneurs. The
opportunity to acquire a property portfolio – sounds pretty sexy doesn’t it – was
even facilitated by the government, with tax incentives legislated by political
parties trying to win or keep the middle class vote. Meanwhile, back out in the
suburban wasteland, also known as the sticks, Janine tries unsuccessfully to
work out the logistics of getting a busy family to visit her aging parents. JJ
works most weekends due to the consumer-driven (or is it profit-driven?) extended
retail hours; Kylie has committed to a
brutal prenatal regime, including in utero language lessons and numerous gym
classes, to give her unborn child the
very best start in life that it deserves; Michael plays soccer for his local
club and regional rep team in hope of signing a lucrative professional sports
contract – which will save him from bullshitting about his passion for healing
the sick; and Jim, after mowing the lawns, poisoning the weeds and washing the
car, only wants to relax with the newspaper, a few cold beers and flick around
the sport channels with the remote. Jim,
to be honest, is also a bit resentful that Janine’s parents have
reverse-mortgaged their inner-city home to fund their exorbitantly expensive
retirement community lifestyle. The once-comforting prospect of a very handy
and timely inheritance is evaporating as medical advances keep the in-laws
alive and racking up bills for longer and longer. The irony, which oddly was
brought to the family attention by the usually mute JJ one forty-five degree stinking
bloody Sunday, is that Janine works for minimum wage in the outer suburbs
wiping other peoples’ parents’ bums while her parents’ bums are being wiped by
complete strangers, all funded by the virtual repossession of the family
inheritance by a bank that consistently posts record profits in the billions. The
injustice of it all was lost on Jim and Janine, as it just seems that this is
how the world operates and there’s not much anyone can do about it and
certainly no point in having a whinge.
As the family begin to leave the
dinner table, congratulating mum on another great meal and consoling her that
they will one day visit the oldies, just not this weekend, Michael, insists
that they all come into his bedroom to check out Beckham the rat. The family
gather around the rodent cage and watch Beckham racing at full speed on the
treadmill. Michael states that he has observed Beckham now for six weeks and
has calculated that the small mammal spends 92.6% of his waking hours running non-stop
on that little wheel that goes absolutely nowhere. Kylie, with a contrived tone
of empathy, says, “the poor thing, I wonder if he’s happy?” Jim, summing up as
dads often do, declares, “he doesn’t know any better, he is, as Michael says,
stupid” The family stare blankly at the running
rat for five long seconds – it is as
though they are in a trance, then without notice and in unison they snap back
into the present moment, they look
around at each other and each of them seem to wake up to some pressing notion
that they need to be somewhere doing something, not here, but somewhere else, not staring at the rat,
but doing something else. So without comment they all turn, and walk out of the
room.