dichotomy

Our Chatty sluzza is on time. We talk while Liz tries to check out but is held up by someone else’s complications. Again Tracy chauffeurs us to the venue. Again we stand on our hind legs for six hours and coax our trainees to come with us.

Sometimes I wonder what an introspective hermit is doing in front of an audience using a range of subtle interpersonal skills to meld a disparate group into something more. My natural inclination is for a couch and a book and silence. Yet here I am, like a stand-up comic, making people laugh, my timing and one-liners unrehearsed but exquisite.

A woman up the back uses the word dichotomy: the separation of things into two widely differing or contradictory divisions. That’s me, or one me, or one half of me, standing up there, an untrained ordinary bloke, training 25 psychologists.

The other me sits quietly, unnoticed, up the back, wondering who the me is up there flirting with a roomful of folk. Another me—how many are there?—turns round on an escalator in a foreign place and exhorts a schoolboy to tell his teacher, a good bloke, to fuck off.

Dichotomy, trichotomy. Lobotomy.

When the show is over Tracy hustles us into her Saab and we belt off to pick up her son, Harry, standing in the heat on a roadside somewhere. He’s lost his car keys. He has no idea who the two unexpected odd-bods are in his mother’s car. He’s a fourth-year arts-law student, folded like a grasshopper into the back seat with me, knees brushing his ears.

As Tracy takes us on a tortuous backstreet rollercoaster—“I never use the main road”—jibes pass between mother and son, and between son and the interlopers from Melbourne. Harry’s a sportsman, a cricketer, a quick. He says he went to Melbourne once. He thinks Melburnians friendly than Sydneysiders, but they talk too much about Aussie Rules. He doesn’t get the obsession.

“Are you into chaps rugby or bogan rugby?” I enquire.

“Union,” he says. “It’s a good excuse to roll around on the grass with your fellow man.”

“Ah,” I say. “Latent homosexuality played by homophobes.”

The car explodes. In laughter. My work here is done.

Liz drops me home at eleven. I stand at the front door, backpack on the ground, key in hand. Sid bounds out of the darkness and crashes into my legs. The JRT is all ears at the side gate.

It’s good to be home. A couch, a book, silence.

Rock on.